:: Shekhar Bhatia

Apathy on display

Shekhar Bhatia

Augest.21 : There are two kinds of tourists: those who will see every museum in a city and those who go to the Louvre in Paris and ask for the short cut to Mona Lisa. (In case you don’t know, it also takes you past the other masterpiece, Venus de Milo. So you can do a quick two-in-one, and impress your family and friends back home.)

A good museum is a destination in itself. You revisit it once every few years and always discover something new. I am not a museum junkie — unless it is a science museum — but I know people who have visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York four times in as many visits to the city. I would revisit a museum only if there was something that really fascinates me. For example, the special exhibition on comic abstraction I saw at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Even today I remember a display: an empty dark room with garbled noise and soft light filtering in from a hole near the floor — like the one in Tom and Jerry cartoons. You step into the room, pause for a second, look around to see if anyone is watching, bend down and put your head on the floor to see if there’s anything inside the hole. There was nothing. The exhibit was called "Waiting for Jerry".

Recently, a houseguest from London, a city that has some of the best museums in the world, wanted to see the National Museum in Delhi and the family decided to tag along.

The last time I visited the museum was a good 15 years ago, and I was thoroughly disappointed with the way the objects were displayed. I am sad to say things haven’t changed: the place reeks of monumental indifference.

Allow me to take you on a quick, virtual tour.

The entrance fee for Indians is Rs 10 and for foreigners Rs 300. This 300 includes an audio guide, but more on that later. Then there is a camera fee of Rs 20 for Indians and Rs 200 for foreigners. I forgot to ask the person at the ticket window how he determines if a person is an Indian or a foreigner. By asking each visitor for an ID (no one asked me for one) or by looking at the colour of skin? I spotted the word "racist" in the complaint book.

Let me start with the Harappan gallery because it is the first you come across — I would say stumble upon because there is no signage worth the name — after you go past the men’s toilet and the rooms of museum officials. That the offices are right in the beginning and not housed in a separate block must be something to do with our culture of bureaucracy.

Harappa was a major city in the Indus Valley civilisation (with its mature period from 2600 to 1700 BCE) and some of the objects on display are 4,500 years old. That squarely places it as one of the oldest planned cities in the world. But there is nothing in the entire gallery that does justice to this ancient civilisation, or inspires awe (or even interest) at the sheer sophistication of this urban civilisation.

The mounted photographs of the Harappan excavation site are old and faded, the lighting is poor, you cannot see the details on the seals and the descriptions are inadequate. There is a poster showing remarkable similarities between Harappan and Mesopotamian seals, but there is little explanation of why this is the case.

The audio guide, I am told, is limited to a small selection of objects, is fragmented and does not give any extra information other than what is stated on the walls. You feel sad when you see the famous bronze statue of the Harappan dancing girl standing on a dusty glass case under a grimy tubelight.

As you leave the gallery in search of objects from other eras, you wonder why an advanced civilisation vanished in less than a thousand years. You look for answers but there aren’t any. The captions are matter of fact; they do not add to your knowledge and understanding.

There are iconic sculptures with tags like "Hanuman: 18th century AD", but in the context of a foreign visitor, who was Hanuman? The inscriptions don’t give an idea of the gods and goddesses. Who was Shiva? In an act of deference and respect for a Hindu God, someone had kept two small flowers on the statue.

In the gallery of miniature paintings, which looks recently renovated and is at least airconditioned, the descriptions too are in miniature print: you need a magnifying glass to read them. None of the exquisite miniatures have captions. It is left to your imagination.

Hidden behind the miniature gallery, in a narrow, dark corridor is what I think is an absolute gem: The Story of Indian Scripts. Charts painted on backlit glass panels trace the evolution of the alphabet, of ta, dha, cha and na, all the way from the Brahmi and Tamil cave scripts of the 3rd century BC.

I don’t think any museum official has entered that alley in a long time because if he or she had, they would have noticed that many bulbs have fused and it is difficult to read some of the text. Pity, because someone has obviously put in a lot of research into these charts.

I could go on: you would be advised to carry a torch to see the exquisite objects of art in the Mughal gallery. There is tarnished silverware that has obviously not been dusted for years. There is not a shred of creativity, or a cohesive thread that runs through the galleries and tells you the story of India.

Once you are done with the galleries on the ground floor, only a museum junkie will dare to climb the steps to level two.

And as for the museum shop, the less said the better: apart from a few replicas, the rest of the stuff reminds you of a jumble sale on pavement stalls.

A comment in the complaint book sums up the experience: "I’m sorry but it’s a real shame… how India’s people can’t respect their own country".

If you want to experience the history of India, the National Museum will disappoint. Instead, I suggest you watch the historian Michael Wood’s fascinating six-part documentary, The Story of India. It is well researched, and brings the past to life.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com