Turning museums into relics
By
Jawhar Sircar
(Published
in DNA, 23.05.2017)
On April 18
every year, museums in India celebrate International Museum Day and for a week
or so, except for a small group of enthusiasts, all of this goes unnoticed by
most of us. This is symptomatic of the disconnect between the average Indian
and his heritage. Much of the mental or knowledge gap is thus substituted,
rather effectively, with involuntary “correspondence courses” of post-truth
half lies that are planted so vigorously on WhatsApp. But why is it that
museums fail to attract us so passionately, while in the West or in the Far
East, China, Japan and Korea splurge on setting up more and more museums and in
drawing record footfalls?
Part of the answer
lies in our cultural genes. Eighty per cent of Indians who were schooled in the
traditional Hindu virtue of “purity” still look upon a dead person’s belongings
as “impure”. Once dead and gone, all that is strongly associated with one’s
existence need to be immersed in the waters or consigned to fire. Except of
course, for landed property, cash, gold, precious stones, weapons, common
utensils and some family heirlooms like valuable sarees. But as the vast
majority hardly holds any such possessions, they move on, with not even a grave
to mark the dead, let alone preserve materials of his body. In such a society,
it is rather difficult to expect museums of artefacts to be set up as
assiduously as in Europe, where sentimental visits to the graves of relations
are rather regular.
There is an
interesting argument that our scant regard for precise history and fondness for
myths was because Brahmanism required us to forget inconvenient or unpleasant
pasts, so as to retain peace amongst sharp ethnic communities. This erased
memories that would otherwise have led communities to continue to hate some
specific groups for what they perceived as historical injustices, and was thus
an effective mechanism to sustain a multi-ethnic culture.
The contemporary
Puranas, for instance, forgot to record that Alexander had almost grabbed the
Indus region until foreign historians tore into this amnesia. Our love for
legends rather than for factual history has thus been harnessed effectively to
garner votes and seize power.
The collateral
damage lies in the sporadic bouts of rage against targeted communities for
alleged or real historic wrongs and in the stifling of any meaningful debate on
such issues. A popular and vocal stand is that the majority here should emulate
other religions that hardly brook any dissent and one of them is so closed that
even slight deviance is denounced as blasphemy, punishable by death.
But the problem
that is overlooked in this easy reasoning is that while the Islamic states on
both sides of our border hardly have sizeable Hindu minorities, for many
reasons including sponsored violence against them, India has 180 million
Muslims. Twenty per cent of its people do not subscribe to one religion and
hence plurality and coexistence are not only virtues that made India’s
experiment with multi-ethnicity a resounding success, but also an absolute
necessity.
Returning to
museums all over the world, we find that they emphasise on the “national
narrative” that binds a people to their past, even if some links to “glory” are
rather tenuous. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the colonial powers, however,
used them to showcase the trophies they had snatched from others, like the
exquisite sculptures taken from Amaravati or the Elgin Marbles from Greece or
even the gold of Egypt and Babylon. It is not as if India was always a loser,
it gained as well, such as a part of the Aurel Stein Central Asian collections.
These include priceless manuscripts, art objects and even frescoes
systematically chiselled away from the walls of grottos or caves of Xinjiang.
The Chinese described it as outright burglary, but the Stein collection was
distributed among the British Museum, the British Library, the Indian Museum
and the Srinagar Museum.
The British have
restored, catalogued and displayed much of the Stein collection, but the
National Museum had to be literally goaded into opening its crates, a century
after they were brought to India. Only the inventory has recently been
completed by an external scholar, with Herculean effort.
All that museums
require is a bit of attention from governments, both state and Central, and the
priority that it has never received after the 1960s. After all, a proud nation
surely needs to show the world and its own people enviable collections that
start some 5,500 long years ago.
