A Museum that made me cry

Bangalore’s new airport has some well laid out shopping space. One of which is occupied by a book store and passing through in late August I noticed a book there titled ‘Museums of India.’ Flipping though, I learned that there are two noteworthy items at the Government Museum in Madras – a Nataraja bronze and some Amaravathi sculptures. It was an attractive book that made me want to visit the museums described.

Problem was I did. Just ten days earlier, I visited the Madras museum, drawn to it by a news item I read in The Hindu a few months ago. The museum had gotten together some ‘Friends of the Museum,’ a kind of citizen support group. They were being trained in the treasures that were in the museum, and could serve as guides. Other projects were described. Wow! I thought. Here was a Director who was doing something new. I checked the museum’s website and found a lot of detailed information. There was even the possibility of taking a virtual tour, but the link did not work. Just teething troubles, I thought. I must visit the place.

But I was in for a major disappointment. There were parts of the museum that had been blocked for renovations. This was the section with the sculptures (perhaps where the Amaravathi pieces were), but the sections that were open had construction dust and materials lying around. The descriptive plates beside the display items just told you what the item was and where it was from, and if you were lucky, the period. There was no explanation of the significance of the piece. The gallery with the bronze collection was in good shape, air conditioned and well lit, but many of the other galleries were in various stages of neglect. Some of the galleries, the ones on biology and zoology, resembled a middle school display hall a week after a science fair was held. The beautiful building housing the art collection was closed. A modern monstrosity next to it now had the art collection. Original Ravi Varma pieces were in a corner of the floor without sufficient lighting, and behind glasses that reflected what was around rather than let you admire the painting behind it. I cried.

A month later I was at the Asian art museum in San Francisco. What a delight! Many pieces of sculptures from the same places and same eras as at the Madras museum but built around a theme of how Indian culture and religion spread around the whole of South and South East Asia. It was an educational experience.

As I admired the bas-relief frieze from Angkor Wat showing the vanaras attacking Kumbhakarna, I could even visualize the site at the Banteay Serai temple from where some vandal had dislodged it and sold to the museum. Now, wait a minute. Should I complain?

I would often bristle at the thought of museums like the British Museum that housed ‘stolen’ treasures from around the world. ‘The Elgin marbles must be returned to Greece’ was my ideological position. I am not so sure now. If the San Franciscans do a better job of preserving and displaying the treasures from Madras than Madrasis, let them have it.