Shikha Mukherjee | 05 October 2023 | The Wire

It was a new museum in New Delhi for a new nation, born in 1947. The National Museum grew out of an exhibition that travelled to London in 1948 and then came back to a temporary location within the Rashtrapati Bhavan on Raisina Hill. 

The new National Museum was built by new India as “ways and processes through which modern identities and associated cultural practices are contested, challenged, and (re)configured),” Tapati Guha Thakurta, distinguished historian of art and art institutions wrote in Monuments, Objects, Histories – Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post Colonial India.

The ways and processes were unexpected, as Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh have pointed out in their book, No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying because of the “notorious unwillingness on the part of India’s subaltern masses to follow the museum’s cultural script” by transforming the event of the visit into an entertainment as well as a darsan, a dialogue between the innumerable deities on display and the devotee. 

Museums in India are identified by the “subaltern masses” as places of wonder or magic, the Ajaib Ghar made famous in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim or the immensely popular tourist destination of the masses, the Jadu Ghar or Indian Museum, where thousands visit en route to the pilgrimage at Ganga Sagar in the Sundarban or political rallies in Kolkata. 

The incomplete complex – the final part was to be constructed in 2017 – that is the National Museum today on the intersection of erstwhile Rajpath-Janpath roads is waiting to be demolished as the plan for the central vista includes its erasure. Why a building, one part of which was completed in 1960 and the second part in 1989 needs to be destroyed is unclear. The venerable Indian Museum building in Kolkata was constructed and opened in 1878. It is the ninth oldest museum in the world and Asia’s first museum. The British Museum building was completed in 1852.

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