Our Graveyards of History

We disrespect our history when we neglect our museums.

The Government Museum at Kasturba Road

Bangalore is a young city that lives in the present. Despite the efforts of Kannada scholars and the city’s cultural elites to remind us of the city’s pre-colonial, medieval past, young people would rather believe Bangalore was founded by the IT companies that provide today’s jobs and is watered by the numerous pubs that dot its gritty cityscape.

The indifference to the past is exemplified by the fate of the Government Museum situated on Kasturba Road in the city centre. Established in the second half of the 19^thcentury under the stewardship of Scottish surgeon Edward Balfour, Bangalore Museum is the oldest museum in South India after Chennai.

Despite its striking neoclassical style and ochre-red hue, the building stands with a forlorn and forgotten look on its façade. On entering the museum, the signs of neglect are everywhere. The halls are dimly lit, the paint work is chipped in places and mold is creeping along the ceiling.

A feeling of gloom and disrepair engulfs the antique artifacts housed within its walls, whether they are intricately carved sculptures, Deccan-style paintings or myriad ancient artifacts dating from prehistory.“Oh, people come, but not as many as you think. We see more foreigners than Indians here,” says a museum official. “We see students and teachers coming on some weekdays for short excursions.”

A plan to renovate the museum is underway but would a new coat of paint be enough to help the museum attract more visitors? Last year the museum saw around 122,000 footfalls when the entry fee was Rs.4. This year the entry fee has been raised to Rs.20 and 69,698 people have visited so far.

In a bid to make the visit more engaging,the museum provides visitors with a free mobile app called Pinakin that works as a tourist guide. Plug in your ear phones and listen to the stories behind the sculptures and paintings on display. It’s in fact an indispensable aid as there’s little other information available about the exhibits.

Indian history goes back thousands of years and museums around the country are treasure troves of numerous relics that record this extraordinary past. If developed along the lines of their more famous counterparts like the Louvre in Paris or Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, India’s museums could become magnets for both domestic and foreign tourists.

In fact, these museums are virtually synonymous with their host cities and are usually the tourist’s first call. Most museums in Europe and the U.S. are privately funded and that helps the museums to a great degree.

In fact, patronage and art go hand in hand. The world’s most famous museums are massively endowed by their richest citizens and one sees scores of private owners lending their collections to be displayed to the public. But we rarely see this in our country.

India’s rich and famous do a lot to promote the country’s vast cultural heritage, including preserving buildings and monuments and the many art forms that could otherwise have died out. But somehow their largesse doesn’t seem to extend to these historical repositories.

In the 12^th Plan, the union ministry of culture proposed a public-private partnership model for museum funding. Though the plan could prove a godsend for the country’s neglected museum infrastructure, we’re yet to see any concrete results.

Waiting patiently in that long queue to renovate and rejuvenate itself in the hope of attracting more visitors stands Bangalore’s forlorn Government Museum. Where the Louvre annually sees millions of visitors from around the world, India’s museums would be grateful for even a fraction of that audience.