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As an ancient civilisation, India is steeped in certain values and most traditional Indians believe that every object, whether animate or inanimate, has its own lifespan, at the end of which it becomes impure. This means that the clothes and other possessions of a dead person are also impure. Given such obsessions with the clean and the unclean, the pure and the impure, most conservative Indians are programmed to burn or consign to the waters any item that has outlived its period. This may explain why India historically never built any collections or museums: we were uncomfortable with the thought of preserving “polluted” items. It was only after we had been exposed to Western education and thinking that we accepted that a nation’s pride lies in flaunting its rich antiquity. 

Why, then, can’t the Indian Museum in Kolkata be as appealing as the British Museum in London? After all, it was formally established in 1814, largely to house the collections assembled by the Asiatic Society of Bengal, set up by the philologist William Jones, and had a head start over every other museum in Asia, as it arrived within a few decades of the British Museum, the Belvedere in Vienna and the Louvre in Paris. It is housed in a resplendent mansion and has not only Egyptian mummies and fascinating prehistoric fossils, but also relics of the Buddha and a large chunk of a Buddhist stupa [ancient monument] that with true colonial swagger was physically lifted fr om Bhahrut in Madhya Pradesh. But most of the museum’s infrastructure has been left virtually untouched for decades. All attempts to modernise the galleries, displays, lighting and signage are met with strong bureaucratic resistance, red tape and internal politicking.

The visitor entering the British Museum or the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin looks up in wonder at the beautiful transparent atrium dome that covers the whole area and connects the old buildings with the new. In both museums, the dome adds value, glamour and utility—and such a dome could transform the very character of the Indian Museum. Yet when this was proposed during the bicentenary renovations in 2014, it was greeted in Kolkata with shrieks of alarm by conservationists, so-called heritage experts and a sensation-hunting media; the governing body thought it wiser to drop the idea.

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