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| Cultural Catch-22 |
| Kishore Singh / New Delhi Jul 08, 2009, 00:23 IST |
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Neither the government nor corporate houses spare a thought for museums.
 Another Budget and lots of analysis about what Pranab Mukherjee may or may not have meant, round-tables on why the stock markets crashed, media bytes on whether the tax reforms will put more food on your table or not, and, predictably, not a word on culture, or the arts, or the very genesis of nationhood which is defined by these terms, but which finds no mention, ever, in presidential, prime ministerial or finance ministerial dole-outs. Culture, therefore, remains an amorphous term to which our leaders pay lip service when convenient.
Which is why our national institutions of art and culture languish, our government-aided academies are lessons in neglect, and anything they undertake is bogged down by apathy. We announce increased allocations for universities, for our IITs and National Institutes of Training, but no one has had the courage to stand at the podium on Budget day to say we need to increase spending on museums, that they need to be included in our curricula, that each city, town or large village must ensure that its pride in its heritage is translated into something more solid than rhetoric.
Whether government should take on that responsibility (or local municipalities), whether local citizenry can participate (through public-private partnerships), whether the private sector can initiate the process (with local government providing the direction and infrastructure) are matters that can be debated once the Centre mandates art/culture as a larger part of its fiscal policy.
In part, this must begin with energising moribund institutions like our museums. The National Museum, for instance, has rare treasures in its archives but makes little of it. Yet, shows such as the Padshanamah exhibition of miniatures (from the Victoria & Albert, London) or the jewellery of the Nizams of Hyderabad, or even the Picasso exhibition (from the Louvre, Paris) attract visitors in queue-lengths. It shows that people are sufficiently motivated to attend exhibitions that are well curated — why shouldn’t the National Museum shrug off its apathy and host similar shows from its own treasures every month ?
Or take the National Gallery of Modern Art with its 17,000-odd works as part of its humungous collection. Even with new spaces added to the gallery in Delhi, and with independent galleries in both Mumbai and Bangalore, it is unable to create the kind of buzz that attracts visitors as a matter of routine. And this when these museum galleries are located in the centre of each city. What do they do to incentivise people coming in to look at the art?
This is especially relevant given the kind of excitement that private efforts such as Osian’s create with their exhibitions and shows. Promoter Neville Tuli believes that high art can share the same platform as popular (or low) art; similarly, his openings and exhibitions combine the city’s elite with students and the hoi-polloi. If he can invite school principals for a viewing (before the opening of his shows) to convince them to send batches of their students for the duration of these exhibitions, why should our government-funded institutions fail to do anything similar? Especially given that Osian’s — or other private funded institutions such as the Devi Art Foundation — do not charge for entry or levy any cess on visitors.
Nor is it strictly the case for just art institutions. Is there any corporate house in India that documents and archives its advertising and publicity collateral, or even its products, over any length of time? For decades now, I have believed that our large business houses focus too closely on their businesses and bottom lines, and just a little on CSR activities and now their carbon footprints, but neglect the very genesis of the business. Some do support the performing arts (music in the case of ITC, theatre in the case of the Mahindras, and so on), but have never looked at leveraging museums in any serious way. Why does it take a small apparel company like Anokhi to archive and create a museum of block print motifs (in Jaipur), while large companies think nothing of it?
As an instance, think of ITC’s history: Would it not profit if it could have somewhere a museum dedicated to the history of tobacco and smoking that would record, in a sense, its colonial history and trade (for serious scholars), or smoking implements (hookahs from across cultures, pipes, cigarette holders — indicative of lifestyle trends over the ages)? Why don’t we have museums of locks (Harisons?), storage systems over the ages, from grains to documents to household goods (Godrej?), shoes (Bata does have a small space in Batanagar, but perhaps something a little more ambitious is in order), glassware (Yera?), make-up (Lakme?), cars (Hindustan Motors?) — and so many other things like telephones, motorbikes, chocolates, buttons and beads, typewriters and items of daily utility that have gone into the hubris of nostalgia?
Or, to argue further — would Hindustan Lever be able to provide public access to products of popular use from the decades past? Of the kind of shaving tablets and brushes and cut-throat razors our grandfathers used, or the early styled bottles of Colgate hair oil that Nani favoured? And yet, in the US of A, you can hop on to a bus for a Hershey’s tour of a chocolate factory, or go visit the Corning museum. Isn’t it time our big businesses stole a moment away from looking at the future to glance back at the past?
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