The only sane man

The National Gandhi Museum has a good collection and some devoted employees, but it is not living up to its potential

The only corner of the National Gandhi Museum which gives the visitor the sense of an ashram is the replica of Hriday Kunj, the house in the Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmedabad in which M K Gandhi, his wife Kasturba and his secretary lived between 1918 and 1930. Once or twice a week its verandah hosts a pair of charkha-spinners demonstrating how cotton is spun into thread.

They use not the familiar big charkha but a peti (box) charkha. This is a horizontal charkha that folds into a box the size of a small briefcase. There are several peti charkhas inside the museum, but here are two actually being used.

A middle-aged, lean man in khadi, “Guptaji”, is spinning calmly. He holds a tuft of cotton in his left hand and turns the wheel with his right. The thread spools steadily onto a spindle. If the thread breaks, Guptaji joins the ends with a twist and a dab of spit.

Guptaji is a junior government servant. He cycles to the museum all the way from south Delhi. Spinning away, he looks serene, but he will scold you for not having read the Bhagavad Gita and Hind Swaraj. “You must read these two books,” he says. Then he jokes about being like the madman who thinks he is the only sane person in the world.

Hriday Kunj itself, five rooms around a courtyard, is in poor shape. Roof tiles are missing, and water-streaks disfigure the walls below the framed photographs and Gandhi quotes.

This reflects the state of the museum. There are exhibits of great value — Gandhi “relics” like diaries, pocket watches, eyeglasses, chappals, dentures (very clean) and tooth powder, besides the bloodstained dhoti in which Gandhi died — but they are housed in an uninspired whole. As a result, visitors walk through very fast. There is a good library of about 25,000 books, but few people to use it, and little effort is made to make its collections more readily available.

According to current director Sangita Mallik, whose five-year term began in September 2010, the museum gets 75,000 visitors a year, and 200-250 researchers. The latter number is slowly going down. Maintenance is a problem, because conservation experts are hard to find. “We have called 30-40 people, but we can’t find people to do it,” she says, about the cloth items on display.

Mallik’s predecessor Varsha Das led the museum for four years and is credited with a turnaround after years of neglect, including a rise in the number of visitors. Das worked at the National Book Trust before that, and Gujarati is her mother tongue, so she was able to fast-track and complete the translation of Gujarati works — such as the diaries of Gandhi’s long-time secretary Mahadev Desai — into Hindi and English. This is part of the work of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, the private trust which founded the museum and which has an office next door.

But the first thing Das did was to clear a large hall of its clutter of partitions, for exhibitions. The current show has photographs of Gandhi and Tagore. The first show she did here was an exhibition in 2006 to mark the centenary of satyagraha. The next was built on Gandhi’s phrase, “My life is my message.” The centenary of his book Hind Swaraj was in 2009. Das helped get the full run, 1913-40, of his South African paper Indian Opinion archived on the website.

Other efforts were less successful. “We were lucky to get a huge collection of Gandhi and Kasturba’s personal belongings from Manubehn Gandhi’s niece [Gandhi’s great-granddaughter],” she says. Das left the museum soon after this donation, but the items are still not on display. “It is all in the almirah,” she says, “but I was able to [catalogue] each and every piece. The museum does not have facilities to preserve paper, so Manubehn’s diaries, 20-30 of them, we put in the National Archives. She was with Kasturba in jail, and with Gandhiji until the end.” The collection includes Gandhi’s last nail clippings and sheddings from his last haircut.

Funding is not a problem — the corpus includes the original sum from Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, corporate donations and a couple of government infusions of about Rs 5 crore — but the funds are not being spent. This is an institution with “tremendous potential,” says Das, in “spreading the knowledge of Gandhiji”. As one employee pointed out, it needs a tireless organiser and marketing genius like Gandhi himself to achieve its true worth.

The museum is closed on Mondays. Entry is free