Treasuring our past, their way

I was walking through the royal collection of art and artefacts at Windsor Castle when my aunt, who lives in London and who had taken it upon herself to show me around the city, exclaimed: “These belong to us!” Startled and immensely curious to find out what could it possibly be that the queen had in her possession that belonged to us, I followed her gaze to a glass cabinet.

Inside was a pair of tassels from Tipu Sultan’s turban. Around it, in other glass cases, were some more artefacts from India.

One contained a sword that was, according to an engraved label plate, a gift to the crown from the begum of Bhopal. “A gift, huh?” said my aunt. “In that case we don’t have any issues with this one,” she declared.

I remember laughing at her indignation, which I would soon realise wasn’t all that unusual. Indian treasures displayed in British museums, palaces, castles and libraries tend to evoke such sentiments from Indians who often stand a tad longer in front of them with an expression that seems to say, “This was ours, before they took it away.” I, too, have felt similar pangs gazing at the bounties from India that today form a sizeable part of the phenomenal collections that institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum and British Museum so proudly display.

But the more I have thought about it, the more convinced I am that it’s a good thing they are the ones who have them and not us. Because left to us, we would have allowed these treasures to be damaged, lost or stolen. What sits in the possession of the British today is not just a proof of the might and reach of the Empire at one time in history but also of their genuine desire to preserve the past. Driven by this desire, they have sought and employed the expertise needed to conserve what would have otherwise been so easily lost.

In the British library, for example, are shelves upon shelves of India office records which, if laid out, would stretch across a good 14 km. There are some 70,000 volumes of official publications and 105,000 manuscript and printed maps all painstakingly preserved in temperature and humidity controlled underground rooms. Among them are letters from Gandhi, documents related to Partition, including one that carries thousands of signatures against the move to divide the country, and other such crucial records. A mammoth exercise is now on to digitise them.

The archivists are very clear about their brief — their job is to preserve the records. Period. It is not for them to interpret these records. They are simply the keepers of history, of the past. In their hands, our past is secure for the future. There is comfort in the knowledge that no lunatic will try to rewrite it, or tweak it, or reinterpret it by omitting this or adding that. 

There is also comfort in the knowledge that no lunatic will look at this past and decide that it does not represent Indian culture and hence needs to be obliterated.

And then our museums too haven’t been the best custodians of our cultural wealth. Time and again the Comptroller and Auditor General of India has flagged these issues. Earlier this year, in its audit report it said that the sculptures in the possession of Kolkata’s State Archaeological Museum were not being stored properly and this was affecting their condition. What the museum has is no ordinary collection. Besides what’s on display, it has a reserve of nearly 37,000 antiques, which include rare tools from the Early, Middle and Late Stone Ages, and sculptures from the Gupta, Maurya, Sunga, Kushana and Pala empires.

Disappearances of invaluable treasures from museums are also not unheard of. The CAG has in the past raised questions about how these rare items have made their way from national museums to some of the world’s biggest auction houses.

While we struggle to maintain and conserve what’s left with us (and, there is still plenty of it), archivists in Britain are already working out ways to preserve what will be tomorrow’s history — our today.

And this includes a good deal of intangible stuff, such as the apps that came and went, the social media platforms such as Orkut that made waves for a while and then faded away, and so on.

We have a lot of catching up to do. We can start by displaying an honest will to do so. The rest will follow.

veenu.sandhu@bsmail.in