Sabyasachi Mukherjee talks about leveling walls between people and culture

Food is not on his mind as Sabyasachi Mukherjee casts a perfunctory look at the menu before suggesting that we sample the buffet, popular with office goers in the area. We are at Kala Ghoda, Mumbai’s art district where Mukherjee works and lives, a stone’s throw away from Copper Chimney, where we have seated ourselves in a quiet nook. Once an iconic restaurant for the rich and famous and a Bollywood favourite, the restaurant is a long way off its heydays. 

Not too many people stop in for a bite here anymore and the restaurant has quietly dropped its tony status to sit inside the food courts of malls where it draws much more custom. For us however, its quiet confines are a plus; in a city where noisy restaurants are the norm, we have few choices and Mukherjee has even suggested a boardroom meet over a meal. I gently shot that down, hoping to draw him into a more candid conversation outside the oppressive demands of his workspace. 

I needn’t have bothered. Mukherjee speaks from the heart, even if he hesitates to shoot from the hip. Despite having spent his entire working life in the city, in south Mumbai, which may well qualify for the gangster status recently awarded to New Delhi’s Khan Market, he has not picked up the fine art of privilege, doublespeak. 

Originally from Santiniketan, where he schooled in the Bengali medium before studying museology and museum studies from M S University in Baroda, he came to the Mumbai as an intern with Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya or CSMVS. “I fell in love,” he says. One look at the magnificent Indo-Saracenic structure that rose above everything else in the vicinity and he, a 25-year old who had wanted to become a social worker, was hooked. “I fell in love and everything changed from there,” he says. 

He has been two decades (and some more) at the helm. Under him, the museum has undergone a dramatic change, shedding its old elitist form with mothballed artefacts and slow whirring fans into an open, well-lit structure bringing in exhibitions from all over the world. He has just set up a children’s museum, a glass structure built around the old and majestic trees in the museum’s three-acre campus. This is his most rewarding project he says. Keen on giving something to the children, by them and for them, he ensured that the first collections have been curated by a group of children too.  

A few years ago, CSMVS drew much applause from peers across the world for another first, its ‘museum on wheels’, also a pet project of Mukherjee. “I used to wonder if the role of the museum is to enlighten the enlightened,” he says softly, referring obliquely to the fact that CSMVS, like most major art and culture institutions in the city is situated in south Mumbai. In a way the people who come to the museum are mostly privileged city residents; although there are tourists from all over the country and the world coming in today, it was not always the case. “I used to question myself, what am I doing for the underprivileged and since 2009, I think the shift began. We reached out to NGOs and identified a strategy to take the museum to the people, whose culture we celebrate,” he says. 

The city has good people, he says and “if you have a good idea and can implement it, the money comes.” The museum on wheels and the children’s museum have found generous private and corporate donors. “There is a huge cultural hunger in the country and we do not know how to feed them, everyone is curious but we don’t have enough people to take this forward,” he says. Mukherjee is a strong advocate for setting up dedicated Indian heritage management institutes and training people to look after what could be a goldmine for the country’s exchequer, in terms of tourism revenue. 

The food comes to the table, the attendants finally giving up on us making our way to spread. A few chicken and paneer tikkas and some biryani that Mukherjee asks for, specifically. No surprises as Copper Chimney sticks to the tried and tasted onion-tomato gravy routine that was once the norm in all city restaurants, but has long lost its taste. Mukherjee is a small eater, eats without spending much time over his plate. I wonder if it would have been better if we had organised a cook-in with home chefs, perhaps more in keeping with the style of a man who wears his accent and roots on his sleeve. 

Mukherjee sees his role as that of a culture manager, a custodian of people’s culture. This is a different approach in a world where museums are seen as sterile spaces, meant to educate children and foreign nationals about past glory. Mukherjee was also rankled by the criticism leveled at Indian cultural institutions from all over the world, that the buildings with some the most priceless objects in their custody were extremely cavalier about their privilege. 

So what does a museum mean to him, having spent his entire life working in one? He takes no time to answer this one. “An open space for conversation, it is not a building or an object but an idea.” The answer may sound glib but Mukherjee approached it with the drive of a research scholar. He began by defining what a museum must mean to the people and then worked his way backwards to draw up a strategy for engagement and involvement. 

He is ambitious he says but never really thought he would hold the top job. “A curator writing a few odd academic papers that is what I saw life as.” And yet, he is the first museum director to have attempted anything as big as the India and the World exhibition in partnership with the British Museum. It took three years of planning and execution, but the beginning was over a meal with Neil MacGregor, a former director of the British Museum, at Trishna, a popular seafood restaurant in the vicinity. “We were keen to bring it here but the cost and the logistics were daunting. The entire project cost close to ~14 crore. This was the most expensive ever for us and we had to get support.” 

Organising the funds was surprisingly easy. Money is not the hurdle, mindsets are, he says. “Before you transform an institution, you transform its people,” he says referring to his work at the museum. It helped that he was a student of history. Because he looked at the history of the institution (they have recently set up an institutional archive to document the museum’s storied history) to explain himself better to his people. The idea was to demonstrate to those now working in the cavernous insides of the sprawling structure that they were walking on the shoulders of giants. 

The museum was set up with contribution from wealthy industrialists, by people who wanted to give back to their city. Not just its founders, the collections carry a similar story. Mukherjee talks about the many who have gifted their collections, but the story of Sir Ratan Tata (son of industrialist Jamsetji N Tata), collector, lover of art, good food, music and interesting conversations, resonates the deepest with him. Most of the collection at the museum today is his donation, picked off the cultural hothouses of London (he died there in 1918) in the early 1900s. “He was collecting Indian antiquities and art objects in London at a time when they were being taken out of the country quite freely (as the property of the British rulers) and he gave it all to the museum as a gift,” he marvels. It is a gift Mukherjee is determined to keep giving back.