History gets a makeover at Delhi's National Museum

With guided walks, theme-based galleries and performances, the National Museum in Delhi is reinventing itself

Next to the ticket counter of the National Museum in Delhi sits “Shiva Vamana”, or Shiva the dwarf, a fifth-century sculpture. Considered a rare piece of sculptural art, the figure depicts child-like innocence on the face of a rotund Shiva. A small, almost imperceptible, smile plays on the lips of the dwarf god. It’s almost as though it is pleased to witness the activity around it.

It’s Wednesday morning. Ordinarily, the museum would be practically empty expect for the staff and some foreign tourists. Today, the lobby, where the Shiva statue sits, is bustling with visitors: parents with their children, young men and women, elderly couples.

The National Museum has undergone a transformation of sorts in the last year or two. Some of its galleries have been renovated and new ones have opened; guided walks are held twice a day free of cost; the audio guide, available in English, French and Dutch, is being updated; monthly talks on art, culture and history are being organised (free and open to public); volunteers from across age groups and professions are being trained to take people through the museum; and a number of temporary exhibitions are being curated.

The National Museum on Janpath has always boasted of a phenomenal collection. So much so that if you spent one minute with each piece, it would take you three years, nine months and 23 days to view the 200,000 sculptures, paintings, coins, textiles, arms and armour, manuscripts and anthropological objects it houses.

But the problem was: how to draw people in to see, appreciate and understand this collection. Venu Vasudevan, who was until recently the director general of the museum, turned things around through a series of outreach programmes. While his abrupt and unexplained transfer in May invited loud protests from the fraternity, the museum is trying to keep alive and carry forward what he started.

Instead of the earlier trend of clubbing things based on their material — stone objects in one gallery, terracotta in another, coins in the third and so on —, some of the galleries are gradually being redone thematically. Four such galleries are currently open to public: “decorative arts” and “jewellery” on the ground floor, “Thanjavur and Mysore paintings” on the first floor and the “tradition art and continuity” gallery, which has ethnographic objects, on the second floor.

On display at the decorative arts gallery, for example, is the game “Gyan Chaupar” (snakes and ladders), which represents salvation by overcoming life’s challenges symbolised by snakes. In the same gallery is a five-foot-long ivory tusk that tells the life story of the Buddha carved into 43 small roundels. Everything here — the lighting, wall finish, casing and text — is more contemporary as compared to the older galleries.

Adjoining it is the jewellery gallery, which is almost completely dark but for the light shining off the diamonds, emeralds and gold ornaments encased in small enclosures in the walls. Starting with the Indus Valley civilisation, this gallery takes you through the splendours of the Mughal era and of the various princely states of India.

Later this year, the “bronze gallery” will reopen and early next year, the “manu-scripts gallery”.

Besides engaging people with its permanent galleries, the museum has started organising carefully curated temporary exhibitions. In March next year, it will hold an exhibition on Parsi heritage. Planned on the scale of the “Body in Indian Art” exhibition, which had on display over 300 artifacts spanning over 4,000 years, it is being visualised as one of the most exhaustive exhibitions on Parsi heritage that will cover ancient, medieval and present time and include collections from international museums.

The “National Museum History Performance” series is also an ongoing effort. The first such event featured a Delhi-based organisation that does theatre heritage walks. The performers dressed up like characters from history to tell the story in a performative style. The museum later had Thumri singer Vidya Rao rendering compositions of Deccan poetry during the exhibition “Nauras: The Many Arts of Deccan” earlier this year.

To keep alive the interest in its permanent galleries, the museum has a “Gallery in Focus” programme. Last year, for example, it invited the traditional Sikligarhs from Rajasthan to demonstrate sword-making. The gallery in focus was “arms and armour”.

With all this, visitor count has gone up by about 10 per cent. But more needs to be done. Says art historian Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, who is the director of Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai: “Look at museums in the US and Europe. They are such dynamic institutions. In the US, they are almost as popular as football matches,” she says. “With Venu (Vasudevan) gone,” she adds, “I am not sure how long National Museum can sustain this momentum.”

National Museum Delhi is open all days, 10 am to 5 pm (except on Monday and public holidays)