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On a breezy April morning, the five-acre sprawl of the Crafts Museum, pervaded by the singing of visiting Baul minstrels from Santiniketan, is a sanctuary in the heart of traffic-choked central Delhi. There is visual drama at every turn: a great wooden figure in a doorway, a deity presiding over his open-air terracotta court, intricate jharokas from old havelis embedded in the museum's façade, giant urns, a chariot dominating a forecourt. Conservation architect KT Ravindran holds that "not just the buildings, but the entire campus, produced by some of the best minds in the country, should be considered a heritage site".
The roll call of famous names associated with the museum begins with Kamaladevi Chhattopadhyay, legendary promoter and collector of Indian crafts. Her collection, housed at first in rented galleries in Connaught Place, became part of the museum's repository of treasures. Architect Charles Correa designed the museum, sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri and architect Ram Sharma laid out the village complex, with rustic homes from across India. "Cultural czarina" and friend of Indira Gandhi Pupul Jayakar played a stellar role in getting the museum off the ground, though her contribution is underplayed because of strains that later developed between her and Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi. The talented art scholar Jyotindra Jain, recruited as senior director through the Union Public Service Commission, arrived in end-1984 and found, as he recalls, "a small building, an administrative block, a library and one temporary exhibition gallery. The collection was in boxes, and some of it was getting damaged." By the time Jain resigned in
2001 to join Jawaharlal Nehru University, he had conceptualised and curated the permanent galleries, the collection had been augmented and catalogued, and the museum had made a name for itself with its exhibitions, notably Other Masters, on folk artists, which was featured in Newsweek.
After this the museum's story turns erratic, and you find disquieting evidence of this, when you visit, despite its abundant charm. The galleries look jaded and bear depressing signs of damp, mould and peeling paint. The labelling is sometimes eccentric - a Patan Patola sari, for example, is identified as a Baluchari - clearly not having kept pace with shifted objects. Disappointingly, the Cultist gallery is closed on account of falling plaster; another is being renovated, leaving only two galleries to visit. There are more specimens from the museum's outstanding collection of Bhuta sculptures lying face up in its cavernous store-room than there are on display. The famed village complex is in disarray, some of its huts turned into storehouses. A dish antenna pops up from a Gadaba hut from Odisha, which now serves as a worker's home.
Caught in controversy
Many in the crafts community accuse the Union textile ministry, of which the Crafts Museum is, in official parlance, "a subordinate office", of treating it shabbily. For nine years after Jain left, the museum was run by a succession of bureaucrats holding "extra charge" and suffered epic neglect. In 2010, Ruchira Ghose, an economist turned craft specialist, was made consultant, and effective head, reportedly on the intervention of Sonia Gandhi. Ghose, whose most talked-about achievements are a popular cafe, a lucrative museum shop, and an impressive new residence for visiting artisans, left earlier this month; her contract was not renewed. She says she achieved her mandate "of revitalising and rescuing the museum", despite being "resented by the museum's permanent government staff and undermined by the ministry, which wants to control everything". She points out that she secured, with great difficulty, permissions and money to restore the buildings, and the task was just beginning.
Those waiting for a professional head for the museum should perhaps not hold their breath. Union Textiles Secretary S K Panda told Business Standard that a new director would be appointed "as per procedure, in due course". Meanwhile, the Crafts Museum, which badly needs to have its buildings restored, its galleries updated, its collection, frozen for over a decade, grown, has been engulfed in a controversy it does not need over whether or not it will become part of a planned Hastkala (handicrafts) Academy.
Ghose says the ministry made it amply clear, in recent dealings with the museum, that it would be integrated in the proposed academy, a research and educational institute announced in last year's budget. Laila Tyabji, chairperson of Dastkar, who has followed the matter closely, says, "The plan has been executed with speed and stealth, and with no consultation with anyone from the crafts sector".
An uncertain future
The ministry, for its part, is confusingly opaque. A report last month in Mint that the Craft Museum would become a "subset of a new Hastkala Academy" quoted Panda as saying, on the one hand, that nothing would be closed down, but then adding, that "we cannot have two bodies pursuing the same thing after all and the availability of land at the Crafts Museum, in fact, will be put to better and bigger use".
To Business Standard recently, he said, "The Crafts Museum will not be shut down. It will be strengthened, consolidated and improved." On the question of whether the Hastkala Academy would come up on its terrain, he said the matter was before the Cabinet, and nothing had been decided. However, according to PTI, a textile ministry press release this week said the Hastakala Academy would be set up at the Crafts Museum premises without dismantling any of the museum galleries and without disturbing museum activities.
Ghose and Tyabji argue strongly against a new institution coming up on the site, saying it would dilute the integrity of the museum. Ravindran agrees, pointing out that this would actually not be legal, since the museum, across the road from the Purana Qila, is in a conservation zone. "In any case," he says, "a new body should have its own space, its own potential to expand." On the other hand, Jaya Jaitly, president of the Dastkari Haat Samiti, sees nothing wrong, given the difficulty and cost of acquiring land, "if five or six rooms were to come up on the site, to house the new academy". Is that what the government has in mind? Jaitly, who first mooted the idea of a Hastkala Academy, has no idea. Indeed, she has the same complaint as everyone else: why is the government acting alone, without consultation with the crafts sector? Why indeed.
