It wouldn’t be
surprising if the past counted for little in India. This is, after all, a
country with over a billion people and all the challenges that come with that.
The reality
though is that we obsess about our past. We lose no opportunity to tom-tom the
glories of India’s culture and civilisation. It is, of course, another matter
that this pride in our heritage seems to be wheeled out only on special
occasions and is not really a part of our DNA. Why else would we be so
indifferent towards visible symbols of our past — museums for instance?
Several weeks
ago, I was at the Pondicherry Museum — the Puducherry Museum actually. The government-run museum was then in
the throes of a renovation, which mostly seemed to revolve around giving the
building a fresh lick of paint.
What stopped me
in my tracks though was the extreme casualness with which the whole process
appeared to be carried out. To begin with, visitors were being allowed in, to
dodge falling paint and bamboo scaffolding and see what they could of the
exhibits.
The exhibits
themselves were left to the mercies of the painters — very little effort
appeared to have been put into protecting them from the paint and dust. There
was, for instance, not a dustsheet in sight to protect the exhibits. Instead,
just a few sheets of newspaper spread desultorily across some of the objects;
many though were splattered with paint. And dust-covered furniture — I’m not
sure if they were antiques or replicas — was stacked in the corners of some of
the rooms on the first floor of the museum.
In other rooms,
wiry workmen pushed around glass-fronted display cabinets that held shards of
ancient pottery and antique weapons. Elsewhere, burial urns of clay nestled on
beds made of old car tyres, propped cosily against walls. The glass on some
display cabinets was long gone and a visitor could have easily walked away with
a souvenir that was centuries, if not millennia, old.
I know it’s not
easy to find the resources and expertise required to run a museum well, let
alone renovate one properly. But surely, it can’t be too hard to find some expertise
in a town like Pondicherry, which has a very active chapter of The Indian National Trust For Art and Cultural Heritage (Intach).
And failing all else, is it so hard to bring some commonsense to how we manage
museums and view the past?
Perhaps new signage
has been put up in the palace since my last visit, but the signboards with a
difference popped up in my mind when I saw this report about efforts to get
Padmanabhapuram onto UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites list. 
