Belle et rebelle

(Did a slightly shorter version of this for The Hindu)

Facing me is a white wooden door with graffiti sprayed across it. As I pass through it and walk down a flight of cemented stairs, the light fades and the temperature drops sharply. My phone beeps that it has no signal.

I am several meters underground in a bunker that was a German air raid shelter during World War II. And for a moment, the world I know seems very distant.

Then lights flicker on, lighting up the concrete- and metal-lined corridors of the Musée Rochelais de la Dernière Guerre or the La Rochelle Museum of the Last War. Almost simultaneously, Jean-Luc Labour’s vibrant voice fills the space, as he starts talking about how he acquired the bunker in the early 1980s and turned it into a museum that tells the story of La Rochelle and France during World War II.

A beautiful town of 80,000 on France’s Atlantic coast, about 450 kilometres South West of Paris, La Rochelle was one of five German submarine bases in occupied-France during the Second World War. During the War, the Germans constructed several air raid shelters in the town, including one for the commander of the submarine base. And it is this underground bunker, on a quiet street off La Rochelle’s main market, that houses the museum. What makes the privately-owned museum special is that it has been painstakingly put together by Labour, a history buff and former tourism director of the town.

A good part of the museum’s motley collection of guns, uniforms, clothes, photographs, flags, maps, documents and other memorabilia has been acquired either in or from around La Rochelle. Opening a rather battered suitcase, Labour shows how its false bottom concealed a wireless transmitter and weapons. The case belonged to a British secret agent smuggled into France to help the French resistance movement, he says.   

Labour is such a smashing storyteller that for a little over an hour I am transported to wartime France. I guess it also helps that he allows me to handle several vintage guns including a Luger pistol and a Schmeisser MP-41 sub-machine gun.

Equally adept time machines are the three towers that stand watch over the entry to La Rochelle’s old port. Perhaps the most recognised and photographed features of the town, the Saint Nicholas, ‘Chaine’ and ‘Lanterne’ towers once regulated entry into the town’s port and also served as watch towers, military barracks, prisons and navigational aids. Today, they are tourist magnets that offer visitors glimpses of La Rochelle’s past and also its celebrated ‘rebel spirit’.

For being different is, it seems, a part of La Rochelle’s DNA. By the middle of the 12^th Century, the town was granted a ‘Charter of commune’ by the Duke of Aquitaine, who ruled the area. The charter allowed the town a degree of political and economic freedom available to few of its contemporaries. It was, for instance, allowed several tax and customs privileges including exemption from some taxes levied by the Crown. And in 1199, La Rochelle firmly signalled its autonomy by electing its first mayor, perhaps the first French town to do so.

Over the next few centuries it flourished as an important port on the Atlantic, especially for the trade in salt and wine. In keeping with its penchant for being different, the town embraced the values of the Reformation — the movement for reform that split Christianity in Western Europe into the Catholic and Protestant churches. And by the middle of the 16^th Century La Rochelle was a Protestant stronghold in Catholic France. 

However, the town’s privileged existence came to a rather sorry end in the 17^th Century after the Great Siege of 1627-28. France, under Louis XIII and his Chief Minister Cardinal Richelieu, brought La Rochelle firmly under royal control. The ‘rebel town’ was forced to surrender and was stripped of the economic and political privileges it enjoyed.

By the end of the 17^th Century though, La Rochelle bounced back, becoming the nucleus of trade between France, Africa and the West Indies and Canada in the ‘new world’. Much of La Rochelle’s past lives on in some of its museums including the Orbigny Bernon Museum, the Museum of the New World and the Museum of Protestant History.

However, La Rochelle is not only about the past, but also has its eyes firmly set on the present and the future. Not very surprising for a town that celebrates its difference with the slogan ‘La Rochelle, belle et rebelle’ translated as ‘La Rochelle, beautiful and rebellious’.  As Christophe Marchais, Director, Office of Tourism, La Rochelle tells me: “La Rochelle is not just a historic city, but also a very contemporary city.”

Among the more important of La Rochelle’s relatively contemporary attractions is its International Film Festival. Though not as well known as the one in Cannes, La Rochelle’s International Film Festival is France’s second largest film event and is celebrating its 40^th edition this year, says Marchais. Other interesting events on the town’s cultural calendar include the annual Francofolies music festival and two smaller jazz festivals, besides theatre, documentary and dance festivals.

As a town whose fortunes have been shaped by the sea, La Rochelle is big on water sports. Its marina, located in the Minimes neighbourhood is so packed with yachts and boats that at times it seems I’m trapped in a forest of masts. The marina is currently being expanded and will soon be able to accommodate 4,500-plus pleasure craft, making it the biggest in Europe, Marchais declares.

The best part of the La Rochelle experience though, especially on a fine evening, is to do what many of its residents do — head to the old port. As I stroll along the waterfront and then linger over a drink at one of the many cafes that flank the old port, it’s hard to escape the incessant clanking of halyards whipping against yacht masts in the wind. An aural reminder, perhaps, that La Rochelle is still a bit of a rebel. 

(The pic used here is a low-res version of one that appears with the piece in The Hindu)

Museums on my mind

The entrance to La Rochelle's Natural History Museum

I’ve had museums on my mind these past few days.

What got me thinking, again, about museums is the number there are in La Rochelle, France. Now La Rochelle is not a very large city. It has about 80,000 residents, whose numbers are buoyed by the several million tourists who visit every year.

Yet for a city of its size, La Rochelle has about 10 museums. There could be more, but I’ve been able to count 10 so far. Some are public museums and others are private ones; a couple are large and others are tiny. The museums are on all domains under the sun – natural history, modern art, the ‘new’ world, maritime history, World War II, scale models. And all of them seem to draw in a good number of visitors – at least in spring and summer. And all of them add a zing to the city.

All of which had me thinking about Trivandrum, the city I consider my home town. It is larger than La Rochelle both in area and population. And yet, it has only four museums that I can think of. One privately-run and three run by the government. And yes, it may soon have a fifth one.

For a city with a million or so residents, and one that draws several million tourists every year four, and indeed five, museums is just not enough. We need simply need more of them for the many worlds they open up.

The most obvious candidate for a new museum is the treasure that has been unearthedfrom the city’s Padmanabhaswamy temple. There simply must be a museum that showcases some, if not all, that has been discovered from the temple’s vaults. Such a museum is needed to tell the story of Trivandrum and southern Kerala.

Equally possible are several other smaller museums underpinned by private collections. There are people in Trivandrum with interesting collections of objects ranging from antiques and art to coins and LP records. Why can’t these collections be turned into museums? For nowhere is it said that a museum has to be a huge building with a vast collection. These private collections could even be temporary exhibitions in an existing museum.

The possibilities are many and should be explored. Of course, even as we open new museums we need to ensure that they are interesting, accessible and well maintained – all crucial challenges in India as I wrote a few months ago. 

What we need, perhaps, in Trivandrum – and elsewhere in India – is some sort of a partnership between the public and private spheres to ensure that museums of all sorts are part of our vision of development, part of the social infrastructure we are building.

I know that for India museums may not be a priority. But they are an investment in our past and our future. For in various ways they tell our story, just as the many museums of La Rochelle tell the story of this beautiful city and of France.

And when all else is gone, it’s the stories that remain.

The past is a mirage

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?