Two weeks ago, when I went to the Bhau Daji Lad museum in Byculla for a lecture, I also caught a display by the artists’ collective CAMP in the main gallery; a life-size sculpture of a truck made entirely of shiny metal discs by Valay Shende in the courtyard; an exhibition of large scale prints that was part of the FOCUS photography festival, also in the courtyard; and, in a new gallery dedicated to special exhibitions, evocative photographs by Sebastian Cortes of old havelis owned by Dawoodi Bohras in a small town called Sidhpur.
I visit BDL regularly, being on the faculty of an art history course conducted there, and am always struck by the variety of workshops, film screenings, talks, guided tours and exhibitions organised by the curatorial staff and partner organisations. The scope of that programming can be glimpsed on the museum’s Facebook page.
I was an occasional visitor to BDL in the 1990s and early 2000s, a time when it was virtually unknown even to the city’s art lovers and educationists. Almost the only people who wandered into the 19th century building in those days were families that had come to visit the zoo next door and had time to kill. It was established as Bombay’s first museum, named for the Empress Victoria and her consort Albert. After Independence, the Bombay Municipal Corporation renamed it after a prominent Indologist and let it go to seed.
Prize-winning restoration project
A little over a decade ago, Tasneem Mehta of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage launched an effort to revitalise the institution. Vikas Dilawari headed the award-winning restoration team that gave back to the building its original grace and flamboyance. Mehta, as honorary director, was instrumental in getting private partners, mainly the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation, to contribute to restoration and programming. She set up a conservation lab, rescued several damaged artefacts, modernised the display and wall text, hired enthusiastic young curators, cleared out the courtyard at the back, and established a new exhibition space, a lecture theatre, and a café. She recognised that the main collection, while an interesting account of the city’s history, hardly justified repeated visits, and turbocharged the supplementary programming to compensate for that limitation. Her most radical and successful initiative was to encourage interactions between contemporary art and the permanent collection.
The municipal corporation, acting on the principle that no good deed should go unpunished, has recently launched a campaign against her. It began with a battle around a plot that had been earmarked for infrastructure development but had come to be used as a playground. BDL initiated an ambitious expansion plan that would make it an indispensible culture hub for the whole city, but would take over that plot. Perhaps the museum wasn’t adequately sensitive to the needs of locals in a space-starved city, and failed to jog the municipal authorities sufficiently and secure an alternate site for the playground. This oversight could have been rectified easily, except that the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, which took up the cause of the playground, is less interested in finding solutions than in exploiting wedge issues to gain votes and influence. The battle over museum expansion soon turned into a grudge match against Mehta.
Last month, MNS hoodlums threatened to prevent by force a fashion show that was planned in BDL as part of its larger fund-raising effort. The incident was laughable and tragic at the same time: political functionaries with no interest in museums and contempt for BDL were claiming the museum was sacred space being defiled by those dedicated to its improvement. The fashion show at BDL had to be moved hastily to another location. Back in 1998, I worked on supplementary programming around the Enduring Image, a show of British Museum artefacts at the National Gallery of Modern Art. NGMA’s honorary director at the time, Saryu Doshi, and the British Council’s Roopa Patel envisioned an Abu Jani–Sandeep Khosla show as the exhibition finale. It was extraordinarily well-received and the British Museum, which two years later rented its premises for a Bollywood song and dance, didn’t feel its artefacts were besmirched by the event.
Following the fashion show cancellation, the Shiv Sena, feeling pressure from its fellow chauvinists, turned decisively against the BDL administration. The Sena-ruled BMC has now cut the budget for the proposed museum expansion and revoked an agreement signed over a decade ago that formed a trust to guide BDL’s development. India’s been ranked 186th of 189 countries in enforcement of contracts, and the BMC’s move to scrap the agreement only reinforces the idea that in any dealing with Indian officials, citizens have no rights, and the government no duties.
Municipal corporators and the mayor now want “control in the affairs of the museum”. When they had that control, they turned the institution into a decrepit shadow of its former self. Sadly, though we might witness a return to that period of stasis and decay, the city at large seems apathetic to the museum’s fate. We don’t have a real museum-going culture yet, and the population is unconvinced about the worth of these collections of artefacts.
Rigorous study
Until recently, votaries of museums had few arguments on their side in the debate about museum funding. All they could say was that museums broaden peoples’ horizons, which sounds wishy-washy. Following the establishment of the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Tate Modern, museums came to be seen as important fulcrums of urban regeneration. A little over a year ago, a study that has not received the attention it deserves provided the first rigorous, quantitative evidence of the benefits of museums. The New York Times carried a good summary of the study by its authors.
The surprising hero of the story is Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart’s founder Sam Walton. She set up the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, a place that, it is fair to say, was culturally deprived. A region that had never had a proper museum suddenly had a major one, with a gargantuan $800-million endowment. To cope with high demand for school tours, the museum assigned visits by lottery. It became a perfect social experiment, because the cohort of students who walked through the galleries was randomly selected. The study’s authors tested this group against those who didn’t make the trip, and found significant improvements in socially desirable behaviours like tolerance and critical thinking in the group that had been to the museum. The benefits were particularly strong among poor, minority and rural children.
Needless to say, to have a beneficial effect, a museum has to be well run, with qualified and enthusiastic tour guides and a gripping display. This caveat aside, the study demonstrates the potential museums have as agents of social cohesion and liberal belief. Of course, boosting critical thinking and tolerance isn’t top of the agenda for the MNS and Shiv Sena. Should they read the Arkansas study, their determination to undo a decade of good work at the Bhau Daji Lad museum might actually escalate.
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I visit BDL regularly, being on the faculty of an art history course conducted there, and am always struck by the variety of workshops, film screenings, talks, guided tours and exhibitions organised by the curatorial staff and partner organisations. The scope of that programming can be glimpsed on the museum’s Facebook page.
I was an occasional visitor to BDL in the 1990s and early 2000s, a time when it was virtually unknown even to the city’s art lovers and educationists. Almost the only people who wandered into the 19th century building in those days were families that had come to visit the zoo next door and had time to kill. It was established as Bombay’s first museum, named for the Empress Victoria and her consort Albert. After Independence, the Bombay Municipal Corporation renamed it after a prominent Indologist and let it go to seed.
Prize-winning restoration project
A little over a decade ago, Tasneem Mehta of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage launched an effort to revitalise the institution. Vikas Dilawari headed the award-winning restoration team that gave back to the building its original grace and flamboyance. Mehta, as honorary director, was instrumental in getting private partners, mainly the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation, to contribute to restoration and programming. She set up a conservation lab, rescued several damaged artefacts, modernised the display and wall text, hired enthusiastic young curators, cleared out the courtyard at the back, and established a new exhibition space, a lecture theatre, and a café. She recognised that the main collection, while an interesting account of the city’s history, hardly justified repeated visits, and turbocharged the supplementary programming to compensate for that limitation. Her most radical and successful initiative was to encourage interactions between contemporary art and the permanent collection.
The municipal corporation, acting on the principle that no good deed should go unpunished, has recently launched a campaign against her. It began with a battle around a plot that had been earmarked for infrastructure development but had come to be used as a playground. BDL initiated an ambitious expansion plan that would make it an indispensible culture hub for the whole city, but would take over that plot. Perhaps the museum wasn’t adequately sensitive to the needs of locals in a space-starved city, and failed to jog the municipal authorities sufficiently and secure an alternate site for the playground. This oversight could have been rectified easily, except that the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, which took up the cause of the playground, is less interested in finding solutions than in exploiting wedge issues to gain votes and influence. The battle over museum expansion soon turned into a grudge match against Mehta.
Last month, MNS hoodlums threatened to prevent by force a fashion show that was planned in BDL as part of its larger fund-raising effort. The incident was laughable and tragic at the same time: political functionaries with no interest in museums and contempt for BDL were claiming the museum was sacred space being defiled by those dedicated to its improvement. The fashion show at BDL had to be moved hastily to another location. Back in 1998, I worked on supplementary programming around the Enduring Image, a show of British Museum artefacts at the National Gallery of Modern Art. NGMA’s honorary director at the time, Saryu Doshi, and the British Council’s Roopa Patel envisioned an Abu Jani–Sandeep Khosla show as the exhibition finale. It was extraordinarily well-received and the British Museum, which two years later rented its premises for a Bollywood song and dance, didn’t feel its artefacts were besmirched by the event.
Following the fashion show cancellation, the Shiv Sena, feeling pressure from its fellow chauvinists, turned decisively against the BDL administration. The Sena-ruled BMC has now cut the budget for the proposed museum expansion and revoked an agreement signed over a decade ago that formed a trust to guide BDL’s development. India’s been ranked 186th of 189 countries in enforcement of contracts, and the BMC’s move to scrap the agreement only reinforces the idea that in any dealing with Indian officials, citizens have no rights, and the government no duties.
Municipal corporators and the mayor now want “control in the affairs of the museum”. When they had that control, they turned the institution into a decrepit shadow of its former self. Sadly, though we might witness a return to that period of stasis and decay, the city at large seems apathetic to the museum’s fate. We don’t have a real museum-going culture yet, and the population is unconvinced about the worth of these collections of artefacts.
Rigorous study
Until recently, votaries of museums had few arguments on their side in the debate about museum funding. All they could say was that museums broaden peoples’ horizons, which sounds wishy-washy. Following the establishment of the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Tate Modern, museums came to be seen as important fulcrums of urban regeneration. A little over a year ago, a study that has not received the attention it deserves provided the first rigorous, quantitative evidence of the benefits of museums. The New York Times carried a good summary of the study by its authors.
The surprising hero of the story is Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart’s founder Sam Walton. She set up the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, a place that, it is fair to say, was culturally deprived. A region that had never had a proper museum suddenly had a major one, with a gargantuan $800-million endowment. To cope with high demand for school tours, the museum assigned visits by lottery. It became a perfect social experiment, because the cohort of students who walked through the galleries was randomly selected. The study’s authors tested this group against those who didn’t make the trip, and found significant improvements in socially desirable behaviours like tolerance and critical thinking in the group that had been to the museum. The benefits were particularly strong among poor, minority and rural children.
Needless to say, to have a beneficial effect, a museum has to be well run, with qualified and enthusiastic tour guides and a gripping display. This caveat aside, the study demonstrates the potential museums have as agents of social cohesion and liberal belief. Of course, boosting critical thinking and tolerance isn’t top of the agenda for the MNS and Shiv Sena. Should they read the Arkansas study, their determination to undo a decade of good work at the Bhau Daji Lad museum might actually escalate.
