Reimagining India's Museums

[@malasyu]

Museums need professional curators who will organize trips for school children with work shops to instill in them the value of museums. As one of the speakers said, start the interest early. How many history students visit museums. Even though they visit when they go overseas.

[@shreedevinair-pal9594]

There are so many problems with Indian Museums. 1. They are not user friendly for one thing. 2. They do not keep the objects properly and in the best light. 3. The objects in storage are kept really badly,. sometimes in appalling conditions. 4. There is scant documentation so if something is lost it will take years to find out what happened to it. 5. The photography of every new object that gets into the museum is inadequate. All parts of the object especially sculpture are not documented in photographs. Many sculptures are only photographed from the front. 5. There are no docents who make the exhibits comprehensible to the viewers. 6. There is very little information given to researchers on Indian art by Museum curators. 6. Cutting edge conservation departments for the maintenance of precious objects is glaringly absent. When there is a conservation department., it is usually stuck in research done on the subject 50 years ago. I can go on and on. .......And I am not exaggerating because I have had to deal with many of these problems in the course of my research. It pains me to say all this, but unfortunately, everything I say is true. I am an art historian and when I was doing my Ph.D. in art history a few years ago, I got far more help from museums abroad than from any in India. And all the above is true of every government museum, probably - and especially so of the National Museum in Delhi. The Directorship of this museum is given for a period of two years or so to people from the IAS, some of who are not interested in museums. We need museums to be run professionally by people who know about art and the conservation and display of art. Not a Babu who marks time till his retirement. Things have to change big time before our museums become showcases for objects instead of mortuaries for them.