The ‘Public’ Indian Museum,Calcutta,1858–1878

List of Abbreviations:

Agr.—agriculture

Br.—branch

Cal.—Calcutta

Camb.—Cambridge

Comm.—commerce

Dept.—department

Dir.—director

eds.—editors

Govt.—government

Lib.—library

No.—number

N.M.M.L.—Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

Progs.—proceedings

Rev.—revenue

Secy.—secretary

Supdt.—superintendent

Univ.—university

Vol.—volume

The Orientalists in the Asiatic Society of Bengal played a significant part in illuminating the ancientness and sophistication of the Indian civilisation. The Society was formed in 1784 in Calcutta under the leadership of Sir William Jones, and its learned members carried on exploring the ancient land’s past history and heritage throughout the colonial period. Their findings, based on the discovery of relics and specimens of artistic, sculptic, numismatic, anthropologic, zoologic and geographic varieties, needed to be kept secured for the benefit of posterity. The Society initially tried to preserve such findings in its journal (Asiatik Researches), other publications and the library, and house accumulations of the basic materials within its office premises and the surrounding compound. In due course, the Society’s growing collections of antiquarian objects and historical primary sources led it to consider displaying these as exhibits to an interested and inquisitive audience. This prompted the Society to raise donations from its members and patrons and start constructing a building in 1796 for the upkeep and supplementation of its valuable possessions. The painstakingly built house, on a piece of the government-granted land at the corner of Calcutta’s Park Street, came up for the Society’s occupation in 1808. Six years later, the Society succeeded in setting up the first museum in this premises in the whole of India, and inaugurated it in 1814.

I

It was infinitely less difficult to establish a private museum than to run it, with all its bureaucratic paraphernalia and gradually accumulating liabilities. The Asiatic Society came to realise this in the following two decades and was forced in 1836, under obvious financial strain, to appeal to the government for a monthly grant for the museum. Since the paltry sum of ₹200 per month as official grant (raised in 1839 to ₹300 with the provision for additional support on special occasions) ¹ was found to be grossly inadequate, the Society was forced to plead persistently for the government to adopt the Museum or take over its overall maintenance. The foundation in 1840 of a small Museum of Economic Geology in 1 Hastings Street, Calcutta, further encouraged the Society to pursue this plea. Consequently, its members submitted, in 1856, a memorial to the Government of India for setting up an ‘Imperial Museum’ in Calcutta (the British-Indian capital), built upon the holdings of the private repository that it was already running. ‘The motives which have led the governments of all other civilized nations to establish Museums at their capitals’, according to the Society, ‘apply with equal force in the case of British India’. It was perhaps with greater force, since its rulers, or a handful of foreigners, claim for themselves ‘the ability, if not the will, of taking the lead in all improvements {of their subjects}’. ² Nothing came out of the Society’s memorial of 1856 because the oblivious government was overwhelmed dramatically in 1857 with the outbreak of a great uprising and the ‘terrible events’ that followed. When, however, the authorities managed to survive the crisis, and seemed to have recovered their composure to an extent, the Society ventured to raise the issue once again in October 1858. It now pressed for transferring its precious collections to a museum to be founded by the Government of India in Calcutta as an ‘Imperial Museum’. ³

According to the Asiatic Society’s proposal, such a museum should be ‘freely open’ to all under suitable regulations and would probably be ‘as much frequented by Europeans as natives’. ⁴ Persons to derive most benefit from this kind of institution would be those who, having acquired the first elements of knowledge elsewhere, use it in the further pursuit of their enquiries. Constituted as ‘a most valuable and a most essential portion of all complete education…it ought not to be made subordinate to any individual School or College’. Rather, it ‘ought to be, as it were, the general library of reference and consultation for all’. Since the museum itself was being thought of as a marked evidence of progress in civilisation, it should ‘find its abode in the best part of the city {of Calcutta}’, and at such a venue as might ‘not be inconvenient to the native population’ for visitations. ⁵ The Government of India, though agreeable to establishing a Government Museum in the metropolis of Calcutta, was not financially comfortable at that particular point with giving effect to the proposal. After some dilly-dallying on its part, and following the Society’s unceasing insistence, the Government of India finally decided to accept the proposal to found the so-called ‘Imperial’ Museum on 22 May 1862. It approved the transfer of the Society’s collections (barring the library) into the proposed government depository and decided to house it at the site occupied by the Small Cause Court on the Chowringhee Road, Calcutta. ⁶ It also resolved to set up a Board of Trustees for the management of the museum, allowing the Society a ‘liberal share’ in power and membership in the Board. ⁷ The authorities, however, did not find the ‘Imperial Museum’ to be a suitable name for it, and the Governor General in Council himself suggested the ‘Indian Museum’ as the appropriate name for such a ‘Public Museum’. ⁸

The use of the term ‘Public Museum’ in place of the hitherto oft-repeated ‘Imperial Museum’ was distinctly noticeable in the late 1850s (from 1858 onwards, to be precise) in the vocabulary of both the government and the Asiatic Society. Even in 1858, the Society termed its recommended museum as a “Public Museum” whose classified, catalogued and neatly arranged specimens were to be visited by the ‘public’, including ‘a large number of natives of all classes’. ⁹ In 1862, following the decision of the Government of India to give effect to its proposal, the Society hailed the forthcoming ‘Museum to be a Public Museum’. ¹⁰ That was exactly what the Government of India also felt on their part when they drafted ‘the Bill to provide for the establishment of a Public Museum at Calcutta’. ¹¹ Even their initial positive response in 1862 to the Society’s proposal was similarly to treat it as the subject matter for the ‘foundation of a public museum in Calcutta’. ¹² They further asserted in 1862 the solemn right of the pubic over the museum thus: ‘When the Museum has become the property of the public, the public ought to enjoy as free a use of its contents as is consistent with their due preservation. It should by no means necessarily follows that the terms on which this use is granted should be more limited than those on which the members of Asiatic Society now enjoy the use of their collections…’. ¹³

The growing consensus among governmental authorities and the Orientalists in favour of charactering the museum in Calcutta as ‘Public’, rather than ‘Imperial’, was somewhat startling in the mid-nineteenth-century British-Indian official lexicon. The term ‘Public’ was used generally as the opposite of ‘Private’, indicating the government or its agencies, and seldom, on rare occasions, to denote the ‘people’, the ‘commonalty’ or the ‘masses’. The term was scarcely used by the scholarly classes to identify institutions and organisations they patronised, and they often appeared to be guarding their elite precincts from the multitudes. It is worth noting though that the enthusiastic Asiatic Society members managed somehow to keep their own ‘Private’ Museum at the Society premises ‘freely open to all’. ¹⁴ Besides, one of them, James Princep, even wished it to be made a ‘national’ museum of an all-India stature. ^14a Despite all this, to raise the issue of a ‘public’ Museum and the government’s agreeing wholeheartedly to act upon it, and that too within the short span between 1856 and 1862, appears to have been occasioned by some unusually significant and far-reaching occurrence. Such an occurrence, shaking the very foundation of the British rule in India, was the Great Revolt of 1857–1858.

Initiated by mutinous sepoys of the British-Indian army, and sponsored by disaffected Indian princes and landed magnates, the Revolt dramatically garnered the massive participation of the common people, or the public at large—the various categories of peasants and artisans, the rural and urban poor, the vagabonds, mendicants and the ‘riff-raffs’ of Indian society. These were not merely the armies of the rebellious sepoys, or those of the hostile rajas and nawabs, nor retinues of the disgruntled aristocracy, that the underprepared British authorities had to deal with. The latter found themselves at sea before semi-armed volunteers from among the discontented public—the so-called killers, looters and arsonists—particularly in the vast countryside in areas full of the victims of high land assessment (on the basis of an unimaginative importation of the Ricardian Rent theory) and dispossession for arrears, as well as in the innumerable urban pockets of the irregularly employed and unemployed. Heretofore, they had not faced ‘the rising of an inflamed people, the rush of the menacing crowds, the fear of aggressive numbers – the confrontation with the hydraheaded monster’. ¹⁵ It was the threateningly advancing commonalty—its bloodthirsty mobs—‘the humble innumerables in march’—that scared the British in India most, ^15a especially their non-officials, who shuddered from daily nightmares of it for long. So the apparently quiet and peaceful Indian public, living at a slow, sleepy pace, could by no means in the long run be taken for granted; rather, it should carefully be observed, constantly controlled by strengthening the hands of its social superiors (and exploiters) ¹⁶ and kept as much in good humour as perhaps possible, and, even slightly cajoled on occasions, if need be.

Although the great uprising was confined generally to the North-Western Provinces (freshly ‘settled’, land revenue-wise), ¹⁷ covering mostly the northern, the central, partly the western and the major portions of eastern India, its impact was felt more or less all over the country. It was also felt strongly in the metropolis of Calcutta—the epicentre of British activities in India—and the areas surrounding it in the Gangetic Plains. It disturbed the European populace deeply and evenly across these territories.

Calcutta’s cause of utmost concern and trepidation seemed to have grown over Barrackpore (so named for quartering army men in its ‘barracks’)—a place barely 15 miles away from it on the eastern bank of the Ganges—where the rumble of a minor mutiny was first heard as early as in 1764. Barrackpore, however, saw a major revolt of the sepoys 60 years later between 31 October and 3 November 1824 over preparations for sending the reluctant among them on an expedition to Burma. It was suppressed by the British after executing 14 ring leaders and massacring 200. ¹⁸ Following about another three decades, Barrackpore again marked practically the beginning of the Great Revolt of 1857, with Mangal Pandey’s execution there on 6 April coinciding with the Meerut sepoys’ outbreak on 10 May, virtually for similar reasons. ¹⁹ With the rapidly spreading flames of the Great Revolt in the North-Western Provinces, their intensifying heat passed quickly from the fringes at Barrackpore to the centre of the city of Calcutta. By the beginning of 1857, the Calcuttans reached suddenly a pinnacle of tension and alarm with all kinds of rumours afloat about the mutinous sepoys’ pouring down into the city, the native inhabitants’ making common grounds with them and together causing havoc on European lives and properties. Apparently, the anxieties climaxed on Sunday, 14 June, when the city was apprehended to fall into the hands of maddened crowds soon after an uprising of local sepoys, and in panic practically the entire European population, official and non-official, ran helter-skelter to find refuge either in the ships on the Hooghly or inside Fort William, or other protected government premises. ²⁰ Although the month of June, and those succeeding it, passed without any catastrophic outcome, the fear psychosis of the authorities and the Europeans continued unabated, and it resulted in a total embargo on the natives’ purchasing and procuring of arms and in the promulgation of an Act for the licensing of arms. ²¹ The ‘crowd’ outside Bengal—reminiscent of the ‘Parisian mob’ the Englishmen had nervously heard of since the French Revolution (1789 onwards)—meanwhile looked so ominously real and close that it needed to be carefully monitored in the future, strictly at times, but more temperately, and even caringly, at most others. The ‘common folk’, the ‘man {and woman} in the street’, the ‘people’ and slightly officiously, the ‘public’, all of a sudden loomed large in the eyes of the British and their Sarkar in India.

The passing of the governance of India from the hands of the East India Company to the cautious care of the Crown in 1858, and deliberations as to how it ought to be carried out, seemed to have brought about a certain congeniality within the ruling circles to be shown to the Indian public. This apparently was generated in Britain by such of the emerging heavyweights in Parliament (Gladstone in the Liberal Opposition and Disraeli in the Tory Government), who pondered in 1857–1858 how to further the British cause in a disturbed India. While at his romantic best, Gladstone wanted to prepare India for self-government and govern India ‘for India’, and practically ‘by Indians’, ²² a procrastinating Disraeli felt that Britain’s interest in using India as a source of raw materials and a market of its manufactures would not work ‘unless they {Indians} are well-governed’, ²³ and a balance maintained between ‘the happiness of India {Indian people} and the welfare, power and glory of Britain’. ²⁴ In the immediate post-uprising days, British political higher ups thus emphasised the need for the authorities to keep the lot of Indians always in mind, and this was necessarily being reflected in the corridors of power in India. Expressions such as the ‘people’ and the ‘popular’, the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘commoner’, and even the ‘mob’ and the ‘masses’, signifying together the all-encompassing ‘public’, began finding their way into the regular official and non-official vocabulary. To describe an institution set up by the government as ‘Public’, therefore, seemed to have become quite acceptable, and preferable, by the early 1860s, and so was the case with the government-built museum in Calcutta about that time. The Governor General in Council, however, had opted for demonstrating greater liberality and decided to name their ‘Central’, ‘General’ or ‘Public’ Museum as the ‘Indian Museum, Calcutta’, representing not only the whole of India but also as meant essentially for all the Indians. The draft of the Act relating to its establishment also formally ascribed to it the name ‘Indian Museum’. ²⁵

II

Whether Imperial or Public, Official or Private, Central or Local, a museum after all has to try to conform to the evolving concept of a museum and to strive continually to live up to it. By the present-day definition of the International Council of Museums, ‘a museum is a permanent establishment administered in the public interest, with a view to conserve, study, exhibit, for the pleasure and education of the public, objects of cultural value’. ²⁶ Stepping on to the line that was thus to be defined in due course, the work in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, proceeded with the passing of a legislation (Act XVII of 1866) and the formation of its Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees was composed of twelve members—eight nominees of the government (including the Bishop of Calcutta, the Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University and the Secretary, Home Department, Government of India) and four nominated by the Asiatic Society. ²⁷ When a new statute was passed for the Museum in 1876, repealing the earlier one, the number of Trustees was increased to sixteen, ²⁸ and that continued to be so thereafter. ²⁹ As regards the cost and maintenance of the museum, it was decided to provide from the general revenues of the state a capital sum of ₹1,000,000 (or £1000) and invest it in the name of the trustees of the Indian Museum so that ‘the said Trustees shall only be entitled to receive the interest thereof from time to time’. The Trustees should also be entitled to accept bequests, gifts, devises and grants, and also special grants from the government. ³⁰

Simultaneously, a new building was intended to be constructed for the museum at state expense on the ground situated between the Small Cause Court and the Chowringhee Road. ³¹ But before that could be accomplished, the Asiatic Society’s rich and varied collections (kept in its own premises with a view to use these as the museum’s base materials) needed to be classified, accessioned and made ready for transferring finally to the museum’s repository. To undertake these tasks (namely of arranging the Society’s original collections of Archaeology, Natural History ³² , Sciences, Antiquities and Literatures, as well as of organising these with new acquisitions), and to put all this into such broad sections as Anthropology and Ethnography, Archaeology and Zoology from the beginning, and Arts from 1876, Geology from 1877 and Industry and Economics from 1888, the museum needed the services of knowledgeable and competent staff. Accordingly, the Trustees of the Indian Museum appointed a Curator (Dr John Anderson) in 1866 and an Assistant Curator (James Wood-Mason) in 1869 to lead a team of enthusiastic employees to process the museum’s possessions. Soon, the supervisory workload turned so heavy that the Curator had to be given the post of Superintendent and the Assistant Curator the position of Deputy Superintendent in 1877. ³³ Rapid expansion of the archaeological section of the museum, necessitating accurate projection of the exhibits (scriptures, sculptures and other antiquities), led the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India (Major General A. Cunningham) to offer the services of his assistant, J.D. Beglar (specially qualified to deal with the Buddhist artifacts from Bharhut) for the benefit of the Museum in 1876. ³⁴

The work of the Indian Museum thus being organised in Calcutta (in the Asiatic Society’s premises at the corner of the Park Street) was certain to get a phenomenal boost after the stately structure to be erected on the Chowringhee was completed. Since it was felt from the beginning that the Museum should be situated conveniently for ‘all classes’ of people, and that it should find ‘its abode in the best part of the city’, ³⁵ the ultimately chosen venue appeared to be the most appropriate. The imposing building was designed in the first half of the 1860s by the renowned British architect, Walter L.B. Granville, who had also been responsible for the creation of some of Calcutta’s grand structures, such as the General Post Office, the High Court and the University Senate House. In 1866, the construction cost of the designed building was calculated to the ₹5,500,000 ³⁶ and its work progressed rather sloppily, despite having March 1871 as the targeted time for completion. Exactly one year before that, however, the Public Works Department of the Government of India discovered the cost to have been underestimated and decided upon an increase by ₹102,500,000. ³⁷ Following further increases in expenditure, fresh allotment of additional amounts, ³⁸ some revisions in the plan and a lot of bureaucratic tangles, the building was finally made ready for occupation in 1875. It took more than two more years to reorganise the galleries and rearrange the exhibits there before the museum could be thrown open to its patrons and visitors—the omnipotent public at large—on 1 April 1878. ³⁹

The number of members of the public or the people visiting the Indian Museum, Calcutta, was meticulously recorded by its custodians from the beginning. Since social categorisation of the museum’s visitors was not in vogue anywhere, ⁴⁰ the Indian Museum concentrated on their main imperialistic divide—Europeans and Indians or the ‘natives’—and rigorously maintained from the outset the records of their males and females, month and year-wise. A glimpse of the Museum’s records of visitors between 1 May 1866 and 31 October 1867 (Appendix A) ⁴¹ will show the care it had taken in enumeration. Records further show that from November 1867 (the museum was closed for the whole month of November) to 31 March 1868, a total of 1,52, 002 visited the Museum with an average of 543 a day on which it was opened to the public, that is, 280 days. ⁴² Understandably, the number of Europeans visiting the museum formed merely a small fraction of the number of the Indian visitors, including very ordinary members of the public. With the so-called native persons, especially commoners of various sorts, taking an active interest in the museum exhibits, the number of visitors in 1869–1870 more than doubled the number of the previous year, that is, 352,673 or an average of 1,199 for each open day. ⁴³

Barring a month (1 November to 1 December) each year, when its premises were to be repaired, refurbished and cleaned, the museum remained open 6 days a week, except Friday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (4 p.m. in December and January). ⁴⁴ Entry was free of charge to members of the public on all days, but the Indian multitudes’ notorious fondness for chewing pans (betel leaves), as well as of smoking bidis (‘native’ cigars) was prohibited within the museum. ⁴⁵ They were also required during the visits to deposit their personal belongings at the museum gate. ⁴⁶ No restriction, however, stood really in the way of the Museum’s gaining popularity with its admiring Indian populace, especially on holidays. Of the total number of visitors in January 1868, namely 15,681, with 581 as the daily average, the largest attendance was on the 27th (1769) and on the 28th (1753)—the former being a Muslim holiday and the latter a Hindu one. ⁴⁷ Such rapid increases in the number of visitors seemed to the museum authorities to be ‘real and permanent, notwithstanding the paucity of space’ in the Park Street accommodation. Curiously enough, however, they attributed the increases most to the attractions the visitors felt for ‘fine specimens of taxidermal art, representing the combat of a lion and a tiger’. ⁴⁸ The mounted presence of less fearsome animals, mammals and birds in the museum displays also proved to be exceedingly popular with the spectators. Since the visitors’ numerical strength was generally believed in the nineteenth century to be more important for a depositary than their quality and capability, ⁴⁹ the Indian Museum authorities decided to lay emphasis on taxidermal reproductions in its galleries to lure the commoners—the semi-literate and illiterate masses. Consequently, it had to treat the lowly paid taxidermists (those who practice the art of preparing and mounting skins of animals with lifelike effect) somewhat liberally, and ensure they—as the proven hands—did not easily leave the museum’s services. The trustees of the museum in fact had no hesitation in February 1871 in recommending a substantial increase in the salary of Mr Swaries, the Artist and Head Taxidermist, in view of the skill he had acquired in his job and the emoluments he could receive by obtaining employment elsewhere. ⁵⁰ All the taxidermists attached to the museum were considered for convenient and free accommodation in the museum premises, Park Street, or near the Kyd Street Office of the Asiatic Society where their workshop was also situated. As the rent of the accommodation in Kyd Street at the heart of the city was rather high, the Government of Bengal tried hard to find quarters for the Museum’s taxidermists outside Calcutta in the suburbs on moderate rent. ⁵¹ They were also treated leniently in service matters, and their undertaking private work outside for extra money was often conveniently ignored. ⁵²

Not only the taxidermal reproductions of wild animals and birds but also their actual skeletons and body structures, as well as the samples of fishes and other marine lives, proved to be so attractive to the common visitors that by 1871, the museum authorities appointed an Osteologist (to deal with skeletons and bones of animals and birds) ⁵³ and planned to have an Ichthyrologist (to take care of fishes, fossils and marine lives) for the future. ^53a Besides, the native commoners were awe-struck by the sculptural remains of ancient Indian gods and goddesses, architectural pieces from the ruins of various shrines, the arms and armaments of warriors of the olden times, weapons like lances, khandas (falchions) and kuttars/kuthars (hatchets). ^53b The ornaments, precious stones and attires that adorned men and women in the distant past fascinated and excited the native commoners, the vast majority of the museum visitors. They must have thoroughly enjoyed viewing the exhibits, animatedly explained these to one another, brought families and children also to witness from the villages, bastis (slums) and bazaars (market places), and even mumbled prayers before the preserved godly images. From the beginning, therefore, they perhaps found the museum to be what appeared to have been observed ever thereafter as a ‘peep-show, a wonder house, a mansion full of strange things and queer animals’ whose main appeal seemed to be ‘to the Indian sense of wonder and credulity’. ⁵⁴ Consequently, the museum in Calcutta (and also elsewhere) came popularly to be known as the Ajaib Ghar (the mansion of the wonders) or the Jadu Ghar (the mansion of the magicalities). ⁵⁵ In the course of time, and with the steady flow of unsophisticated visitors, clandestinely smoked bidi (‘native’ cigar) remnants and spittle spots of chewed pan (betel leaf ) started appearing in the nooks and corners of the museum premises, ⁵⁶ despite the cleaners’ routine efforts. Nothing much was seriously done to prevent this, probably because of some reluctance to restrain the spontaneously growing popular enthusiasm around the museum. The government, after all, had already committed itself to the advancement of education at the popular level in the country, and the authorities of the Indian Museum also knew what important role they must play in it. The Indian government’s policy statement of 19 July 1854 had laid stress on ‘mass education’ and declared it to be ‘a responsibility of the State’. ⁵⁷ The ‘need for help to mass education’ was felt increasingly again by the education departments of provincial governments in 1871. ⁵⁸ Almost similarly, the organisers of the Indian Museum echoed as early as in December 1858 that their kind of Museum ‘would form a most valuable and a most essential portion of all complete education’. ⁵⁹ It was reiterated when the museum authorities seemed to have felt an ‘urgent commitment to the cause of popular education’, ⁶⁰ and decided to take steps ‘to arouse the interest of the public and to promote their instruction’. ⁶¹

III

It appears from the above that the Indian Museum, Calcutta, like other well-established museums, seemed to have operated from the outset simultaneously at the lowly popular plane, as well as at the high scholarly. Committing itself to the advancement of learning by accumulating those objects which ‘illustrate the phenomenon of Nature and the works of Man’, it stood for affording the learned the use of these specimens for extending the frontiers of knowledge. It also wished to offer facilities for elucidation and investigation of the specimens, and ‘for the diffusion of knowledge acquired thereby’. ⁶² Consequently, the collections of the museum were opened for close observation to ‘all studious and curious persons’ ⁶³ who could use its contents ‘in the further pursuit of their enquires’. ⁶⁴ Side by side with such mobilisation of intellectual activism, the Indian Museum was also required to raise ‘the culture and enlightenment of the people’. ⁶⁵ In actuality, this called for its taking suitable steps ‘to arouse the interest of the public and to promote their instruction’, ⁶⁶ as well as to conceive itself as one of the ‘popular educational bodies’. ⁶⁷ The best possible course of it naturally was to welcome the common man and woman to visit the museum, to allow them an incessant free access into it and to ensure the museum’s steady rise in popularity to be ‘in a great measure real and permanent’. ⁶⁸ It certainly was, and in the course of time the Indian Museum, Calcutta, seemed to have had ‘a larger annual attendance than any other Museum in the world’. ⁶⁹ Those who visited it daily in large numbers were the common folks—mostly the mass of pseudo-literate or illiterate. They did usually come for recreational and entertainment purposes, but they exchanged opinions with each other and discussed enthusiastically among themselves about what they had seen. And seeing items in a museum, consciously or even semi-consciously, resemble in a way the act of seeing a book with broad pages and in large print, and which—as per a saying—‘by mere inspection teaches somewhat, even if be not read’. ⁷⁰

In the hullabaloo of the commoners’ crowding the museum, the investigative gaze of the academicians, and also the enquiring look of the serious viewers, had perhaps the misfortune of fading out a bit—being sidelined to an extent. Consequently, some anxiety was likely to be experienced by the museum lovers over the Indian Museum’s being both a Jadu Ghar to the numerous natives and also a scholarly domain to the numbered learned. Even after conceding that museums were places where one could ‘see’ and ‘wonder’, the knowledgeable felt that ‘wonder’, emptied of adequate curiosity and interest, hardly had any academic relevance. Seen in this light, ‘wonder’ and ‘spectacle’ could only be construed as the polar opposites of ‘knowledge’ and ‘science’, and the ‘quantity’ of the public viewers as contrarious to the ‘quality’ of their viewing. ⁷¹ The learned and the scholarly seemed, therefore, to have found in the museum ‘a dichotomy of Ajaib Ghar for the natives at large and an enclosed scholarly domain for a select few’. Caught in the unresolved tensions between the ‘scholarly’ and the ‘popular’, they found the museum as an institution to have ‘fumbled, floundered and turned increasingly inward’. ⁷² Such pedantic innuendos directed against the museum’s neglect of its scholarly functioning, in order to cater to the populism surrounding it, does seem to have been uncharitable if one cares to take the museum’s version into account. The introspective museum authorities found their circumstances to be quite otherwise, that is, that while their performance vis-à-vis the people was somewhat deficient, they had succeeded significantly in serving the scholarly cause. They felt satisfied with their taking vital measures for the advancement of learning and research. They claimed to have aided the learned in the work of enriching knowledge ‘by affording them the use of material for investigation, laboratories and appliances’. They also felt that they had not been ‘slow to stimulate the original work in connection with our {the Museum’s} collections and to promote the publication of result by our {the Museum’s} investigators’. ⁷³ The self-satisfaction of those running the museum dipped a bit, however, when they referred lukewarmly to their limited achievement ‘in arousing the interest of the public and promote their instruction’. They regretted their inability to attain yet the fullest measure of success in this respect, or their default in obtaining so far the glory of ‘an institution for the culture of the people’. ⁷⁴

Neither the output of the Indian Museum in the academic domain, nor its dynamism—or the lack of it—in the public sphere, appeared in hindsight to have been as impressive as the long queues of the masses it magnetically drew to itself. This was perhaps the most fundamental among other profound objects that the colonial regime in 1858 thought the founding of a grand museum could fulfil. Its thinking was linked ominously to the mob-furies that accompanied the Great Uprising of 1857, the consternation these brought about and the panic they set in motion from the countryside to the urban centres and, above all, to the headquarters of the British in India, to Calcutta itself. To avoid such a fearful prospect, and over and above their befriending the feudal social superiors in the countryside (who apparently enjoyed some influence over the peasant masses), ⁷⁵ the ruling authorities felt they could also try to come to terms with many of the unfavourably disposed common men and women—the combustibles in high voltage sociopolitical explosions. The authorities were in a position to do this, subtly but persistently, by getting closer to the masses, by keeping the commonalty as much in good humour as possible, by winning over public opinion on most of the sensitive issues and by attaining a position to restrain the mob from becoming convulsive. All such moves in the calculations of the Government of India were more or less in consonance with what the policymakers at home thought in the interest of ‘good governance’ in India, and for balancing between the ‘happiness’ of India and the ‘glory’ of Britain. ⁷⁶

Of effective means at the government’s disposal to interact with the non-descript vast masses, the museum itself and a few officially sponsored exhibitions were the only ones available. Local exhibitions, originating in India in a rudimentary form from the 1840s, were initiated by the government to promote agriculture, commerce and economic resources. Some of these were organised locally and then integrated into the traditional fairs at the district level. One such important agricultural and industrial exhibition used to take place annually in Paglu Mian’s Mela in Feni, Noakhali. Similar local events also took place in other district and sub-divisional towns till these were given a provincial, national and international character in the Calcutta International Exhibition in 1883. But all these were irregular, short lived, localised and also too particularised to attract diverse and widespread audience. The museum, on the other hand, was provocatively inviting to the entire populace of the region, if not the whole country—a permanent place for the regular viewing of illustrations of the national heritage, natural history, physical and animal conditioning of the subcontinent. Its site was also permanent and suitably placed at the heart of the metropolis, where an imposing structure came up by 1878, with galleries for an impressive display of specimens. Consequently, the Indian Museum turned ‘so enormous, composed of the most varied and representative local public’, ⁷⁷ that its authorities did not even mind the museum visitors’ overlooking the visiting rules a little. The magic ( jadu) of the place seemed to be working well, crowds continued to gather in the premises in increasing numbers, the half-burnt bidis and marks of uncleaned hands and chewed pan juices appeared there in regularity, and mumbled prayers were being heard and obeisances observed inside the galleries. For the first time, in the corridors of the Indian Museum, their security-obsessed guardians conceded to the bulk of the Indian public—the commoners, the rustics and the masses—the all-important right to be curious, and they did satisfy their curiosities in the way they liked.