Trinamul MP and former Union culture secretary Jawhar Sircar has asked the housing and urban affairs minister and culture minister whether the National Museum is going to be demolished and its artefacts shifted.
He has also sounded a warning about the magnitude of the task and the risks of attempting it without thorough knowledge of what the job entails.
The National Museum, South Asia’s most prominent museum, is unrivalled in its diversity and has almost 2.1 lakh objects including the Harappan bronze dancing girl. It was created in 1949 in Rashtrapati Bhavan, from artefacts of the subcontinent exhibited in London the previous year. In 1960, it shifted to its current home, designed by Ganesh Bikaji Deolalikar.
In May, the Centre announced that a national museum’s exhibits would be shifted to a new museum called Yuge Yugeen Bharat in the refurbished North and South Blocks. The culture ministry has not responded to reports that the National Museum has been asked to vacate by the end of the year and shift its collections to storage facilities.
Neither ministry responded to this newspaper’s requests for comment on the MP’s caution.
As part of the Central Vista redevelopment project, announced in 2019, the National Museum too was expected to shift to the North and South blocks to make way for the new Common Central Secretariat (CCS) buildings.
Sircar has repeatedly questioned culture minister G. Kishan Reddy on this in Parliament since 2021. Reddy replied in July last year that no decision had yet been taken.
In a letter to housing minister Hardeep Puri on Thursday, Sircar wrote: “Krishi Bhavan and Shastri Bhavan, which are earmarked in Central Vista for two CCS buildings remain functional and there is no sign of any current demolition. The same goes for Udyog Bhavan and Nirman Bhavan, and life continues (mercifully) to be as usual.
“One, therefore, does not understand why the most important building in this area, the National Museum, has reportedly received a notice to prepare for vacating the premises.”
Sircar warned that it would take time to transform office space into display halls. He added that shifting more than two lakh objects from the museum to an intermediate space, and then to the North and South blocks, is complex and should not be undertaken without complete knowledge of how to do it — challenges that he feels the planners were not sensitised to.
“How do you convert the cubby holes of the North and South blocks into large exhibition halls?” Sircar told The Telegraph.
“Also, you need images of multiple dimensions of these objects. For example, a tooth can’t be replaced by a nail when you reassemble, as it will be imbalanced.”
In his letter to Reddy, Sircar underlined that the minister had in a reply to him in Parliament said that more than 90 posts at the museum had been abolished and several more lay vacant.
Cautioning against “pilfering and substitution” of artefacts, Sircar asked how the government could entrust outsourced staff with “identifying, documenting, packing, transporting etc. of the irreplaceable national treasure….”
He also pointed to the minister’s reply to him in December 2021 — that less than half the inventory had been digitally recorded. He asked the minister whether substantial progress had been made in this task, without the completion of which it is impossible to shift the museum.
“I would like to remind Prime Minister and you that these treasures belong to the Indian nation and to Indian civilisation — not to any temporary government holding power,” Sircar wrote.
