Amar Chitra Katha Vs Museum Discourse

Museum display

In an interesting essay, noted young art historian and researcher Anuradha Nambiar raises a few questions regarding the contemporary museum discourse. Can there be a cohesive narrative possible with every museum collection, she asks.

My parents were the sort who marched us off to museums in every city we visited in the hope that we would benefit from some exposure to our culture and heritage. My early memories of museums are therefore of my sister and I grudgingly wandering around large halls filled with sculptures and paintings that were, for some puzzling reason, considered intriguing by adults. There would always be the odd object that would hold our interest for a bit… an enormous urn that both of us could have fit into, lavishly ornamented costumes or photographs of the erstwhile royal families in full regalia sporting gigantic moustaches. For the most part all we wanted to do was to run to the nearest snack bar.

Amer fort

This ambivalence changed with a trip to the Amer fort. We had been given strict instructions to behave and to entertain ourselves by imagining what the place must have been like when kings and queens would have actually lived in it. Amar Chitra Kathas, then my sole source of information regarding Indian history, provided some clues but the museum and signage at the site itself was rather unhelpful in terms of dealing with the rest of my long list of queries. How, at a time when there were no cranes and bulldozers, did the Rajputs managed to haul the massive blocks of stone up the hill? How were such forts built without cement? How had they survived for so many years? Who designed such buildings? Who built them? Why were they all on top of hills? Who lived in them? What were those people like? What did they wear? What did they eat? Where did they go for food? Nothing seemed to grow on the land nearby other than dry shrubs…What did they do for water? And given the state my bladder was in after drinking two glasses of juice and half a Bisleri bottle, the rather natural question regarding where people went to pee!

What’s with the trip down memory lane, you may ask. It is merely a means of pointing out that Indian museums are not a friendly place for children or for that matter, for most adults. Artefacts are often grouped together based on their dating and dynastic affiliation with their signage often reading like ‘Mahishasurmardhani, Pallava, ca. 7th century.’ None other than the few who already possess a working knowledge of Hindu iconography or mythology will be able to read the sculpture and of those who do, most will probably not decipher anything more about its association with the Trivikrama panel and the Gajalakshmi standing near it other than that they were made in the same period. In narrative sculptures such as this, would it not be far more exciting to talk of the demon Mahisha, his transformation into a bull and his death at the hands of Durga? Or for that matter, the evolution of rock cut architecture under Pallava patronage and scultpure’s place within this new context?

I have long been an armchair critic of Indian museums and their display strategies. Now, employed as a researcher struggling to create narratives for a few Indian museums that wish to push their hallowed halls into the 21st century, I find that creating alternatives to the ‘subject/date/period/site/ material/size’ system is more complex than I ever imagined and that armchair criticism is the cheat’s version of constructive criticism.

To begin with there is the battle of the designer versus the researcher to contend with. One waxes eloquent about the need for “experiential” museums where spaces are “immersive” and “interactive”; the other holds forth on stylistic differences, the nuances of technique, the socio-cultural context and so on until the designers are all sitting there with glazed eyes and a decidedly fixed, if not always polite, smile. While both may want to revolutionize Indian museums, the paths of the twain often do not meet.

Trying to part oneself from a compulsive habit of producing page after page of text is not a feat that can be achieved overnight and the process is riddled with potholes because it is not merely a matter of ruthlessly eliminating unwieldy words but of sifting through the mountain of data and binning a whole lot of it. The logic of this editing is somewhat problematic. The selection of sub-narratives, factoids and trivia must necessarily be based on its intended end representation. Nobody wants to read copious amounts of text in a museum and most stories that cannot be translated into a multimedia installation, graphic treatment, film or sound and light show inevitably meet a speedy death. Narratives, whether in text or visual form, must add value to the visitor’s experience of the museum and its contents – assuming the visitor is not someone who has much prior knowledge of history or art, what sort of information does one chose to provide? Is a museum’s task to “educate” the masses or to create “popular” exhibitions and if so how does one do this without over-simplification?
  
There thus emerge a whole host of other issues regarding how the museum’s audience and its contents are imagined that are fully capable of driving the earnest researcher and curator absolutely nuts. Does one work on the assumption that objects can and do speak for themselves, and accordingly, restrict the amount of data that could alter the object-audience interaction? Or instead, does one assume that objects, when seen in contexts that are alien to that of their original use, are merely things that may at best be appreciated for their beauty and so attempt to redeem this bias by placing appropriate information regarding the object’s past at convenient distances from it? How important is such information? Is an aesthetic appreciation not sufficient? And if information is important, how much is too much?  

Who is the audience that the museum is being designed for? Is it a small bunch of specialists who one can safely presume know most of what there is to know about the objects are visiting the museum to further their area of study, the local population who may already be familiar with at least some of the history or socio-cultural context of the objects, tourists who are curious to understand the new culture they are seeing or disinterested individuals dragged to the museum by enthusiastic tour guides, spouses or friends? Obviously, the displays and information that would interest one group may seem terribly onerous or trivial to another.

Every museum exhibition, whatever its overt subject, is based on certain curatorial decisions – to emphasise one element and to downplay others, to assert some truths and to ignore others – and these are decisions that curators consciously or subconsciously take. After much thinking and rethinking, I am sticking to my Amar Chitra Katha-loving childhood self’s instincts… stories work because it gives you a means of placing the objects in some sort of context and visuals work because they can relay information without daunting the viewer. Characters, events, and representations of a time or place have a better chance of living on in an audience’s imagination than titles and dates. Then again, it is not possible to create a cohesive story for every museum’s collection.

This is the paralysis of analysis stage. And a long and painful stage it has been. What follows is the brave, or perhaps merely foolish, decision to muck along and see just how many bouquets of brickbats are delivered to your doorstep. And that is my present location… sitting and chewing my nails waiting for the karmic cycle to complete itself.