Very few private museums owned by individuals exist in our city, and we have tried to cover those few we were aware of — Kiran Nadar’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Aditya Arya’s Camera Museum. And as we come to the conclusion of this series, we feature yet another sterling example of one individual’s enterprise and zeal — senior artist Arpana Caur’s Museums of miniature painting and folk art housed in Arpana Caur’s Academy of Fine Arts and Literature in Siri Fort Institutional Area. The aesthetically designed red brick structure — which also houses her residence, studio, galleries, library and classes for underprivileged children in skills like sewing, knitting, embroidery, beauty culture and Kathak — is home to some rare Company paintings, Pahari, Deccani, Rajasthani, Mughal and Sikh miniatures. There is a sizeable collection of sculptures too.
At such places it’s difficult to single out a few works and talk about them because each piece is unique. An unusual Kishangarh miniature of Radha Krishna, comb paintings of Hazaribagh, a 19th Century Jain miniature portraying scenes from hell, contemporary renditions of Madhubani by late artist Sat Narayan Pandey — who died in Delhi in a road accident — are among the collection. There are also portrayals of Sufi saints by Shambhu Acharya (a Hindu painter in Dhaka), 200-year-old Janamsakhis (birth stories of the first Sikh guru, Guru Nanak Dev) and a painting depicting the Japji Sahib — a sacred hymn composed by Guru Nanak Dev — on Guru Nanak’s garment, besides a 100-year-old Chamba rumal. Her museums are filled with such delights.
“The latter is loaned to us till my death. The owner has a shop in Regal Cinema and when he saw the collection, he felt this is the right place for the painting. Besides some money, the understanding is that it will go back to him after I am gone,” says Caur explaining to us how she went about garnering the collection.
Always interested in folk arts, Caur started with collecting books on the subject. “One wouldn’t have that kind of money, so how I bought my first book on miniatures was in exchange for a painting of mine, from Kumar Gallery. When I started selling in the ’80s is when I started buying folk art. I exchanged a lot of my art for folk art from collectors,” she adds.
The artist says that a private museum of miniatures is a big deal because every work has to be registered with the Archaeological Survey of India. “And it is a time-consuming affair, but I wanted to share it with everyone. What would I do with these works dumped in some storage?”
But last year, a hundred works from the collection got damaged due to flooding. The paintings remained submerged in water after it broke into the museum following a heavy downpour. The huge backflow of the August Kranti Road drain which was partly covered for the Commonwealth Games was the culprit, and Caur filed a case. “I won the case with the judge ordering both MCD and NDMC to clean the nullah (drain). It was de-silted after 25 long years.”
The paintings are back restored, accompanied by a photograph of the original painting to give a sense of the original work to the viewer. The captions are being worked on. “But in any case, each and every painting is documented in our books which are kept here and in the library too.”
(The museum is open from Monday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.)
