Signatures are said to reveal a lot about one’s personality. Some signatures are instantly recognisable, others are not. They arouse curiosity about the character and nature of a person. A one-of-its-kind signature museum will open in the city next month to provide visitors a glimpse of some famous and some relatively unknown signatures.
The signatures of 92 famous personalities, ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to poet Akkitham, will be displayed at the museum, being set up by the Archives Department at its directorate at Nalanda here.
The collection will include signatures of Presidents, Prime Ministers, Chief Ministers, social activists, litterateurs, painters, sportspersons et al. These include those of Raja Ravi Varma, Thakazhi, Malayattoor Ramakrishnan, P.T. Usha, P. Bhaskaran, and Vayalar Rama Varma .
Signatures of Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Mother Teresa, Rabindranath Tagore, Bhagat Singh, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Amartya Sen are also included.
Samples of signatures such as those of Michelangelo, Bruce Lee, Nelson Mandela, Neil Armstrong, Charlie Chaplin, and Abraham Lincoln too have been exhibited in a bid to attract students.
Some of the signatures are from the department’s own records, while others have been sourced from private documents such as those of the former Supreme Court judge V.R. Krishna Iyer or the Indian National Army’s unit here.
Signature cards
Some signatures were directly collected by the department by handing out signature cards to various people. “We started with O.N.V. Kurup who used to sign in Malayalam. MT (M.T. Vasudevan Nair) too signed a card for us,” says Archives Director P. Biju.
The signatures have been etched on metallic plates that also bear the person’s name and portrait.
The museum will also be a study of the history and evolution of signatures, department officials say.
