The Egmore Museum, on every tourist’s to-do list, saw a 10% rise in footfalls in the past year. Concerted efforts by the government to arrange tours of the museum for schoolchildren, and a large and stunning collections of artefacts, have made the museum, one of the oldest in the country, a place that must be visited.
Over the years, the museum has made a number of positive changes, with a variety of items on display, and a better viewing ambience inside. “The grandeur and elegance of the icons they have are outstanding,” said Vikram Raghavan, who works with the World Bank in Washington and visited the museum recently.
Treasure trove
Kishore Mahadevan, a heritage enthusiast and volunteer at the Tamil Heritage Trust, said the Egmore Museum displays every kind of artefact dating back centuries. “That kind of collection under a single roof is amazing,” he added.
Sreemathy Mohan, textile researcher and conservation enthusiast, who has conducted a heritage walk of the museum, also points out the work undertaken by the curators at the museum to raise its standard. “The curators are really helpful. Also, all the museum’s publications are online. It’s a treasure trove that has been digitised and is very handy,” she said.
Debris and dust
But with such a large collection of items and a vast campus, the museum seems to be struggling under its own weight. Apart from the work that’s currently under way for a project funded by the Asian Development Bank to spruce up the campus, provide better lighting, utility ducts and stormwater drains, the campus also has a lot of debris and waste strewn about at many places. Old items, iron rods, and articles that are rusting away, are seen all over the campus. As one visitor put it, “Some of the areas surrounding the museum are being treated like a junkyard.”
Dust is another major issue that the authorities have to act upon, visitors to the museum said.
Inside some of the galleries, dust is seen inside the glass boxes displaying artefacts. Officials, however, claimed they were chemicals used to preserve the artefacts.
In the anthropology gallery, the entrance offers an element of surprise, with its darkness leading to a large staircase lending beauty to the building, but dust and dirt on the staircase and the corridor show that the kind of attention that’s being given to the curation is missing when it comes to maintenance of the buildings.
Not accessible
“Also, sometimes, they lock up certain sections of the museum and one has to go and ask the museum officials to open them up, especially when there is a guided tour organised. What is the purpose of having such an amazing collection and then lock some sections up,” asked a regular visitor to the museum, who did not wish to be named.
“They also do not have guides at the museum. This causes confusion among visitors who have just an hour to pick a gallery to visit in the large campus,” the visitor added.
Mr. Mahadevan said the Egmore Museum needs to be appealing to the lay citizens of Chennai, apart from heritage enthusiasts and historians. “The museum needs to be celebrated,” he said. Mr. Raghavan concurs, “One of the main reasons for Chennai to be on the tourist map is the Egmore Museum, but it’s not on the city’s tourist map.”
Both Ms. Mohan and Mr. Raghavan say the ‘Friends of Museum’ initiative needs to be developed, so that people can become stakeholders and take the museum ahead.
