Museums tell many stories, most explicitly political. For instance, among the issues facing Brexit is EU’s demand that the huge marble slabs, stolen from the roof of the 5th century BCE Parthenon temple in Athens, be returned. They are among the biggest attractions at British Museum, where they have been housed since 1816. The slabs were removed by the Scottish nobleman, Lord Elgin, who was then the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which had conquered Greece.
So naturally, the keynote address at the Bihar Museum Biennale 2021 by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, was of huge interest. He, along with Sarat Chandra Maharaj, Professor Visual Art & Knowledge Systems, Lund University, Sweden, and Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Director-General, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya and advisor to the Bihar Museum, spoke of the the history of museums as key institutions in creating an image of a country’s identity, heritage and values.
They also discussed several current debates within museums, including the call last year to remove images and statues of imperialists and exploiters. They didn’t offer solutions. Instead, what the biennale did was to juxtapose smaller museums and regional issues against these bigger international topics.
Good initiative
The biennale was a good initiative by the Bihar government to promote the new Bihar Museum, designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki at a cost of ₹500 crore, and possibly
the largest public museum in South Asia, both in scale and its wide collection, ranging from the historical to the contemporary. At a time when the Centre has cut the allocation for the ‘Development of Museums’ scheme by more than 50% — ₹126 crore in 2020-21 from ₹286 crore in 2019-20, this is a welcome move by a State government, in line with countries such as China, U.K., Singapore and Australia, which have increased their budget for arts and culture in the wake of the pandemic, offering multi-billion relief packages for the sector.
The biennale itself had to be postponed to 2021, thanks to the pandemic, and was finally held online, with curated walk-throughs of museums, workshops, master classes and talks. Participants included speakers from Prado museum in Spain; National Museum of Interventions, Mexico; Castle Museum in Pszczyna, Poland; the National Museum of Colombia; Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh; and Assam State Museum, Guwahati, among several others.
Unusual collections
The walk-throughs of over 20 museums included the new Bihar Museum, which houses the beautiful 3rd century BCE Didarganj Yakshi among other treasures. The story of the Yakshi is legendary. She was found in 1917 on the banks of the Ganges in Didarganj in Old Patna City, where her base had been used for years as a washing slab by dhobis. The statue’s nose was damaged during a travelling exhibition, and a decision was made to not send the Yakshi abroad again.
This is one among the nearly 49,000 artefacts in the museum, as Bihar seeks to reclaim its legacy as an international centre of culture dating back to its history as Pataliputra, the capital of Magadha, as well as being a centre of Buddhist, Sikh and British history.
This as well as the other walk-throughs of museums in Florence, Poland, Canada, Colombia, Jaipur, Goa,
Assam and Bengaluru are now online on the Bihar Museum’s YouTube channel. But what made the biennale particularly interesting and unique was the introduction to unusual museums, such as the Museo Camera in Gurugram and the Kanha Museum of Life and Art in Madhya Pradesh, located at Singinawa Jungle Lodge, which looks at indigenous Gond and Baiga art and life.
Relevant conversations
“It has been both an exciting and challenging experience to re-imagine a grand physical Bihar Museum Biennale into a completely virtual one,” said Alka Pande, curator of the biennale. “The reach has been phenomenal and now with everything being on Facebook and YouTube, it is there for posterity and people can watch and rewatch the sessions.” It was a massive exercise to coordinate with 20 museums, both national and international, create a microsite, conceive the virtual conference, the master classes, podcasts and virtual tours, she said.
The master classes focused on storytelling through dance, cultural appreciation, and vernacular dialects. An important intervention was a smaller museum, such as the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum in Jaipur, speaking about how engagement-driven programmes, workshops and seminars can help museums open relevant conversations.
The impact of the first-ever museum biennale in India will continue. It raised
the profile of museums in general and asked questions not just about the return of stolen and confiscated treasures but about their survival in their own nation. Looking at the plight of the Amaravati Marbles in the Chennai Museum or the sculptures that have disappeared or been damaged over the years, a conversation around museums has been long overdue. This might have been the beginning.
The writer is the author of a fantasy series, and specialises in art and culture of South East Asia.
