Treasure trove of history

A little over 150 years ago, 18th August 1865 to be precise, one of south India’s well-known museums opened in Bengaluru. This was the so-called Mysore Government Museum, which celebrated its sesquicentennial on September 23, 2015. The man behind the Museum was Edward Green Balfour, a doctor by profession. He was a man with a wide variety of interests ranging from zoology, geology and languages to archaeology and forests. Prior to starting the Museum in Bengaluru, he had spearheaded the establishment of the Madras Museum in 1851 and served as its superintendent for nine years.

The beginning
In 1861, Edward moved to Bengaluru, where he was appointed as the Deputy Inspector General of Hospitals. Within a few years of his stay in Bengaluru, he had convinced the government of the need for a Museum. Accordingly, the Government asked its officers everywhere to send in interesting artefacts that might be suitable for display in the Museum. While some of the objects were donated by the public, some were purchased: today, we would say the exhibits were crowd-sourced!

It was initially thought that the Museum could be housed in the new Public Offices building, which is also known as the Attara Kacheri (it is now the High Court) that was then being built. But when it opened in August 1865, even before the Attara Kacheri was completed, it was actually from a jail — a room in the Cantonment Jail served as the Museum’s first digs. It was situated in a part of the compound that then, as now, housed the Good Shepherd Convent and Sacred Heart School. C Hayavadana Rao, reports in his authoritative Mysore Gazetteer that when this room proved too small for the growing collection, the Museum moved to another rented building on Museum Road.

The Museum became extremely popular with the public as soon as it opened. On an average, 8,000 — 10,000 people visited it every month, with the numbers peaking to 15,000 in October during the festive season. Interestingly, in the 1890s, the museum became out-of-bounds for men on Monday afternoons as that time was reserved for ladies!

As the Museum’s collection grew, it quickly outgrew the rented premises. Accordingly in 1877, work began on a new address for the Museum. The construction of this building was part of the famine relief work that took place under the Department of Public Works.

Classic design
Designed by Colonel R H Sankey, the new building on Kasturba Road came up on an axis with the Attara Kacheri in Cubbon Park. The Museum moved to the new building in 1878. It remains here at this very location to this day.

R H Sankey chose for it a classical Greco-Roman style that was all the rage in Victorian England. The classical detailing above the doors and windows (with the Greek/Roman gods in the keystone), different window styles for the two floors and the taller and pedimented windows on the upper floor and semicircular arches on the lower are all characteristic of this style. In 1960, construction began on a new wing, in the same style. This extension was opened in 1962.

The Museum began in 1865 with a respectable collection of geological and natural history specimens including fossils and stuffed animals, and several objects of archaeological interest including coins and sculptures. A catalogue was brought out three years after its opening. It listed various objects in the Museum that may be of interest even today.

For example, among the plethora of geological specimens, there was also a piece of ‘variegated sandstone from the Palace of Lucknow, taken during the Mutiny 1857’. This particular object was contributed by J Williams of the Ordnance Department in Bengaluru. Some years later, one Ms Campbell presented a piece of agate which had been used in the locks of a gun by a mutineer in Lucknow in 1857. Another object that caught my eye was a set of crystals, donated by His Highness Rama Varma, the prince of Travancore, in the 1880s.
Later reports of the Museum list some exceedingly curious objects donated by the public.

These include birds’ nests, spiders, potters’ clay, a painted tray, measuring tape, a wasp’s nest and even ‘a monstrous calf’! These exhibits are no longer in the Museum. According to the Museum director, H T Talwar, all the geological and natural history collections were moved out about 40 years ago to the Natural History Museum in Mysuru.

Historian Vemagal Somashekhar writes that this Museum, like all other museums and zoos in the erstwhile Mysore kingdom, was once referred to as a tamasha bangale. That still holds true today, even if one does need to exercise considerable imagination and effort to look past the poor lighting, poor labelling and poor arrangement of exhibits.

H T Talwar lists some of the Museum’s priceless properties including sculptures, some of which date from the 1st century AD, wooden carvings, musical instruments, Mysuru-style paintings, and of course, numerous archaeological relics. For a Bengalurean, there are several things in the Museum that may be of interest. Some of them are the massive and exquisitely carved herostones near the Museum entrance, brought in the 1860s from the temple in Begur by Commissioner LB Bowring, the neolithic and iron-age relics that were found during archaeological excavations in Savanadurga and elsewhere near Bengaluru and the many paintings showing Bengaluru in the 1700s. Of course, any history buff will be extremely overjoyed looking at the pottery, dice and toys from Mohenjodaro. The queen of the collection is perhaps the Halmidi inscription, the oldest known inscription in Kannada.

One hopes that as the Museum drifts towards its bicentenary, it will also move with the times and that Museum officials will work to give this diamond in the rough some shine.