Relics to living culture: Remaking public museums

India’s diverse cultural wealth and expansive history call for a fresh approach to museums—one that moves beyond static displays and academic retellings to create meaningful, immersive experiences

Bengaluru: Jerry Saltz calls museums “wormholes to other worlds”. The Pulitzer-winning art critic advises the visitor against going to a museum, looking for a destination. The idea, in contrast, is to be led by the eyes to wherever they lead you – that is when new worlds will emerge and an immersive experience will likely unravel.

Museums and galleries in India, particularly the public-funded entities, are not always designed for this personal, inward experience. Most of them, typically, are extensions of academic exercises that offer adequate, often sanitised, retellings of the subjects on display – carefully arranged, barely interpretative, and seldom tailored for unconstrained appreciation.

Globally, the opening up of museum content has been inspiring innovation in curatorial approach and efforts to look at subjects outside of their purely historical bearings. The themes have become increasingly niche, from ramen (Cupnoodles Museum, Japan) to excrement (The National Poo Museum, Isle of Wight, England).

The Museum of Broken Relationships which has two permanent facilities in Zagreb, Croatia, and Chiang Mai, Thailand also runs a series of travelling exhibitions. An upcoming event partnered by this crowd-sourced enterprise will feature stories of heartbreak “intertwined with music, sound, and the personal objects that tell these tales”. The organisers have called for donations in the form of objects, sounds, or music relevant to the break-ups.

International trends have resonated closer home where private groupings backed by philanthropists or CSR funding are engaging with niche content and creating spaces dedicated to subjects ranging from science to music. This restyling of the idea has not found serious traction in plans for public museums and galleries, executed by the Ministry of Culture at the centre and the departments of archaeology in the states. A part of the resistance, arguably, stems from compulsions to conceive museums as entirely show-and-tell spaces that rarely offer the excitement of exchange, of interaction, with the subjects. 

The shift from the purely visual to the multisensory is happening but museum enthusiasts note that at the conceptual level, these spaces are found wanting in context. How do we make the viewers care, and not merely look or even contemplate, for things that exist outside of their time and frames of reference? How do we add meanings to the artefacts, stories to the structures, and repurpose the experience, from distant history-watching to live engagement?

The number of museums around the world has risen by five times over 50 years and the popular ones consistently better their footfall numbers. The Art Newspaper listed the Louvre in Paris as the biggest draw in 2023, with a footfall of 8.8 million, followed by the Vatican Museums (6.76 million), the British Museum in London (5.82 million), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (5.36 million), and Tate Modern in London (4.74 million).

On Christmas day in 2024, the Indian Museum in Kolkata – one of the country’s most visited museums – recorded its highest footfall of the year, around 10,000.

India’s staggeringly diverse cultural wealth and expansive history call for an approach to museums that goes beyond the mere representation of existing knowledge and builds a deeper engagement with the viewer – a case in point is the Partition Museum in Amritsar. But a fundamental shift on these lines appears distant, almost futuristic, considering the more immediate concerns such as sub-par maintenance of the existing facilities. The issue persists at two levels: in many cases, there is no adequate monitoring of the artefacts or periodic rotation of the displayed exhibits; for the visitor, poor accessibility, unclean restrooms, and glitches in online ticketing are among the unaddressed concerns. Sparse corporate funding has limited the scope of enhancing the public museum experience in India. The existing allocations – the Union Budget earmarked Rs 123.72 crore for museums in 2024-25 – are utilised more in preservation efforts than ideation and execution of new programmes.

Dated approach

A 2020 report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India about the modernisation of the Indian Museum noted that the work, executed between 2008 and 2015, did not follow “proper conservation processes” and resulted in damage to priceless artefacts. The report also underlined the poor upkeep and storage of reserve artefacts at the showpiece museum – founded in 1814 – during the modernisation project. The reserves that consist of inorganic objects susceptible to heat and humidity were left open to “excessive temperature and humidity variance, crumbling walls, dust, dampness, water seepage, loose hanging electrical wires and unscientific storage systems,” the report said.

These concerns about administrative neglect and unscientific management of resources are largely disregarded in museums across the country. In 2024, a CAG report on the preservation and conservation of state-protected monuments and antiquities in Karnataka raised similar questions about the lack of adequate storage facilities in museums. The report highlighted artefacts left open to the elements, worn-out artworks, poorly maintained restrooms, water seepage, and the absence of bilingual display boards. Critically, it also noted that the department did not follow a periodic rotation policy that ensures all objects in possession of a museum are showcased.

Inefficient maintenance

Madhya Pradesh, home to museums that display exhibits from the 1st century BCE to the 17th century AD, has also been called out for inefficient maintenance and failure to enhance the visitor experience. In a 2021 report on 22 museums in the state, CAG points to serious shortcomings in the identification of artefacts, lighting facilities, extended closure of galleries and unsuitable display of at least 500 artefacts in the open space. The audit noted that cement was used in conservation work, distorting the original appearance of the artefacts. It also underlined the department’s lack of initiative in digitising the database of any of the museums under its purview. Guidelines of Archaeology Survey of India Museums 2013 stipulate that museums should digitise the documentation of their collections.

B R Mani, Director-General, National Museum, New Delhi, emphasises the museums’ presentability and their utility as educative and interactive resources. A multi-pronged approach that leverages outreach efforts, exhibitions, publications, and the participation of students is in order. “Museums should have two or three virtual experiential galleries and interactive kiosks. It is important to house chronological as well as thematic galleries in these spaces,” he says.

In December 2024, India’s Ministry of Culture announced a partnership with the France Museums Développement to establish the Yuga Yugeen Bharat National Museum, envisioned as “a celebration of India’s unbroken civilisational history”. India now has a Constitution Museum, its first, at the OP Jindal Global University in Sonipat, Haryana. These are interesting times; the nation is engaging, at once, with its foundational principles and an assortment of politically interpreted pasts that stand in conflict with these tenets.

In February 2022, the Government of India organised a two-day global summit on ‘Reimagining Museums in India’, as part of celebrations around the 75th year of the country’s independence. This reimagining is a place to start because only a foundational shake-up can help address the more practical concerns over processes and upkeep. This is also, perhaps, the time to reimagine India’s public museums as inclusive spaces where people can discuss the times they live in. The larger question, therefore, for the administrators will be: what does it take to reposition museums, to transform spaces that house boxed-and-labelled pasts into commons of living culture?