City archaeological museums as islands of culture

While newer museums gaze on the present as well as the future, archaeological museums in older Indian cities secure the past

- Bibek Bhattacharya

Whenever I think of travelling to a city, one of the first things I put on my to-do list is visiting a museum, or maybe two, or three. You see, rather than the concert venues or the hip cafés, the shopping malls or book stores, what draws me to a city is how it chooses to institutionally remember history, both the local and the national. For me, a city's cultural pretensions are only as good as its museums. And since I have certain, very particular, interests, a more prime category among museums are the ones on archaeology and antiquity.

One of the accepted myths of modern urbanisation is constant forward motion. To this headlong hurtle, we give loaded euphemistic names: "progress", "development".

As cities become more cosmopolitan and more broadly representative of the people who live there, they have the mandate and duty to create fresh cultural institutions that gaze at the present and the future. However, I am invariably drawn to the older cities and towns that have done, or are still doing, the heavy lifting of memorialising the past.

Museums in such cities do so by preserving historical art. These may be housed in buildings as diverse as the new and hyper-modern Bihar Museum of Patna, the grand colonial pile of the Indian Museum in Kolkata, or the National Museum in Delhi, which, stylistically, sits somewhere in the middle. What they have in common, though, are stupendous antiquity collections that can take the breath away, especially when you consider that the artworks on display constitute a small percentage of the museums' permanent collections.