PRIVATE MUSEUMS: THE NEW SOCIAL CURRENCY

Wealthy philanthropists are helping shift the gaze on Indian art and culture.

- BY SANJANA RAY

Standing in the courtyard of a half-dilapidated 7,284-square-foot structure in South Kolkata’s Ballygunge Place, its exterior blending vernacular Bengali architecture with deco elements, I look up at the mango tree framing the sky.

This peach-hued, three-storey building was the home, studio and creative universe of Jamini Roy, one of the most significant Indian painters of the 20th century. He is widely credited as the father of modern Indian folk art, famously fusing the flat, bold lines of the Kalighat Pat style with a deceptively simple visual vocabulary. Roy’s work is represented in collections at some of the world’s greatest art institutions, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the San José Museum of Art in the US.

Yet until recently, the house Roy meticulously designed and lived in until he died in 1972—and where several of his prominent works were housed—was quietly falling apart. Like many of Kolkata’s fading historic residences, the cost of preservation had long outpaced what generational wealth alone could sustain. So in 2023, Roy’s family, who occupied the upper floors, handed over the keys to the pioneering DAG (formerly known as Delhi Art Gallery), which is in the process of transforming the property into what it describes as India’s first solo-artist museum, and a cultural hub. In a city often accused of romanticising its past yet failing to preserve it, this project signals something larger: the revival of heritage assets by thoughtfully turning them into contemporary cultural hotspots, rather than allowing them to slip into terminal decline.