India’s Oldest Museum Is In Disarray

The 204-year-old Indian Museum in Kolkata is in a total mess and most of its 1.08 lakh priceless artefacts are rotting away. Museum director Rajesh Purohit has sent an SOS to the Union Ministry of Culture requesting an urgent revamp of the museum, especially its store where most of the artefacts are kept. Barely 6 per cent of the artefacts, most of them centuries-old, are on display in the museum’s galleries. The museum’s store, according to Purohit, is a damp and dark low-ceilinged vault without modern and scientific storage facilities and lacks proper lighting.

Shockingly, the museum does not even have a proper inventory and catalogue of all the artefacts in its possession. There are no CCTV cameras to monitor entry and exit from the store, as a result of which theft of artifacts had been rampant. Purohit’s letter mentions how squatters inside the museum premises had developed a nexus with some museum staff to smuggle out priceless paintings, sculptures and documents that were being sold cheap, especially to foreigners, in the vicinity of the museum where a number of hotels are mostly patronised by foreigners. Purohit said 42 families of squatters have been evicted over the past few months. These squatters are patronised by political parties.