from the moment visitors step into the Indian F Museum, they are left with no doubt that they are in the awesome presence of not only the country's cultural heritage of great antiquity, exquisite artistic accomplishments and mind-boggling diversity, but also of its immeasurable and mostly untapped natural wealth. Everyday, its superlative exhibits attract a motley crowd of visitors, both the multitudes from the far corners of the country, and the informed viewer. This prodigious collection was assembled by British rulers 200 years ago for the edification and exploitation of the subjects. It is now ours, and is for us either to cherish and conserve or obliterate and relegate to obscurity. As we often do.
The beleaguered landmark building of the Indian Museum on Chowringhee was shaken to its foundation during the construction of the flyover from 1998 to 2003. Perhaps for the first time since it opened, its skin of lime plaster was peeled and replaced with a brand-new epidermis to firm up the structure. The Indian Museum is a Grade I heritage building, according to a list drawn up by the Calcutta Municipal Corporation's Heritage Committee. So no external change is permissible. The building came up and was ready for occupation 61 years after Dr Nathaniel Wallich, a Danish botanist, made an appeal for the formation of a museum on February 2, 1814.
In the hierarchy of the Museum, the archaeological remains and the geological and natural history collections have played equally important roles. In effect, both past and present India co-existed within the confines of the Museum.
After the city of Calcutta lost its primacy in the British Empire once the capital was shifted to Delhi in 1911, there have been efforts to depreciate the value of the Museum by removing a part of its huge collection to Delhi. Such efforts were resisted once in 1930, and post-Independence in 1949, when, during a huge and much-admired exhibition held first in London and then Delhi, a large number of objects were loaned from the Indian Museum. The idea was to hold them back for the National Museum that came up in Delhi. Such schemes were, however, thwarted and the Indian Museum remains the largest in the country with one of the richest collections anywhere. The feeling of awe and wonder at the magnificence and monumentality of the objects on display increases as we ascend the steps of the grand staircase. Some of these sculpted stone objects belong to the Mauryan period, the great Buddhist emperor of emperors, Ashoka, being one of the best-known figures of this dynasty. Historians and archaeologists have rescued the chronicle of his life and times from oblivion. Here one can admire the Rampurva Lion capital, a Yaksha figure of Patna, the Besnagar Yakshi, the famous Kalpadrum, and at the entrance of the celebrated Bharhut gallery, a Yakshi and Yaksha from the Bharhut stupa Writing about these robust expressions of early Indian art as early as the 3rd century BCE - Nani Gopal Majumdar, Superintendent, Indian Museum, Archaeological Section, noted in his book, A Guide to the Sculptures in the Indian Museum, published in 1937 that the striking features of this period were "strength" and "massiveness." The free-standing Rampurva Lion capital of Ashoka (7 ft 5 inches), Majumdar added, was excavated by Daya Ram Sahni in 1907-08 at Rampurva in Champaran district of Bihar. The capital with the crowning figure of a single, sinewy, seated lion, retains in places its high lustrous polish, a hallmark of Mauryan art. It is "endowed with a vitality and strength which ranks it amongst the finest sculptures of the Mauryan period."
The Kalpadrum (5 ft 6 inches) or wish-fulfilling tree of Indian tradition discovered at Besnagar "probably belongs to Sunga period (2nd century BCE)" and has an impressive feeling of volume and massiveness. It shows a "banyan tree enclosed by a railing at the base and higher up a bamboo fencing with the shape of a network," wrote Majumdar. The "Tree in railing" motif occurring in Indian coins represents the same miraculous tree.
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