India is not a great country for museums. Most are tawdry affairs, overstaffed, under-curated and swaddled in bureaucratic cobwebs. The exh...
India is not a great country for museums. Most are tawdry affairs, overstaffed, under-curated and swaddled in bureaucratic cobwebs. The exhibits might be the best-in-class, not surprising, considering India’s cultural and historical heritage goes back 5,000 years. But the experience is neither uplifting nor immersive. They enjoy a rather dubious reputation as places schoolchildren are forced to walk through on annual excursions.
As for non-generalist museums, the situation is dire. Few exist. Despite a continental coastline exceeding 6,000 km and a maritime heritage going back many millennia, India does not have a maritime museum. The railways have fared a little better with a National Rail Museum in Delhi and numerous regional museums. But most other areas have done pretty badly.
For instance, Mumbai was one of the textile capitals of the world but has been struggling to set up a single textile museum for over a decade. For a country obsessed with movies, film museums are a rarity in India. Ditto for almost anything else you can think of – including printing museums.
Printing museums? What are they? Why do we need them? As ubiquitous as the air we breathe, print is something we hardly notice. Apart from the books and newspapers we read, print...
