In Bihar, A Museum Of Memories Beyond Material Confines

“Piya gailan kalkatwa ei sajni...
gorwa me juta naikhe, sirwa pe
chatwwa ei sajni
Kaise chalihen rahatwa, ei sajni”

—Bhikhari Thakur’s ‘Bidesiya’

Museums bring to mind stone and stiffness. Archaic colonial architecture, robust columns, daunting facades and labels in minuscule font. But can a museum be more? Can it grow beyond its ontological and material confines to become a living, breathing thing? Like a tree or a song?

The 19th-century Bihari poet and playwright Bhikhari Thakur was one of the strongest intellectual forces in Bihari literature and theatre, and much of his work reflects themes of women empowerment and the pain of migration. Through plays like Bidesiya, Gabar gichor, Putra vadh, Vidhwa vilaap and others, Thakur’s poetry reflected the impact of migration on Bihari society through the eyes of men and women living it. Can a song by Thakur be considered a museum?

These questions were discussed at length in Mumbai at the launch event of the second edition of the ‘Bihar Museum Biennale’, in collaboration with Outlook.

“Since its inception, the Bihar Museum has been intrinsic to creating a sense of lost pride in its own identity and past for many Biharis today” says Anjani Kumar Singh, Director General of the Bihar Museum in Patna. With the museum Biennale, the organisers hope to create a more inclusive platform for people to engage with art and more importantly, for museums to themselves interact with each other.

Starting August 7, the Biennale will feature museums from across the world including Thailand, Austria, Nepal and Costa Rica. The initiative will also feature innovative events from all over the globe, like the International Print Exhibition, an immersive experience from Russia and virtual tours and shows with the likes of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Inspired by art biennales like the Kochi Muziris Biennale in Kerala, the Bihar Museum Biennale too has ‘inclusion’ at the heart of its artistic and cultural agenda by using site and presentation as tools for communication and storytelling in order to synchronise art and lived experiences and locate them in collective memory. It is interactive and open-ended. Unlike museums, it is inviting. “The idea of a biennale is to allow people to engage with art in a way that allows movement, space for engagement, emotionality and memory. Essentially, it is to bring art outside the confines of power centres and make it more democratic,” says Bose Krishnamachari, the founder of the Kochi Muziris Biennale and intimately involved with the Bihar Museum Biennale.

But how does one make museums more inclusive and democratic?

Since their inception, museums have acted as the guardians of history and antiquity. These resilient sentries of civilisational culture are not just reminders of history but an agglomeration of the cultural wealth of peoples and, in extension, nations. Meaning that only the very best of what is considered to reflect a nation’s cultural wealth and soft power make it to the ‘sacred’ confines of a museum.

“Museums can be intimidating, hierarchical spaces. In India, most museums have a colonial structure that does not allow room for any dialogue between museum and the audiences,” says architect and academic Neera Adarkar. Research into how people react with public spaces shows that women and other social minorities often find the very entrances of colonial public buildings in urban spaces intimidating and inaccessible. Further, several academics, practitioners and teachers of architecture, art and aesthetic history education agree that museums in India (and across the world) have largely been undemocratic spaces.

“It isn’t just gender. If you see across caste, class, genders—how many feel welcome inside and represented?” Adarkar asks. She points out that in post-independent India, museums like the Jawahar Kala Kendra and now the Bihar Museum, have tried to rethink the spatial configuration of museums to allow for more physical and emotional room for dialogue and interaction between people and objects. Between people and the museum itself.

The first museum ever to be found in the world was built in 530 BC by a woman. Yet, the story of this first curator remains missing from the pages of art history and archaeology. Ennigaldi-Nanna was the daughter of  Nabonidus, the last king of the Babylonian Empire and was herself painstakingly involved in the labelling and cataloguing of articles that reflected 1500 years of Mesopotamian civilisational history. What became of Ennigaldi remains lost to history but the ruins of her museum—discovered in 1925 by a British archaeologist—remain as reminders of a woman’s quest to capture the past in the past.

It is perhaps these intersections that the Bihar Museum is trying to extrapolate through the fusion of form and abstraction. This changing nature of museums to meet the evolving sensibilities of young, tech-driven audiences in an increasingly ‘post-truth’ world is evident across the world. The Haus der Musik Vienna for instance, is set in the house that Otto Nicolai,  founder of the Vienna Philharmonic, lived in about 150 years ago. It offers audiences several ways to interact with the music and sounds and interpret them in their own ways. The Universium in Sweden aims to simplify the history of science and space travel through play and games. The Museum of Childhood in London encourages children to be creative. The Quake: Lisbon Earthquake Centre museum tells the story of a devastating disaster through sounds, visuals and found objects. The pop-up Museum Of Feelings in New York explores art through scents and smells by evoking emotions using specific fragrances.

Bihar Museum too has been designed to include interactive spaces and sections devoted to get audiences to engage. Delhi-based contemporary artist Subodh Gupta, who hails from Bihar, points out that in the museum, there is a platform that allows visitors to translate their names and other words into Pali, Urdu and other languages. “It was delightful to see how much interest people took in finding out how their names sound when read in a language like Pali,” says Gupta. Through its Diaspora Gallery, the museum has also tried to revive Bihari linguistic heritage by tracing migration patterns from Bihar to countries like Fiji, Surinam, French Guyana and Mauritius.

In Bihar, the ‘yakshi’, a mythological nature spirit—free of religious ideology and gender norms—has become the symbol of the cultural rejuvenation of the state—and by extension—the nation’s history. With the museum biennale, the organisers, which include professionals from diverse social, anthropological and artistic backgrounds, hope to not only make museums into a more inclusive space but also turn the history of Bihar into a history of the nation through juxtapositions of the said and unsaid, of the metaphysical and the emotional.

One wonders what Ennigaldi, the first ever museum curator, would think of the museums of the world today and the histories they tell. The histories that are largely of men, and men of power that neglected or completely ignored women like her. Perhaps she would say that it is time to wrest museums from their colonial, patriarchal and majoritarian pedagogies, and transform them into living, breathing, active spaces of learning and interacting that better reflect the multicultural history of a diverse civilisation like India.

(This appeared in the print as 'A Museum Of Memories')