August 24, 1998

Yet another foreign show marks India's 50 years. 

By S. Kalidas

Even if we Indians continue to be cynical about our survival as an independent nation through these past 50 years, it is some consolation to see the rest of the world being more generous when it comes to celebrating our freedom from colonial rule. So, while successive governments in Delhi dilly-dallied and planned and unplanned lacklustre commemorative events a full year late, foreign missions here and their governments abroad lit up the Indian cultural scene with a dazzling array of exhibitions, concerts and performances.

Partly by default, over the past year, the National Museum in Delhi, has been the venue of some major exhibitions like the Padshahnama and the Enduring Image from Britain and The Macedonians from Greece. The latest in this series comes from Germany titled Treasures of Indian Art. A vibrant collection of art objects spanning the tantalising traverse of Indian art from Mohenjo Daro (2000 b.c.) to Mughal and Pahari (18th century a.d.) miniature paintings, the show comes as a German tribute to India's 50 years of Independence.

On August 14, with the political situation again fluid, President K.R. Narayanan took time off to inaugurate the stunning array of sculptures, panels, decorative artefacts and paintings culled from the collection of the Museum of Indian Art, Berlin. "Ours is the only museum in Germany which is exclusively devoted to Indian art," informs Marianne Yaldiz, director of the museum and curator of the present show. Yaldiz, who is an Indologist and art historian by training, spent her youth excavating sites in Mathura and studying the art of the Munda tribals between 1966 and 1974. With many friends and colleagues in India, she is thrilled about bringing the core of her museum's collection to the "place of its origin, on such a momentous occasion". After being on view in Delhi till the end of September, the exhibition travels to the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai and the Indian Museum, Calcutta.

The logistics of moving such precious and delicate works of art and putting them on display in a travelling exhibition can be stupendous. Normally, such exhibitions take anything from 12 months to two years to plan and execute. Some three months ago, officials of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) and the Department of Culture rather belatedly went scouting around Europe and America for collaboration with major art institutions possessing Indian art who would be willing to lend objects for a loosely conceived theme like "India's Heritage". They drew a blank at most places.

"We were so pleasantly surprised," admits Himachal Som, director-general of ICCR, "when the Berlin Museum of Indian Art not only agreed to put up the exhibition but also do it in the short time frame that we had." Says a pleased Kasturi Gupta Menon, joint secretary at the Department of Culture and acting director-general of the National Museum: "It was a race against time to mount this exhibition within three months from conception to final execution but we did it."

Of course, with such obliging foreign friends, it would not even occur to anybody to put up a cogently conceived and properly mounted exhibition drawn from the collections of our own museums, the treasures of which are far superior to any collection abroad. It would have shown up the calibre of our own curatorial talent, or at least aired our own dusty vaults.

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