As New Delhi’s North, South Blocks become repositories of Yug Yugeen Bharat, why not house a Museum of Bengal?

Big changes are afoot on New Delhi's iconic Raisina Hill as the imposing North Block is close to being emptied of its VVIP occupants, notably the home and finance ministers along with their secretariats, who will move down the slope to the brand new buildings on Kartavya Path. South Block's denizens will not be clearing out just yet but the mammoth process to convert the entire hilltop complex into the Yug Yugeen Bharat Museum will begin next month.

It is deeply symbolic that the grand edifice built by the British to emphasise their imperial sway over India will now be downgraded. Anyone who ever visited those buildings soon realised why the politicians and bureaucrats who 'rule' democratic India have so often been imperious and cut off from the common people: the colonnaded corridors and huge, high-ceiling offices with the occupants' names in polished brass letters outside always fostered delusions of grandeur.

The prosaic new buildings along the north side of Kartavya Path will bring these 'rulers' down to earth, symbolically and otherwise. The very ordinariness of these new ministry complexes will presumably force the occupants to realise they are merely servants of the people, tasked with running-not ruling -India. There is absolutely none of the monumentality of the Lutyens-Baker creations in these new sarkari offices and therefore no excuses for hubris or unconcern.


Thoughts, however, turn invariably to the previous seat of imperial British power, the Writers' Building of Kolkata, the 10-acre warren of colonial offices that was divested of its sarkari might by West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee in 2013. Now the state secretariat operates from Nabanna, a nondescript multi-storied building on the other side of the Hooghly while Writers' has languished empty, unlamented and unloved in the centre of the city ever since.

Many people in Kolkata believe this deliberate neglect is due to Banerjee's distaste for the building and its associations with previous ruling dispensations. That is why it is being allowed to deteriorate and die slowly while other similar old structures on prime land have been repurposed, such as the Edwardian era Alipore Jail that once housed nationalist prisoners (and the gallows that hanged many of them) but is now a museum and scenic exhibition space.

Mumbai's Kala Ghoda area is a prime example of how Victorian and Edwardian era colonial structures can be imaginatively repurposed as cultural and leisure hubs. The grand buildings of similar vintage in Kolkata's Dalhousie area have the same potential. The Union culture ministry has opened a branch of the National Gallery of Modern Art in the old Currency Building there and the Town Hall is now a museum on Kolkata. But Writers' still looms large and empty.

When Kolkata already has an Indian Museum (the oldest and largest in Asia, set up in 1814) and other repositories of antiquities, artefacts and art from around the world and the country, what to do with Writers'? Well, anything would be better than letting it crumble under the onslaught of Kolkata's damp weather and corrosive air. A comprehensive Museum of Bengal, spanning 42,000 years from the Stone Age site of Kana in Purulia to the present, would be ideal.

International experts have been engaged by Government of India to help the central team conceptualise the transformation of the Central Secretariat on Raisina Hill into the Yug Yugeen Museum as converting offices, colonnades and corridors into proper display halls is a very specialised task. Banerjee should do the same: scout for the best talent, Indian and international, to envision a Museum of Bengal and lay the ghost of Writers' to rest once and for all.