A lesson in labelling from a 'walking stick'

One colourful footnote to the whole new Parliament building jinbang is the happy noise being created around the installation of a sceptre in the new house on Sunday. The sengol - that, frankly, very few people knew about, let alone ooh and aahed over - was the ornamental symbolic item that Louis Mountbatten handed over to Jawaharlal Nehruas part of the passing the baton that was the transfer of power on the midnight hour of August 14-15, 1947. But enough of that. Our intention here is to highlight the sad state of labelling - whether in museums or galleries - in India. The sceptre, kept all this while in Allahabad Museum, was labelled 'Golden walking stick gifted to Pt Jawaharlal Nehru'. This is the sort of bad information that provides grist to the mill of those who love putting all blame for everything on the first PM. In this case, if the wrong labelling was not found to be wrong, who knows, some folks would have exclaimed how Rahul Gandhi's great-grandfather swiped something that belonged to the nation for himself, and that too as a walking stick.

Our museums and art galleries have labels without dates, sketchy-to-no information, vague facts and silly ones. Once the hubbub has died down, the sceptre incident should trigger a nationwide process of 'cleaning up' our understanding of what good labelling should be.