Love for history

Making history come alive

The Hindu – EDGE – published this piece on 22^nd January, 2018. It is an abridged version of the piece published by Teacher Plus in its November 2017 issue. The piece in EDGE here and Teacher Plus here.

Thanks are due to Shalini and The Hindu.

‘She is not interested in museums’, a friend said, of his daughter. He left me wondering. The history lover in me was not very happy. I frequent museums and try to savour those at places I visit. Here I speak not just of large and exquisite collections like the ones at the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay but also of smaller museums.

Museums in capitals of Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland have taught me about the homes and festivals of people there, the clothes they once wove and wore, their fishing and cultivation practices and more.

Today, we also have privately owned museums. Some of them like the textile and vessel museums at Ahmedabad boast of very focused and novel collections. Then, of course, there are the museums owned by the erstwhile royal families and even state agencies like the Indian Railways and the Reserve Bank of India.

These museums - rich repositories of our shared past - can hold our hands as we move towards the future.  They can not only help take history beyond the mugging of dates and names, and bring it alive, but also help facilitate discussions on a wide range of topics.

The Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad, which, amongst a host of galleries has one dedicated to ivory, can be a learning ground for how forests and their resources were put to use during earlier times. Trips to the Nicholas Roerich Estate in Naggar (Kullu) or the Raja Ravi Varma collection at the Vadodara museum can be learning spaces for art and painting with few parallels. The potential is immense.

Museums offer a wonderful opportunity to become partners in education. They not only enable schools to take education out of classrooms and look beyond the allotted 45-minute periods but also enable students to experience a sense of awe and wonder in course of learning. Some museums also house auditoriums.

Schools may want to take a critical look at their existing relationship with museums. While many of them visit museums, on most occasions, primarily on account of group sizes, all they succeed in doing is to get students to move in a proper file.

Coming back to my friend, after his daughter moved away, I asked him when he last had a chat with her about history, or got a book for her on the topic, or go with her to a structure of historical or cultural significance. Did he expect her to be interested in museums after being taken to Play Zones at malls and subjected to Tarak Mehta Ka Ulta Chashma at home? All said and done, children may or may not be interested in history or museums. This is a choice they make. We have the choice of enabling them access to joyous learning avenues - such as museums – beyond the classrooms.  The question is whether we are playing our roles well - that of exploring these avenues and presenting them as options to our younger friends.