Walking back into the past

Amarjot Kaur

Delve into the farthest corners of your mind to evoke voracious interest in the past. A quaint fascination with museums alone won’t do. After all, the task of interacting with history through art, especially on a Sunday afternoon, which is mostly reserved for sweet, dreamy languor, is an elaborate one. Had it not been for its devastatingly romantic theme, A Different Kind of Love, the idea of a museum walk stood a chance of being misunderstood as an exhausting one. Heritage Lab, however, makes a successful discovery with its new experiment, Museum Walk, at The Government Museum and Art Gallery, Sector 10.

It has already invited half a dozen city-based art enthusiasts for its first ‘walk and talk’ expedition ((#museumwalk with Heritage Lab) at the museum, and that too without any prior promotion on social media. “We just wanted to see whether this idea would click with city folk or not,” says Medhavi Gandhi, a museum consultant at The Heritage Lab. 

She furthers the conversation detailing upon its theme. The month of February celebrates love, she says, obliging the visitors with solid proofs (in the form of paintings and sculptures) demonstrating thereafter the greatest love stories that breathe a colourful perspective into the otherwise dull-grey concrete of the museum’s building. 

Suddenly, the Sikandar Nama Rumal, made on Pashmina fabric and embroidered in wool, which was gifted to Maharaja Gulab Singh of Jammu in 1852 AD, becomes the proof of Alexander and Roxana’s love. 

“Alexander also had close relations with his male best friends and at that time, people did not view love with regards to gender alone. It was an open society,” says Medhavi, while explaining how Roxana became the most loved of Alexander’s three wives and how, on knowing about his death, she killed his other two wives. This was just the beginning of the walk that takes one through the Gandhara sculpture reserve collection, the miniature painting, and the contemporary art section of the museum. “Gandhara, which means the land of fragrance, was the melting pot of different cultures of the Bactrian region. The story of these cultures is told through Buddha’s life in Greek style and it has many references to the Greek Gods too,” says Medhavi.

Through different sculptures, she tells the story of Siddhartha and Yashodhara, and their togetherness through several births. From Manaku’s miniature paintings that spell the romance between Radha and Krishna, to Nayika section that demonstrates women and their desires through Natya Shastra, Medhavi illustrates the course of love through history and its representation through art.

The next theme, she says, will begin in March. “We’ll talk of women artists and their lives,” she signs off.