No museum is better than a home

By Manohar Malgonkar

IT happens fairly often. Someone who has come to my house for the first time gushes: "But this is like a museum."

That sort of remark, I know, is a form of politeness; prompted by a wish to say something nice. Nonetheless I find it a little unsettling, because I don’t think a house has any business to resemble a museum. I can best explain what I mean by giving an example.

A beautiful, talented, rich woman who was also famous. Jackie Onassis. She lived well even after she had been widowed. It was only after she had died and her possessions were put up for auction that even her close friends were surprised at the number of paintings of outstanding merit by well-known American artists that Ms Onassis owned. Even though they had visited her house several times while she lived, they had never noticed them before. So well did they merge into their settings.

A home is, after all, a home; a museum is an institution; a building where objects of artistic and scientific merit are put on display. A museum cannot indeed must not mix up its exhibits with the sort of clutter that most home-owners live with: photographs of children and pets, faded watercolours by maiden aunts, rugs for dogs to chew their bones on, children’s toys.

Why, I keep on a shelf in my workplace a plain mud brick baked more than a hundred years ago because it has a tenuous link with my family’s past. No museum is going to tolerate that brick on their premises even as a doorstop.

So why do some people think that my house reminds them of a museum?

Because some of the things in it would not look out of place in a museum.

For instance, there are a few images, (six to be precise) which date back to the Kadamba period, and what is unusual for such images even in museums, is that they’re altogether undamaged. There are no broken crowns or amputated limbs.

The oldest, a Mahishasur mardini, is said to date back to the sixth century; the others, two chauri-bearers, two bas-relief dwarpals and a mythical leopard-dog-monkey figure, are relatively younger. These sculptures belonged to my father before me, and until 20 years ago, I had no idea that they were what might be called, well, museum pieces.

A professor of the Archaeological Department of the University of Munich, Dr Grittli Mitterwalner, wrote to me saying that she was coming to India on a lecture tour, and that she was working on a book on Indian sculptures. She had been told that I had a collection of sculptures. Could she take a look at them and photograph some of them for inclusion in her book?

I wrote back saying that I had only six images not a collection, and that she was welcome to see them and take photographs. It was while she was busy with the tape measure and the light meter before my Mahishasur mardini to make sure a flawless picture that I told her that my statues were believed to be nearly a thousand years old.

"Oh, older," she told me. "This one is early Kadamba. About the sixth century — certainly not later."

"So it must be quite valuable."

She gave me a hard stare. "It is not easy to put a price on such statues... not many around, even in museums."

So of my sculptures, at least three are good enough for museum; but not much else is. I have a Maratha cavalry sword said to be very old and a shield which may be made of rhino hide. It is certainly not metal; a matched pair of Pathan daggers with inlaid bone handles which some tribal chief presented to my wife’s father in gratitude for curing a son of some malady. This was in the days of the Raj, when my father-in-law, a military doctor, was posted deep in the North-West frontier which is now Pakistan’s frontier with Afghanistan. There is a carved water buffalo with a pair of urchins riding on its back which came from Indo-China and an ornate table made in Burma when it was ruled by its own King.

In his book called The World of Art Robert Payne mentions that Persian carpets made during the reign of Shah Abbas when the Islamic prohibition on the depiction of human or animal figures were relaxed are to be especially treasured: "Vase carpets with flowers exploding over them," and "hunting carpets with intricate designs of leopards, falcons, lions and songbirds." Well, I have one vase carpet and a pair of hunting carpets. They’re supposed to be valuable, but I don’t think they’ll find a place in a museum.

That’s about all, other than the sort of art-pieces and paintings that one goes on collecting: bronze, brass, or wooden figures small enough to go on side-tables, a collection box from a church and, oh, yes, some old books and a dozen or so pieces of period furniture.

The things that people have in their houses are more like a record of their journey through life than an indication of their wealth or good taste. As Alexander Woolcott expressed it, any man of advanced years "is missing something of the salt of life if every stick and patch on which is lamplight falls does not tell him sad or funny stories of where and what he has been."

What we have been; where we have been. So when the morning light falls on the Buddha head in my study, it reminds me that while I was in the army, I went to Kathmandu. The Ranas still ruled Nepal then and the vast bowl of hills that surrounds the city was vivid and alive like a cinerama screen. I had gone there as part of a military mission and brought back the Buddha head as a souvenir. I don’t remember how much I paid for it but, whatever it was, it was for less money than what it would today fetch as a hunk of brass.

On the opposite side from the Buddha, in a special niche in a wall-high book-case, is a milk-white Ganpati in marble. A lifelong friend, Mohammad Ali Chinoy of Bombay, had driven me to the alley of the marble-workers in Jaipur, where I bought the figure for Rs 11. Then, because I was travelling by air and my friend by car, it was he who took the Ganpati to Bombay where I retrieved it.

As Woolcott said, every single object we possess has its own story, sad or funny. Their finding a resting place in someone’s house transforms that house into a home, implying all that it means: warmth, light, affection, a sense of belonging.

O.K. Some of the things I possess may well have ended up in some museum. But there, they would have been treated like orphans. Here, they’re a part of my family.