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ARTS There was a time when a visit to Jaipur was considered incomplete — at least for those with a feeling for the arts — if one did not visit the Albert Hall Museum: that superbly crafted structure in glistening white marble set at the very heart of a sprawling garden. It was an ajai’b ghar of sorts, where you could see all kinds of things: large murals painted to present a view of the great civilisations of the world, royal furniture made of solid silver, exquisite arms and armaments adorning walls, shikar-gah carpets and floor coverings all a-blossom, specimens of enamelling and metal work and ivory work jostling next to little animals preserved in jars of formaldehyde. The other famous museum in the City Palace was, of course, there but this museum had a character of its own. It was meant not only to preserve objects but also to educate the visitor. And it was — one was reminded at every step — the work of two Englishmen, the surgeon Thomas Holbein Hendley, and the engineer, Sir Samuel Swinton Jacob: the former having conceived the idea and the latter having designed and built the museum. Completed in 1886, it was named after Prince Consort Albert, Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, who had died some 25 years before that date.
In 1883, he organised the great ‘Jeypore’ exhibition, which became a benchmark of its kind; he founded the Journal of Indian Art and Industry, which was taken up by celebrated printer and publisher, William Griggs of London, and remains to this day one of the great series of publications on the arts of India; wrote a book on Ulwar and Its Art Treasures, and monographs on Jeypore Enamels and Damascening on Steel in India; and brought to light two of the greatest manuscripts painted in the imperial studio of Akbar, which were in possession of the royal house of Jaipur: the Ramayana and the Razmnama. In his own fashion, the engineer Swinton Jacob matched Hendley’s signal contribution in academic terms by building a museum that was worthy of it. The design he had in mind was to be of what was once called the Indo-Saracenic order, great Mughal and Rajasthani monuments being its inspiration. Indian collaborators whose names are preserved — designers, draughtsmen, artists, masons — worked for and with him. He even published the work of many of them in his celebrated Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details in six large volumes later. The effort that went into the building of the museum was enormous, and required the support of the royal house of Jaipur. But the end-result was quite spectacular: a structure that seemed to float in the air as it were. It has stood there for a century and a quarter, drawing visitors to itself, as much for its own beauty as for the riches that were housed in it. With time, however, the museum had begun to lose its sheen. When I saw it a few years ago, it was home to numberless pigeons that were constantly hovering above it and/or settling down to feed on grain that visitors threw around and for the birds to leave their droppings everywhere. Inside, there was a stale air: unkempt objects, poor or no lighting, strips of printed paper cut from old Hendley catalogue pasted on walls as ‘captions’. It was as if the dust of time had come finally to settle upon everything. Miraculously, however, things began to change some time back. Some officers of the state, among them chiefly Salahuddin Ahmed of the IAS, whom I have known for some years, seem to have decided to take matters in their hand and went about restoring to the museum some of its lost splendour. It could not have been easy, for there is a natural tendency in our land for things to move with the slow gait of an elephant, but they did move. The much-needed cleaning and renovation of the building was undertaken; displays were spruced up; information panels added; academic work in the form mostly of a handsome volume edited by Chandramani Singh, drawing attention to the Treasures of the Museum, was published. The result? A museum that seems to have taken on a new life, as it were. True, problems do not go away that easily, and some of them keep surfacing. But recognising these, and showing the willingness to face these, is a major step in itself. That step has been taken. I mention this for there are lessons to be learnt here. Treasures remain treasures as long as these are recognised as such. The famous Persian garden carpet in the Albert Hall museum will always seduce the eyes; in the 10th century image in sandstone of Shiva from Sambhar one will always be able to hear the music of the veena that he carries; the boldly sketched portrait of Jaipur’s celebrated ruler, Sawai Pratap Singh, will never cease, reminding one of his delicate sensibilities. But these objects are not alone: these are in great company for there are many others of their kind in the museum. The pigeons that still flutter about but are being kept at bay, notwithstanding.
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’Art
& Soul
The
royal house of Jaipur was involved in the enterprise, of course, for
nothing really could happen in the state without its seal of approval
but the spirit moving behind it had been, oddly, a surgeon, even
though a highly placed one, attached to the state of “Jeypore” as
it was called by the British then. Col. Hendley was an unusual man,
distinguished for his contribution to medicine but passionately
involved in, and far more remembered for his interest in the arts and
crafts of the state that he was posted in for close to a quarter of a
century from 1873 to 1897. “Industrial Arts,” as these were called
then, drew him to themselves, especially, for he could see that the
skills that the craftsmen of Rajasthan commanded could hardly be
matched. And he wanted to preserve, enhance, enrich, and showcase
these for the rest of the world to see. 
