As New Delhi’s North, South Blocks change into repositories of Yug Yugeen Bharat, why not home a Museum of Bengal?

Huge modifications are afoot on New Delhi's iconic Raisina Hill because the imposing North Block is near being emptied of its VVIP occupants, notably the house and finance ministers together with their secretariats, who will transfer down the slope to the model new buildings on Kartavya Path. South Block's denizens is not going to be clearing out simply but however the mammoth course of to transform all the hilltop advanced into the Yug Yugeen Bharat Museum will start subsequent month.

It's deeply symbolic that the grand edifice constructed by the British to emphasize their imperial sway over India will now be downgraded. Anybody who ever visited these buildings quickly realised why the politicians and bureaucrats who ‘rule' democratic India have so usually been imperious and reduce off from the widespread individuals: the colonnaded corridors and big, high-ceiling places of work with the occupants' names in polished brass letters exterior all the time fostered delusions of grandeur.

The prosaic new buildings alongside the north facet of Kartavya Path will deliver these ‘rulers' right down to earth, symbolically and in any other case. The very ordinariness of those new ministry complexes will presumably pressure the occupants to understand they're merely servants of the individuals, tasked with running-not ruling -India. There's completely not one of the monumentality of the Lutyens-Baker creations in these new sarkari places of work and subsequently no excuses for hubris or unconcern.
Ideas, nonetheless, flip invariably to the earlier seat of imperial British energy, the Writers' Constructing of Kolkata, the 10-acre warren of colonial places of work that was divested of its sarkari would possibly by West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee in 2013. Now the state secretariat operates from Nabanna, a nondescript multi-storied constructing on the opposite facet of the Hooghly whereas Writers' has languished empty, unlamented and unloved within the centre of the town ever since.

Many individuals in Kolkata imagine this deliberate neglect is because of Banerjee's distaste for the constructing and its associations with earlier ruling dispensations. That's the reason it's being allowed to deteriorate and die slowly whereas different related outdated constructions on prime land have been repurposed, such because the Edwardian period Alipore Jail that after housed nationalist prisoners (and the gallows that hanged lots of them) however is now a museum and scenic exhibition area.

Mumbai's Kala Ghoda space is a chief instance of how Victorian and Edwardian period colonial constructions may be imaginatively repurposed as cultural and leisure hubs. The grand buildings of comparable classic in Kolkata's Dalhousie space have the identical potential. The Union tradition ministry has opened a department of the Nationwide Gallery of Trendy Artwork within the outdated Foreign money Constructing there and the City Corridor is now a museum on Kolkata. However Writers' nonetheless looms massive and empty.When Kolkata already has an Indian Museum (the oldest and largest in Asia, arrange in 1814) and different repositories of antiquities, artefacts and artwork from around the globe and the nation, what to do with Writers'? Nicely, something can be higher than letting it crumble below the onslaught of Kolkata's damp climate and corrosive air. A complete Museum of Bengal, spanning 42,000 years from the Stone Age website of Kana in Purulia to the current, can be ideally suited.Worldwide specialists have been engaged by Authorities of India to assist the central workforce conceptualise the transformation of the Central Secretariat on Raisina Hill into the Yug Yugeen Museum as changing places of work, colonnades and corridors into correct show halls is a really specialised process. Banerjee ought to do the identical: scout for the perfect expertise, Indian and worldwide, to examine a Museum of Bengal and lay the ghost of Writers' to relaxation as soon as and for all.