Heritage is a word that carries sanctimony. When somebody talks about heritage, we feel he is going to tell the tales of past heroes, their adventures, achievements and attainments. We feel something glorious, shining and superb is there somewhere preserved that community hails as its property inherited from the ancestors. In western countries, heritage is what the people are proud about. It is history and culture given tongue. When you visit a museum, the curators who are supposed to impart information about the contents of the museum verbally and visually carry you to your past forgetting the present for the time being. Great scholars in the west have spent most of their time in museums and libraries and then only have they carved a niche for themselves in the annals of history. A museum is the physical collection of what we consider to be the heritage of a community. A visit to the museum is virtually excursion into the past history of the nation to which you belong.
Sri Maharaja Pratap Singh Museum, located on the west bank of river Jhelum in Srinagar was commissioned on the orders of Maharaja Pratap Singh in 1898. Though it started with a modest beginning but with the passage of time, it got enriched by regular inflow of artifacts either excavated by archaeological agencies of received by the royal court as presents from vassals in the length and breadth of the State under the rule of Dogras. It has ten galleries each assigned to different branch of Museulogy. It is a rich trove of heritage treasure whether in terms of archaeological finds like numismatics, shawl specimens, jade, and copper ware, apparels and costumes of ancient peoples or in Sharada, Pali, Sanskrit, Arabic and Farsi manuscripts and more interestingly, the Buddhist writings on birch leaf also preserved in the respective gallery. Buddhist relics and stone and bronze idols of Hindu Pantheon collected in the museum from famous archaeological sites in Kashmir valley are all exquisite finds more exquisitely dumped in the junk house called SPS Museum.
We think that the visitors to this museum are not attracted by the contents of the museum but by the condition of the museum which was built a hundred and fifteen years ago when Kashmir was steeped in the cultural ethos of middle ages. People come to see not the artifacts dumped in the museum but the museum itself how it looks like while in the process of dilapidation. What you least find in the Museum are electric light and fresh air, and what you see most is darkness and the chirping owls and frisking rodents. It looks like a huge godown, a junk house where anything and everything going by the title heritage has been dumped and forgotten. Galleries are giving in, walls obnoxiously steering into one’s face, doors of antique construction and windows almost about to drop down as deadwood. The first impression is that it is a dungeon not a museum. No seat to sit down for a while, no conductor to conduct a visitor, no room to breath fresh air, no window to shed some light even if scare on the consents of the museum, no brochures or guidelines, no recreational outlet and even no comfort rooms either for the male or the female visitor.
A hundred and fifteen years ago, this museum was incepted. For this long period no person in authority in the State thought of improving, upgrading and modernizing this house of heritage. But, there has been profusion of lectures and writings on heritage and the importance of heritage. There has been lot of talk about Kahmiriyat but the museum in Srinagar has never become part of that Kashmiriyat. Whose heritage does it represent? A difficult question to answer indeed… Apathy of the populist Government for last six decades and more is not difficult to explain. But it was Ghulam Nabi Azad, who took the matter serious when he was the Chief Minister and refused to lay the foundation stone for a new multi-storey complex for the museum unless it was raised. When some work progressed he did lay the foundation stone. It is now four years, not a blade of grass has moved. The complex is there where he left it. It speaks a lot about the concept of heritage and Kashmiriyat of the people and their leaders.
The treasure in this museum is relegated to dungeon and junk room. Most of it will get extinguished with the march of time. The Government is loath to let the upcoming generations of Kashmiris get acquainted with their past inheritances. It speaks of cultural level of the people and their leaders. By some strange quirk of destiny, these priceless artifacts still remain dumped in the dungeons there but not vandalized and sold clandestinely as these would have fetched enormous bucks. Who knows, that too might happen one day and those who rule the roost will say that that all is junk and not needed so let it go haywire.
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