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On the first of November, when Karnataka was celebrating her 66th birthday, one other celebration was afoot in Mumbai’s Byculla – the 177th birthday of the legendary Grant Medical School (GMC). It was the primary Indian dean of that institute, Main Normal SL Bhatia, a passionate collector of medical books and artefacts, who bequeathed his whole assortment to the St John’s Medical School, Bengaluru, so {that a} museum on the historical past of medication, the one considered one of its sort in India, could possibly be arrange in 1974.
The SL Bhatia Museum is considered one of a number of area of interest museums within the metropolis, all open to the general public, together with a Mind Museum (1975), the Manjushree Museum of Packaging and Design (2009), the Indian Music Expertise (2019), and the Rezwan Razack Museum of Indian Paper Cash (2020).
All these latest museums solely comply with within the proud custom of town’s very first, the Mysore Authorities Museum. That museum has been housed, since 1877, within the wonderful neo-classical constructing, resplendent in Pompeian crimson, on the Kasturba Street. Many Bangaloreans are conversant in the constructing, however only a few have ever set foot inside it. A tragic destiny for an establishment that, till the early twentieth century, was well-known far and vast because the Tamashe Bungalow – the Home of Enjoyable – and attracted as many as 400,000 guests yearly.
Though the idea of museums was established in Europe by the seventeenth century, it was solely in 1850 that south India obtained its first museum, in Madras. That museum, and its Bangalore counterpart, have been created of the imaginative and prescient and labours of 1 exceptional man – the Scottish surgeon, orientalist, collector and environmentalist Edward Balfour.
Born in 1813, Balfour got here from a household of previous India palms. His father was a part of the East India Firm marine service, and his maternal uncle, Joseph Hume, had labored as a surgeon in a military regiment right here earlier than returning to England and turning into an MP. (Considered one of Hume’s sons, Allan Octavian Hume, would be part of the Indian Civil Service, and finally discovered the Indian Nationwide Congress).
In the midst of an interesting life, Balfour the polymath would write, way back to 1849, unique papers on local weather change, change into a public well being knowledgeable, and translate the e book ‘Outlines of Midwifery’ into Urdu, aside from sponsoring its Kannada, Tamil and Telugu translations. A fervent collector and classifier, he would additionally discovered the Authorities Central Museum in Madras, inviting members of the general public to ship in potential reveals (‘We settle for every little thing!’). To encourage ladies to go to the museum, in the future every week was put aside for them.
When Balfour was transferred to Bangalore within the early 1860s, the then Commissioner, Lewin Bowring, accepted with alacrity his suggestion {that a} museum be arrange right here as properly. In 1865, south India’s second museum was established, within the premises of the Cantonment Jail (right now the Good Shepherd Convent on Museum Street – see why the highway is named that?).
A decade or so later, with the museum having outgrown its premises, Chief Engineer Richard Sankey was referred to as in to design an unique constructing to accommodate it, which he did, in the identical type as his different latest constructing on the opposite aspect of Cubbon Park, the Attara Kacheri.
At present, 145 years after its founding, Balfour’s Home of Enjoyable is a dusty, desolate place. Regardless of containing such treasures in its assortment because the Halmidi inscription, the oldest extant inscription in Kannada, dated to the fifth century CE, and the Begur hero stone, which references, way back to 890 CE, a city referred to as Bengaluru, it fails to draw greater than a few hundred guests a day.
(Roopa Pai is a author who has carried on a longtime love affair along with her hometown Bengaluru)
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