The Indian Museum, 1814–1914

Abstract

ONLY Anglo-Indians who, like the present writer, can recall the days when—in the early middle ’seventies—the natural history and antiquarian collections of the Asiatic Society of Bengal were crammed into an ordinary-sized dweJing-house in Park Street, while those of the Geological Survey together with its offices, were housed in a business tenement near the river, are capable of realising and appreciating the contrast betveen the present and the past in respect to the status of science and art in the City of Palaces. The change was great enough when the Chowringhi “jadu-gahr” (home of magic), as the Indian Museum is invariably termed by Bengalis, was first opened during the later ’seventies, but the present enlarged building, as photographed in the volume before me, with its additional upper storey and doubled frontage, renders the original structure almost a doll's house in comparison, magnificent and spacious as it was thought to be at the time when the present writer assisted in arranging the galleries.