Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c16.s1.t3: Indian Museum
Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c16.s1.t3
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Indian Museum
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Indian Museum, a multipurpose museum for art and archaeology in the second largest city of India, Calcutta (now Kolkata), is one of three national museums of India. It is also the oldest and largest museum in India having one of the richest Oriental collections. It displays the history of Indian history from prehistoric to the Muslim invasion. It was founded in 1814 by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta. The building has a portico with columns
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The inner courtyard of the Indian Museum, Kolkata
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built in Italian style and was completed in 1875. Later on, it was expanded with rising number of collections. It has six sections: art, archaeology, anthropology, geology, zoology and botany, 35 galleries and more than 1,00,000 items. The mansion is a two-storey building, with a square atrium in it. The first floor contains: 1. Main Entrance; 2. Bharhut Gallery, showing the gate and fence of Bharhut stupa excavated in 1875; 3. Gandhara Gallery; 4. Buddhism Gallery; 5. Hinduism and Jainism Gallery; 6. Bronze Gallery; 7. Southeast Asian Gallery; 8. Maurya Historic Gallery; 9. Pre and Proto Historic Gallery; and, 10. Music Instrument Gallery. The second floor has: 1. Folk Painting Gallery; 2. Dyeing and Craft Gallery (pottery, ivory carving, wood engraving, silverware); 3. Zoology Gallery; 4. Economic Botany Gallery; 5. Fossil Gallery; and, 6. Geology Gallery. It is the largest museum in Asia that displays the world's most important geological collections. It has an extraordinary store of ancient coins having more than 50,000 in numbers and have been arranged chronologically. There is also an Egypt Gallery where mummies are exhibited, galleries for tribal life and works of art as well as paintings and ancient hand-drawn maps.
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The Maurya Historic Gallery, or Archaeology Gallery, has a number of stone sculptures of the snake-god couple. The figures have a human head and a snake body, with upper body hugging each other and the lower part twisted together, similar to but more complicated than Chinese drawing of Fuxi and Nuwa. Some works have a simple snake body while some have a twining one. The carving is so delicate that each scale of the sculpture is evident. The Museum is said to have some Central Asian objects discovered by Hungarian-British archaeologist and geographer, Sir Aurel Stein.
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From December 27, 2002 to February 7, 2003, an exhibition named as 'Soul of India: Bronze Sculpture' was arranged by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Indian Ministry of Tourism and it was held in Shaanxi History Museum for three months. Eighty bronze sculptures all from Indian Museum were displayed. Subsequently, the same exhibition was held at Beijing World Art Museum and Tianjin Municipal Art Museum, each for a period of one month. The exhibition was successfully concluded on April 2, 2003.
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(*Liu Jian*)