A muse for children

At a recent event in the Capital, museum programmers had gathered to share ideas and talk about the challenges they face. The big challenge, most of them acknowledged, was the inability to draw in more visitors and make museum visits more exciting. However, when a question was raised on making the spaces more child-friendly, to induce child audiences to walk in, the responses were defensive. Why must we think of children as repositories of culture, it was asked. And surely, our business is not to think of footfalls — we are not a mall! There is separate programming for children, occasionally, another argued.

More so now than in previous generations, a child of eight or nine years has access to information, capacity to choose, and a definite view of the world that is shaped, increasingly, by malls. So how do we want our children to perceive the world? What is the culture we are developing? Think about this: ours is a largely warm country, one where we experience, on an average, nine months of inclement weather — excess of sun or rain — which tends to keep most people indoors. And yet, what are the options of indoor activity available, even in the metros? Let’s look at what a shopping mall provides — comfort, food, cinemas, spaces to walk around or lounge, games arcades and play areas for children — apart from shops that invite you to walk in and buy their wares. Is it surprising that we head towards them in hordes? Those of us who find this growing focus on consumerism disturbing rant and rave about “mall culture”, but what is the alternative?

My friends and I grew up in a Calcutta (which had not yet been Kolkata-ed) which had only a couple of malls — small ones that did not encourage lounging. For us, the options for spending time were often museums, art galleries and bookshops. The British Council Library was a frequent haunt, but it was quite unlike libraries in the sense that it allowed you to talk, and hey! this was before the Internet. In the post-Internet, globalised world, children and young adults have very different options for leisure, and, unfortunately, our museums don’t usually feature amongst those.

In our childhood, learning was a heavy word, imbued with the weight of the world, and signified by difficulty of access. One had to go to specific places — to academia, libraries, museums — to learn. This is no longer true. One merely needs to pick up a phone and information is at one’s fingertips. Facts are online, as are “alternative facts”. Learning is now about learning to discern. But school syllabi, still stuck in factory production mode and increasingly subject to political hues and colours, remains woefully inadequate to the task, and we have not been able to develop a culture of public or community-based learning through museums.

But why a museum? What, after all, is a museum? A repository of relics of different ages, different cultures? A house of forgotten things? A place to preserve communal memory, a capsule in which to freeze time? It is a serious place, surely, not one to be treated trivially. But to me, as a child, a museum was a fascinating house of ghosts captured in endless objects, in sculpture and paintings; of secret stories in unknown languages contained in mysterious manuscripts.

The galleries spoke of the impossibility of ever knowing the past; and provided tantalising glimpses into possible interpretations of it. It gave me an orientation to view our pasts with pragmatism and induced me to open my mind to a diverse and layered “Indian” aesthetic. I’m sure I speak for many when I say that every time I went to the museum, I noticed something new.

But how can children be enticed to walk into museums? To begin with, don’t think of programming separately for children — include them in your programming. Here’s what it takes, in practice: simple measures, such as creating separate, child-friendly write-ups at eye level for a 10-year-old; designing walks and trails around themes that children find exciting; hiring human guides who help children navigate the spaces through storytelling; and looking at the possibility of creating sensorial/kinaesthetic experiences. The museum could arrange debates, discussions, quizzes and interactive presentations that are also accessible to children, and invite schools to participate in deeper, more meaningful ways with its displays and galleries. There are more steps that can be considered, and indeed, have sometimes been looked at, although often in a half-hearted way.

The National Museum in New Delhi has started volunteer guide programmes and has material for children to work with while they explore the Museum. A couple of years ago, they partnered with the Kolkata-based ThinkArts to create a sensorial exploration called ‘Elements’. Widely loved though it was, not only did the programme not change children’s perception of the Museum, it did not transform the Museum’s approach towards exploration by and for children. Isn’t it worth investigating why? By and large, the science and technology museums remain more accessible, with their focus clearly on learning by doing, but there, too, the storytelling remains unsatisfactory, and I did imagine how employing a few of our unemployed science graduates as guides and storytellers might improve the experience. Most of the installations in the National Science Centre, Delhi, don’t work, damaged by hours of relentless jamming and misuse by clueless visitors. Might not having humans invested in the space save at least some of the money, time and effort required for constant repairs?

Primary audience

As an adult guiding my children through museums in England and Scotland, I noted that most of these spaces considered children their primary audience, yet none sought to “dumb down” the experience. The child-friendly storytelling at the Roman Baths in Bath, England — an archaeological site several times removed from their real and fantasy worlds — ensured that my seven and nine-year-olds were happily engaged throughout the 90-odd minutes we spent walking through the site and learning about Roman history. I had never thought that a visit to a transport museum could be interesting until I visited the Riverside Museum at Glasgow. The layout, including aspects of public life in Glasgow down the ages, plus, of course, a lot of interactive material — touchscreens and the like, was inviting: it sought to share the makers’ fascination with the objects on display and their history; it did not create distance. Records of the Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions (ASVA), show the Riverside Museum was the fourth most popular attraction in Scotland in 2017, with over 1.35 million visitors. Interestingly, the list was topped by another museum — the National Museum of Scotland — which attracted over two million visitors last year. I’m sure our most popular tourist destinations attract many more visitors. But are our museums anywhere near the top of the national list? What about the city lists? And does it truly not matter if they do not? Emails to the premier national and children’s museums in the country seeking data on child visitors went unanswered.

Fine line: Museums in England and Scotland, such as the Roman Baths in Bath, consider children their primary audience, yet none seek to “dumb down” the experience for their sake

The crux of the matter is, in India, we are trained to close access to learning. One statement I have heard frequently from friends and fellow artists is: “we don’t want crowds”. I will not presume to plant meanings into their mouths, but what I hear is a continuation of the brahminical view of restricting access to learning, the idea that not everyone “deserves” it.

Children, unfortunately, denied a voice in decision-making done mostly by upper-class men, and women carrying on the same tradition, have no understanding of hierarchies yet, and are the least deserving by this logic. A museum in India, therefore, is more often the very opposite of a space that encourages learning. It is a space that sanctifies, protects and isolates itself and the objects within it. It is a space that encourages awe by creating layers of distance — the security, the ambience, the glass enclosures, the inaccessible text, the lack of human touch.

Of course, there are exceptions. A few museums have sought to relook storytelling — to break norms and create surprises. The Tribal Museum in Bhopal operates through themed galleries and enables visitors to make connections through motifs, stories and tools from different tribes that are often similar, though with different perspectives and purposes. It invites the viewer to enter its spaces, to feel and embrace the ambience. That storytelling begins before you enter the Museum itself is a challenge to the layout of a traditional museum. Rich in visuals and tactile possibilities, the games room has playful installations that challenge the viewer to look at them differently. Even though it does put the “tribal in the museum” as an object on display, it also celebrates tribal life and art and raises questions on what “development” can add to or take away from them. The Museum creates possibilities for appreciating difference and for reflection on the visitor’s own thoughts and biases.

The Musaeum of Alexandria — which lent its name to the modern museum — included, under its domain, the great Library as well as Plato’s Academy. It was an institution that brought together the best sources of learning — human and archival — that were available in the Hellenistic world. In the Internet age, schools will need to quickly reinvent themselves from spaces for imparting knowledge to spaces of socialisation and mentoring if they want to stay relevant. Museums will need, once again, to become public spaces of learning. They have the capacity to offer knowledge that is democratic, rich and fraught with possibilities in ways that a school simply cannot. Museums have the potential to help children understand the nuances of human art, to question the functioning of the human mind and to explore the possibilities of being human. They have the capacity to expand children’s minds in an age when the world is compressed into screens. They have, most importantly, the role to raise doubt in an age of certainties, and to fascinate in an age of boredom. If we want to raise children who appreciate multiplicity and diverseness in a world that is hammering us into homogeneity, if we want to raise a generation of children who question, doubt and seek a better life, the role played by museums is crucial.

Manjima Chatterjee is a playwright and drama teacher at Shiv Nadar School, Noida