The suggestion for a museum in Madras was mooted by the office bearers of the Madras Literary Society in 1846, which was facilitated by Sir Henry Pottinger, Governor of Madras. In January 1851, Edward Balfour, a medical officer in the Governor’s Body Guard took charge of the new museum. A formal notification is in the Government Gazette, 29 April 1851. The Madras Museum (= Central Museum) was started in the ‘College of Fort St George’ on College Road (hence, College Road). Madras Museum started functioning in the first floor of the college with 1,100 geological specimens donated by the Madras Literary Society, thanks to Balfour. In December 1854, Madras Museum was shifted to the Pantheon in Egmore (Pantheon = ‘Public Rooms’, ‘Assembly Rooms’).
The Oriental Museum, Calcutta, administered by the Asiatic Society (1814), pre-dates Madras Museum. But the formally organised Indian Museum, which evolved from the Oriental Museum of Calcutta, commenced only in 1878. Although the Madras Museum owes its start to Balfour, its vigorous functioning started only in 1885, after Edgar Thurston (1855–1935) became its first full-time superintendent.
Thurston came to Madras with a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians (LRCP). He supervised the Madras Museum until 1910, expanded it greatly, and in the process, studied human behaviour and brain by measuring human skulls. He kept his measuring calipers and other instruments handy and obtained data from the visitors to the museum paying some for providing cranial measurements and others not. During Thurston’s superintendence, the number of visitors to Madras Museum was almost equal to those who visited the Indian Museum, Calcutta.
Thurston recorded visitor numbers, which compared favorably with the numbers of visitors to the British Museum in London. The Madras Museum received 36,500 visitors during pongal time in 1895. Recording these, Thurston writes: “The museum grounds presented the appearance of a fair, occupied as they were by a swarm of natives in gay holiday attire, vendors of sweetmeats, fruit, toys and ballads, jugglers, mendicants and others.” As one who studied human behaviour, Thurston also refers to the following, based on his observation of visitors to the museum: “For the great mass of visitors to the museums in India, who come under the heading of sight-seers, and who regard museums as tamasha [show] houses, it matters but little what exhibits are displayed, or how they are displayed, provided only that they are attractive. I am myself repeatedly amused by seeing visitors to the Madras museum pass hurriedly and silently through arranged galleries, and linger long and noisily over a heterogeneous collection of native figures, toys, painted models of fruit, &c?” According to Thurston the museum was popularly referred as ‘stuffing college’ (the idea of which prevails even today: recall the popular terms ‘çetta college’ for the museum and ‘uyir college’ for the zoo; these terms, to me, in fact, convey the intended messages quite precisely!).
Reading the Thurston remarks, I felt why he could not enjoy the innate innocence of the visitors and had referred to their terms by lacing on ridicule.
Anyhow, what crossed my mind is how our forefathers preferred a usage that included the English term ‘college’ while referring to the museum and the zoo, irrespective of the Tamizh prefixes çetta and uyir. Was that because people saw it as a collegium (a location that includes a ‘collection’ of items – dead or alive) or because the museum started in a college building? Whatever is the explanation, their sense of creative recognition, to me, is admirable.
(The author is a senior lecturer in Ecological Agriculture at Charles Sturt University, Orange, New South Wales, Australia)