Efforts to preserve textile artefacts at Tagore museum

20 Mar '10

2 min read

Visva-Bharti's Ravindra Bhavan, which houses a limited collection of Rabindranath's clothes and Nandan, Kala Bhavan's Art and Craft Museum which is a repository of textiles, intends to upgrade their storage facilities, alongside ensuring that the precious collections are dealt with in a proper manner.

A Officer of Visva-Bharati, recently divulged that the Centre has released a grant of Rs. 200 million for establishment of new museums and also for up-gradation and maintenance of the valuable legacy at Rabindra Bhavan, Kala Bhavan and Lipika.

Godrej has been assigned the task of producing display cases for the textile clothes in the museum resembling the showcases in British Museum and also for up-keeping of those clothes, a strong room is to be built.

Another official of Nandan, stated that they have a collection of 2,000 textile items but could not display them all due to limited space, and same is the problem with Rabindra Bhavan museum which unlike Nandan even lacks a climate-controlled room for storage of its collections.

Both the associations together with London's Victoria & Albert Museum intend to organize workshops on Textile Conservation in the following year. This catalyzed after Lynda Hillyer, Ex-Head of conservation at Victoria & Albert Museum, who is associated with the museum till date, paid a visit to Santiniketan.

She was leading a group of UK's textile conservators who were in India to be a part of Raksha, a seminar-cum-workshop on textiles, organized at Rabindranath Tagore Centre, ICCR, during February 20 to 27.

Hillier, is an expert of Indian and archaeological textiles and prior to joining Victoria & Albert Museum, was associated with British Museum. At the age of 20, after being infatuated by a Mughal era carpet with poppy patterns, displayed at Victoria & Albert Museum, made up her mind to work with Indian textiles.

She has also been associated with Mehrangarh's textile museum in Jodhpur in 1986 and Ahmedabad's Calico museum, as a consultant. Ahmedabad's Calico museum with 13,000 textile items reflects the 10,000 Indian textiles items collection at Victoria & Albert Museum.

Fibre2fashion News Desk - India

More Textiles News - India...