Restored and sparkling, iconic Bhau Daji Lad Museum re-opens today

MUMBAI: Mumbai has fewer museums than you can count on your fingers, and one of the big ones has been shut for the better part of the past five years. Until Wednesday that is. On that day, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis inaugurated the newly restored and repaired Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Byculla, nestled in the Veermata Jijabai Bhosale Botanical Udyan & Zoo. The museum will be thrown open to the public on Thursday.

The Who’s Who of dignitaries were present at the opening: municipal commissioner Bhushan Gagrani, MP Milind Deora, ex-MLA Yamini Jadhav, AMC Amit Saini, AMC Ashwini Joshi and minister Mangal Prabhat Lodha.

“There is no other building quite like this in the country,” said a beaming Tasneem Mehta, managing trustee and honorary director of the museum who was responsible for bringing the building back to its original glory in 2008, getting it the UNESCO Asia Pacific Heritage Award of Excellence for Conservation. “The oldest museum in Maharashtra and the third oldest in India, it is a confluence of the melting pot that Bombay was. A novelty to which over 3,000 visitors would come in a single day in the nineteenth century.”

This last round of restorative work and repairs were the touch-ups that went on for 18 months from March 2023 and cost ₹2.8 crore. When the museum last shut in August 2022, bits of plaster were sprinkling off the ceiling; before that, termites had cosied up in the wood during the shutdown forced by the Covid-19 pandemic, said Vikas Dilawari, the conservation architect on the project.

“The museum building is 152 years old,” said Dilawari. “It opened in 1871 and some concrete slabs were replaced in 1920. We tapped shaky areas of the roof and reconstructed those parts, taking care to keep the original gold gilding intact. The roof was waterproofed. A coat of paint was added outside and inside. Railings and ramps were refurbished. Conservation of the artifacts continued.”

The museum in its current form, although visually unchanged since it was last open, owes much to Mehta. On board since 1995 for a “conservation lab”, she slowly garnered the BMC’s trust through her restoration of the municipal corporation building after the fire of 2001. “The museum was in a terrible state then; dingy, dark,” she explained. “The walls were damaged, algae and plants had grown through. There were electric cables crisscrossed all over, the paint had faded and the artifacts stood neglected.”

Mehta rooted around for funding till 2003, in which year a public-private partnership with the BMC, the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation finally initiated the restoration that lasted till 2008. This was all Mehta, as she had honed her designing skills through restoration work with INTACH. The museum’s artefacts were restored, researched, and curated anew, becoming instrumental to her then ongoing PhD at JNU (which she did not defend). Dilawari was called in for the technical conservation bits.

The second time over, Mehta isn’t stopping here. “The museum has acquired new artifacts over the years, textiles, works on paper, rare books etc, which are all stored away because we do not have the space or the money to display them,” she said. “I would love for the museum to give space to contemporary artists to explore the city’s heritage and history, as a city museum should, as well as Marathi artists who have been fostered by my alma mater, the Sir JJ School of Art. We now have to shoo many people away, as the special exhibition space is too small.”

The public-private partnership was not renewed after it ended in 2018, leaving the museum starved for funds. With it also disintegrated plans to extend the museum, which was to be part-funded by the Bajaj Foundation. After approving it in 2014, the BMC dropped the plan in 2016 due to politics.

“A design competition was held for the expansion, which was won by Stephen Holl, the renowned architect behind the Bihar Museum. He still writes to me every Christmas in hope,” said Mehta, her voice betraying the same inflection of hope.

Encouragingly, the new CM and municipal commissioner had expressed a keen interest in the museum; Fadnavis in his inauguration speech called museums “witnesses to the cultural and historical formation of society”, harking back to the ancient Indian civilisation. Gagrani spoke of his visit with Fadnavis to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, remarking that the two museums shared the Celadon green wash. Mehta called it the “colour of contemplation”, explaining why she chose it for the Bhau Daji Lad museum.

For now, however, the municipal commissioner said there were no plans for expansion. But Mehta remains hopeful.

(The next show at Bhau Daji Lad is of artist Reena Kallat on Jan 31)

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