Departmental Field Trip to the Jorsanko Thakur Bari and the Indian Museum

Total number of students: 34 (Semester 3 and Semester 4)
Total number of faculty members accompanying: 8
Destination(s): Jorasanko Thakur Bari and the Indian Museum
Mode of transportation: Bus

The Department of History, The Bhawanipur Education Society had organised a field trip to two museums, namely the Jorasanko Thakur Bari and the Indian Museum. The field trip was a part of their curriculum for the Skill Enhancement Course-A1(Archives and Museums), offered to the students of semester 3 (B. A. History, Second year). Apart from the students of semester 3, the department had also decided to take the students of semester 4, who had previously missed their SEC-A1 field work due to covid 19, to the museums. The concerned field work was attended by 16 students from semester 3 and 18 students from semester 4. They were accompanied by 8 faculty members. 

The destinations were carefully chosen to give the student a sense of two different kinds of museums and the embedded historical processes that these establishments were witness to. While on one hand, the Indian Museum is a general museum that was established as a result of concentrated efforts of the Western scholarship towards studying the Orient, the Jorasanko Thakur Bari, on the other hand, is a historic house museum that upholds the history of the family of the Tagores, and some of the most crucial developments in Bengal’s past. 

The concerned field trip started at 10:15am from the college premises. The students were first taken to Jorasanko Thakur Bari, where they got to see in first-hand the ancestral house of the Jorasanko branch of the illustrious Tagore (Thakur) family, which was at the centre of the new wave of socio-cultural developments in Bengal during the 19th and 20th centuries. Our team of undergraduates were led into the museum through the Bichitra Bhavan, and were guided across all the galleries, spread across the rest of the complex including the Maharshi Bhavan. These galleries house the memorabilia and the works of Dwarakanath Tagore, Debendranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, etc. For the students a special attraction was the temporary exhibition on the life and works of Abanindranath Tagore, where they could see for themselves his pots and palates and brushes along with a collection of his walking sticks, the Esraj he play and his Kutum Katam. They also explored the andar mahal of the Thakur Bari, of which the highlights were the bedrooms of Rabindranath Tagore, Mrinalini Devi, the Atur Ghar (or the Maternity Room), the kitchen of Mrinalini Devi, the dining room used by the Nobel Laureate himself. In the two art galleries the students were introduced to two distinct styles of painting. One of them being that based on the standards of Western Academic art, mostly consisted of the oil portraits of the members of the Tagore family. The other style was the one developed by the Bengal School of Art, that was the hand maiden of Abanindranath and was brought to life with the same premises of Jorasanko’s Bichitra Club. The Siam Gallery, China Gallery, U.S. Gallery helped the students learn in details about Rabindranath’s travels to these parts of the world and the impressions they left on the poet. Unfortunately, the Japan Gallery was closed for maintenance purposes. Apart from these our visit to this historic house museum also allowed the students to get a glimpse of the architectural standards and patterns followed by the concerned section of the Bengali upper classes and how that changed in the course of time into a more pan-Asian style. 

At the Jorasanko Thakur Bari

Post-lunch the students were taken to the Indian Museum. We tried to cover as much of the galleries as possible. The Bharhut Gallery was the very starting point of our explorations here.  This gave a chance to our student to see and understand the entire process of reinstallation of the railings of the Bharhut Stupa that they had already studied as a part of their curricula. The Gandhara, and Archaeological Galleries on the other hand, allowed the students to have a look at the evolution of sculptural activities in ancient and early medieval Indian subcontinent. The Paintings Gallery upheld yet another form of artform in front of the students, where they learnt about the different schools of painting like, Mughal Miniatures, Rajasthani, Deccani and Pahari paintings along with the aforementioned Bengal School. The Coin Gallery, with its permanent display of types coinage used in the subcontinent from ancient times up to the colonial era, especially intrigued the interests of our undergraduates into the field of numismatics and numismatic art. The other galleries of interest to the students were the Egypt Gallery, the Evolution Gallery, Fossils Gallery, Mammal Gallery, etc. 

Inside the Indian Museum

This extremely productive trip finally came to a wrap at 5:10pm. Such a field trip to the museums has indeed helped the students not only understand better the workings of different types of museums, but it also helped them look at objects and structures and institutions that they had studied about inside the classrooms, in first person. This trip particularly provided them the opportunity to explore their fields of interest and get an in-depth knowledge about it. However, had it not been for the whole-hearted support of the college authorities, organizing such a successful field trip on part of the department would not have been possible. Therefore, the department would like to take the opportunity to thank the college authorities for their cooperation and encouragement. In future we as a department hope to make learning more meaningful and interesting through similar endeavours.