A massive scaffolding stands at the centre of the Key Gallery at The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), previously known as the Prince of Wales Museum, in Mumbai. Under normal circumstances, the scaffolding built for the overall conservation work of the 107-year-old structure would be a matter of great inconvenience to the hundreds of people visiting the museum daily. But currently, with the museum “an empty building and most of the galleries lying vacant, the work can be carried out comfortably,” says conservation architect Vikas Dilawari, who is overseeing the museum’s restoration project. “The dome study and a full scaffolding reaching right up to the top was a crucial one and a noisy affair. The work now is reaching completion, which was possible due to the lockdown.”

This is, perhaps, one of the few positives that seem to have emerged in the unprecedented times that befell the museum in March. For the last few months, the museum management has been quietly working behind the scenes to gradually reopen to the public again. Since January 4, some of the museum's green spaces have opened to the community – two families a day for two hours each, by prior appointment. The CSMVS Research Library and the Museum Shop restarted its operations in November last year. “And though we are awaiting the State Government’s directives for re-opening museums and monuments in Maharashtra, the curatorial team at the museum here is working hard to open a special exhibition of Tanjore paintings, exhibiting around 70–80 selected paintings out of the 350 recently received from late Shri Kuldip Singh. This exhibition will be inaugurated shortly, if the authorities permit,” says the museum’s director general, Sabyasachi Mukherjee.
While challenges are multiple and, at times, seem unsurmountable, the museum’s history provides it a template to bounce back. During the First World War in 1914, the Government of Bombay Presidency had decided to acquire the museum building – designed and built by the Scottish architect George Wittet in the Indo-Saracenic style – for temporary use as a war hospital named Lady Hardinge War Hospital. “Unfortunately, except for the minutes of a 1922 meeting, the archive does not have much information about the hospital activities,” says Mukherjee. But there is plenty of photographic evidence and few newspaper clippings that indicate the Lady Hardinge War Hospital was also one of the major medical facilities during the 1918 flu.”

According to a report published in the Times of India in April 2020, “the 1918 flu spread through international travel, on steamships and trains packed with soldiers returning from World War I. In India, the disease arrived in Bombay on a trooper ship from Mesopotamia (Iraq) in May…The city’s sickest patients were sent to what is today Kasturba Hospital. The Prince of Wales museum was turned into a hospital for returning flu-hit soldiers.”
From the photographs, Mukherjee reckons that it is clear that the hospital served the common people besides the British army (largely Indian soldiers) returning from Europe, in treating what came to be known as the “Bombay fever”.

The fightback
Like most spaces that thrive on public patronage, 2020 was indeed a rather challenging year for the museum. The museum has remained closed to visitors since March 15, 2020. It was entirely off-limits for staff when the total lockdown was imposed nearly a week later. “As a result, we have had no income from our ticket sales or any connected revenue,” says Mukherjee. “For a museum that brings together over a million people every year through its external and internal initiatives, the impact the pandemic has had on it is immense.”
The resource crunch aside – the cost of running the museum is nearly Rs 13 crore annually – the inadequate staff, and the safety and security of antiquities and art objects threw up further challenges. The resident members visited the space on a regular basis and moved all delicate objects to the museum’s state-of-the-art climate-controlled storage spaces.

CSMVS’ senior curator, Vandana Prapanna, says, “Incidentally, before the lockdown, the curatorial staff was busy reorganising the new climate-controlled storage area, created for textile, miniature and other precious organic material.” But owing to the lockdown, much of the work, including rolling textiles; preparation of archival boxes to store paintings; arrangement of foolproof storage facility for objects such as ivory and stucco; pre-monsoon cleaning of the galleries; section-wise annual checking of the collection; all came to a grinding halt. “During the first three months of the lockdown, we experienced so much fear, anxiety and uncertainty. But slowly, we regained our confidence and the staff gradually started coming to office (30 per cent of the total staff strength) and we started de-installing the other exhibition spaces,” says Prapanna.
Along with the help of resident staff, Mukherjee removed the precious jewellery and gold coins from the display and kept them in a safe place for security reasons. “It was the second week of May and we could hear the footsteps of monsoon. Manisha Nene (director of collection and general administration), in consultation with the museum director, proposed that we remove the organic materials from the gallery and keep them in the climate-control spaces,” recalls Prapanna. “The challenge was the manpower, availability of space in the storage, and the health and safety of the objects and staff while demounting them.”
Prapanna, along with Nene, Prateek Aroskar and Omkar Kadu from the exhibition and conservation departments respectively, assisted in the marathon task of transporting objects. “In four days, we emptied out the miniature painting gallery, the decorative arts gallery, the Krishna gallery, some of the prints from the prints gallery and the textile gallery. We made a transit lounge to acclimatise these objects before taking them to the climate control storages. We also carried out the checking and cleaning of the objects. Regular monitoring and conserving the objects on display as well as in non-climate-controlled stores was the only solution,” says Prapanna.
The pandemic posed its own set of challenges, but the harsh monsoon in 2020 only added to the staff’s woes. The conservation work started in late October 2019 and had just picked up steam in December. “But due to the lockdown, we had to halt the waterproofing work with terraces completely opened up. We were badly stuck as the brick bat was removed and it was bare slab with no way to drain rainwater. The temporary plastic sheets were not capable of withstanding the storms and rains. It gave us sleepless nights, and it was worrisome, especially for the museum director and staff Ajay Kochle and Bhavdutt Patel,” says Dilwari. “They took the decision to build a temporary shed on these terraces during the lockdown, which in hindsight saved the museum from a likely disaster. We were fortunate that due to COVID protocol, the workers could be housed in the museum and a balance was managed by the museum staff who resided on campus.” But the entire sequence of phases of work that was planned – phase I: external façade repairs; phase II: interior repairs; phase III: dome study and repairs – was upended.
According to Prapanna, “The pandemic taught us that we should have a detailed disaster management policy, which also should include pandemic situations, along with other natural disasters. This challenging situation helped us think on our feet, act quickly and approach things positively.”
Realising the ramifications of the virus and the subsequent lockdown early on, Mukherjee shares, “Our employees voluntarily accepted a reduction in their salaries to help the museum in its crisis. The impact of staff contribution inspired our friends and local community in Mumbai. They extended their financial support by adopting museum objects and galleries for two calendar years i.e. 2021–2022.”

The collected funds are now being used for the maintenance of the collections, their storage, as well as for the essential functioning of the space, which helped the museum to withstand the current crisis. The responses were overwhelming. Veteran investment banker Hemendra Kothari, a prominent patron of the CSMVS, was the first to step in to offer financial support. He says, “I view the cultural institution as a huge contribution to the city, and supporting the museum is a long-term investment.”
While the end of one pandemic (1918) marked the beginning of a new, vibrant museum on January 10, 1922, it remains to be seen how the present crisis will reshape visitor experience in the future of the museum that enters its centenary year in 2022. “The only thing we know is that the museum has to work hard to win the hearts of the local community and visitors by improving infrastructure, exhibition qualities, innovative public programming, and hygiene facilities in the post-Covid era,” says Mukherjee.

As part of its future strategies, the museum is now planning to set up a modern gallery dedicated to the history of the ancient world in collaboration with Getty Foundation. “The new Children’s Museum and the Museum on Wheels at CSMVS are going to play an important role in the future. We hope the post-Covid era will bring people together to learn more about their past, present and future, stimulate new ideas and make them confident to think and work as a responsible community to defeat a future pandemic,” says Mukherjee, adding: “I also hope dependence on technology will be reduced drastically in a post-Covid era, as art, after all, is a physical and sensory activity.”

Video by Raju Shinde, Produced by Reema Mukherjee