Man builds ‘museum of memories’ in South Kolkata house

KOLKATA: A senior citizen has turned his four-storey house beside Baishali Park at Brahmapur in south Kolkata into a ‘museum of memories’ with over 20,000 antique items that he has collected from street hawkers and other sources in the past four decades. Called ‘Taaraar Chhaayaay’ (shadow of stars), the museum curated by Apurba Kumar Panda, a retired state government employee, reflects the history of the Bengali middle class with a wide gamut of relics that could be traced back 150 years ago.
Panda, also a member of the Numismatic Society of Calcutta, had started his “journey down memory lane” as a coin collector and gradually, took to collecting other items like old newspapers, magazines, booklets of Bengali and Hindi films since 1930s, old photographs, autographs of famous personalities and obsolete household items.
From the booklets of Bengal’s matinee idol Uttam Kumar-starrers, newspapers and magazines since pre-Independence era, gramophones and records to quills, reed pens, vintage fountain pens, empty ink bottles, vintage cameras, antique dolls and showpieces, old utensils, betel boxes, toiletries, toys and glasses, the exhibits of the museum help one trace a technological evolution and the transformation of household objects. The idea of making a museum with these relics occurred to him much later, around 25 years ago, when he used to tell his son the stories of his childhood. “I developed an interest in collecting antique items from my grandfather Debendranath and my father Tarapada. While recounting my childhood days, I realized that many things, which I had seen as a kid, are no longer in vogue. So, I wanted to do something whereby the young generation can trace the past. They need to make prior appointment to visit the museum,” said Panda.
Panda made the repository with most of his treasure collected from around 50-odd street hawkers. “For the last 40 years, the hawkers collecting discarded items from households and reselling the valuable ones from the scraps at throwaway prices served as my main source for pursuing my hobby in collection of antiques. I have also depended on some established dealers to do away with the missing links in my repository, but I often had to pay through my nose for this,” said the 64-year-old.