Madras Musium :Strolling down lanes of history

 August 9, 2014 in Chennai

B Sudharsan/The indian express

Ahead of Madras Week (August 17 - 24), City Express visits a few old buildings of Madras that narrate stories reminiscent of the times of the British, and those that shaped the city of today

CHENNAI:  It’s 11 am and the scene at the Government Museum, Egmore, is animated, filled with activity. On one side, there are school children, running around and playing on the lanes inside the complex, and on the other, we find a few visitors engaged in an intense discussion.

And then there’s an extraordinary calmness. Extraordinary, because it exists despite the hustle and bustle of the city. It’s a silence that divulges tales of the structure’s past and architectural beauty. The red-coat edifices house baroque carpentry, conventional and contemporary portraits, Buddhist statuary, engineered art works, and the famed museum theatre.

Previously known as Madras Museum, this is the second oldest museum, only after the Indian Museum (Kolkata).

It is also called the Government Museum as the ownership lies with the State Government. It’s also the first ever museum to have been built under a State Government’s patronage. The museum that was initiated 162 years ago, in 1851, on College Road in Nungambakkam, was shifted to Egmore in 1854 as per the first officer in-charge Dr Edward Balfour’s order.Today, around 1,000 people  visit the complex every day, making this museum one of the most frequented spots in the city.

Pantheon Past

The Pantheon estate, where the museum now stands, was gifted to Hall Plumer, a civil servant, in 1778, by the then Governor of Madras. However, in 1793, Plumer sold the estate to a board of 24 members who managed public entertainment activities in Madras during that period.  After 77 years, in 1821, the estate was sold to an Armenian merchant, E S Moorat. It finally came back to the government in 1830, when Moorat sold the 43-acre land for `28, 000.

How the children’s musem came to be

During the early 1850s, a Museum zoo was built in the area. Six years later, a zoological garden was opened with 360 animals and birds. Meanwhile, in the 1860s, an upper storey was added to the public assembly room, known as the Pantheon (the Pantheon Road gets its name from here), where the elite fraction of the city gathered occasionally. A building housing contemporary art works was opened at  The Connemera Public Library, which had a 200-feet high tower (tallest structure at that point in Madras). It came into being in 1896, but the tower was later demolished. The theatre museum was also initiated in 1896. In 1984, a separate building was erected that housed contemporary art, and in 1988, the children’s museum came into existence.