Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi is a treasure trove for researchers and scholars of modern Indian history, with its enviable collection of books, journals, photographs, private papers and other resource materials on the subject. Talks, lectures and seminars held in the 60-acre complex – which houses a library, a museum, a planetarium, a hunting lodge, apart from the famous Teen Murti Bhawan, the former residence of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister – have always veered towards the social sciences. "Semicolonialism, Siam and the Making of a Nation state", "Women in India's Intellectual Tradition", "Gendering Federalism in India": topics such as these constitute their programme calendar.
But come May 15, and NMML will host something more, for want of a better word, crowd-pleasing: a two-day conference and exhibition on the doyen of Indian cinema, Satyajit Ray, in the month of his 97th birthday. Titled "Revisiting Ray: Conference, Exhibition, Retrospective", the event will have panelists which includes the likes of Sharmila Tagore, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Amol Palekar, Suresh Jindal (he produced Ray’s classic Shatranj ke Khiladi) and Professor Nabaneeta Dev Sen, among other academicians, historians and authors. In what is seen as a clear expansion of its roster of events, a storied cultural institution now intends to court the creative arts more proactively. "Now its Satyajit Ray from the field of cinema, next it will be some other pioneering figure from a different field of arts in modern and contemporary period of Indian history," says deputy director Ravi K. Mishra. Although, there is no full fledged calendar yet on exhibitions and seminars related to art and culture at NMML.
While the conference itself is set to generate interesting discourse on topics as varied as ‘Mahanagar – When Arati and Edith Made Common Cause of their Struggle for an Honourable Identity" and ‘Sarthak Cinema and Satyajit Ray in Hindi Print Media’, the exhibition will invite viewers to admire a selection of film posters, calligraphy art, book covers, and sketches by the film icon, lent by the Kolkata-based Satyajit Ray Society. "The panels on Ray’s family, his emergence, and the changing status of women within the sociocultural churn towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, are distinctive in style. The legendary photographer Nemai Ghosh has been very generous to have shared his rich collection of iconic photographs with NMML," says Nisar Kizhakkayil, from the research and publications department of NMML, about the major attractions of the exhibition.
NMML, which is an autonomous institution under the Ministry of Culture, was in the news as early as August last year when it called for the “appointment of professional advisor for setting up a new museum on Prime Ministers of India.” No such single museum, dedicated to the life and legacy of all prime ministers of a country, exists in the world and the announcement was met with much skepticism.