Swami Vivekananda at Khetri: Re-animating a Moral and Spiritual Mindscape through a New Museum Movement

Abstract:

This concept was made available to Khetri Ramakrishna Mission in 2011 at the suggestion of the Ramakrishna Mission for the celebration of the 150th Birth Anniversary of Swami Vivekananda, scheduled for 2013. Since then the Khetri Palace has been conserved very well by the Mission with expert assistance. It is necessary to conserve the landscape features traversed by Swamiji, in and around Khetri for recollecting, rejuvenating his mission and reading it forwards into the future. This can be achieved only by interdisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration, with proper support.

The 150th year of Swami Vivekananda's birth is to be celebrated with an exhibition in the royal palace at Khetri in Rajasthan. The exhibition is at present planned in the Durbar Hall of the palace with dioramas and digital displays, with funding from the Ministry of Culture, Govt., of India and support of the National Council of Science Museums, on some seminal events of Swamiji's life and highlights of his works.

It would be appropriate to use this occasion to review the conventional approach to a Museum and to an exhibition. The Museum and the exhibition should be planned to be of current and continuing relevance, for present and future generations, not only of India but also of the world. Relevance will be assessed in terms of the pertinence of Swamiji’s life, work and ideas in dealing with the clear and present danger of bio-cultural extinction of human and nonhuman species, homogenization of the complexity and variety of life ways, technification and desacralizsation of life worlds, violence, discrimination and exploitation of the poor and weak by the rich and the powerful.

The exhibition has to focus on the illustration of Swamiji’s ideas, which address such afflictions, and not merely on a biographic sequence of his life. The exhibits have to be categorized thematically, to visualize, with Swamiji, the prophylactic cures for the malaise, infecting human civilization and imagination, and the surrounding environmental and ecological situation. The Museum will, therefore, be conceived as a Museum of ideas rather than objects, ideas of unity and interdependence of all organic and inorganic, human and non-human communities; attaining the fulfillment of the finest and best of all human potentials; serving God by serving humanity; synthesizing spiritual ardor of the East with the practical energy of the West; fighting and dying for the cause, with dauntless courage, rather than shying away out of cringing fear, before hostility and hurdles.

In order to meet this objective, it is necessary, not to adapt an event to event approach, nor to look at the few odd months of Swamiji at Khetri, in isolation, but to see him in the backdrop of Rajasthan, India and the world, to enter, with him, the workshop of ideas, where he gathered his past experiences, learning and thought, and launched his future quest and conquest of unexplored realms of fellowship, in pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty. Khetri became a brief, peaceful hiatus in a tumultuous, meteoric journey, a place for intense contraction, preceding a quantum expansion of Swamiji’s universe embracing consciousness. It was here that he retreated from his ceaseless movements, deep into himself, a microcosm mirroring the macrocosm, to burst, like a tornado, on the world. It is necessary, for comprehending, reliving and revitalizing this, world transforming time of gestation not to confine Swamiji to an exhibition, in the abstract, in one hall, but to move with him through the spaces in the town in and around the Khatri palace, to follow his itinerary from Khetri to Abu, Alwar, Jaipur, the Occident and back to the Orient, to see, with his eyes, the physical landscape and mindscape surrounding Swamiji at Khetri, including the surrounding hills, waterbodies on the ragged outlines of the fort on the rocky outcrop. The exhibition may not be imposed, as a factorymade replica of other exhibitions, on Swamiji, on the Khetri palace. As this is a place, vibrant with the memories of Swamiji’s footfalls, words and living breathing presence, the exhibition has to be woven together, like a thread in a tapestry, with the mental and physical universe, traversed by Swamiji at and from Khetri.

The exhibition cannot be based on the few photographs available or supplemented by dioramas. It has to be a Museum of moving images, based on extensive audiovisual documentation of the documents, sounds, sights and cultural ambience of the places visited by the Swamiji. Once all the available material on such places is garnered from all over India and the world, this can be digitally processed, to illuminate the itinerary of Swamiji’s ideas. Swamiji’s mind was a tuning fork, responding to ideas from all times and climes. The exhibition has to capture the process whereby he ingested, transformed and harnessed these ideas to the Vedantic mission of uniting a fragmented, divided, benighted humanity, and, for exorcising the long shadow of nihilism that had darkened the threshold of the earth planet. The exhibition has to reflected not only the psychobiography of Swamiji but also the intellectual history of his times. It will also act as the seedbed for the germination of ideas, which have unfolded later, with constant rereading and retelling of Swamiji’s corpus.

The exhibition is to be planned not as a canvas for passive contemplation but as a centre, linked with initiatives for restoration and renewal. It is understood a e etri palace is being notified as a national monument for conservation by the A.S.l. e conservation has to be linked with its adaptive, heritage compatible reuse, in its own. A po icy o core buffer multiple use surround in vogue in forestry would be relevant to the consen/ation of the monuments, sites, landscapes, non-monumental features visited, and intangible nnusic, folklore, ballads imbibed by the Svi^amiji. The landscape in the immediate zone of Swamiji s peregrinations should be conserved, beyond a cordon sanitaire approach to isolated elements of heritage, by a comprehensive environmental rejuvenation programme. This in turn, should form part of a tourism cum pilgrimage circuit, to be supported and sustained by the Tourism and Culture, Forestry and Environment Ministries of the Government.

To elucidate, the conservation of the palace should include the half a kilometer long pillared roof atop the present bus-stand, which can serve as an excellent exhibition gallery, with or even without a prefabricated modular roof. This space should be acquired by negotiating with the State Transport Corporation and the State Government. The adjacent Amar Singh Palace and the courtyard in front, presently under litigation, should be acquired for the exhibition, being a logical extension and appendage of the main palace. The double storeyed Sukhmahal Palace, single storeyed in Swamiji’s time, also under litigation, should be incorporated in the plan. The drainage and water supply system of the palace, water cisterns, canals, sluice gates, waste weirs, spill channels, connected with Ajitsagar, should be revitalized and brought back into circulation. The Naubatkhana, the polo ground should be reconnected with the palace. The Pannalal Talab premises, which had witnessed the Swamiji’s reception, should be cleaned and kept in perpetual maintenance. The Sukhmahal, Gopinath, Satyanarayan, Raghunath temples associated with the Swamiji’s visits or Sanskrit Studies should be brought within the purview of exhibition and should require simple, interventions in terms of cultural notices and location specific exhibits. The haphazard aggregation that has grown between the palace and the old city on the foothills of the Bhopalgarh fort should be subjected to an urban upgradation project. The old city comprising the Havelis, the royal mint, the undulating streets, the old market, Loriya ghati, the Patelwanki Bagichi, associated with Swami Akhandanandaji, should be brought back into shape. The Bhopalgarh fort, the Ranimahal and Shishmahal, the bastions, the abandoned copper mines, directly viewed by Swamiji from his observatory on the palace rooftop, should be included in the conservation, environmental upgradation and exhibition project. All administrative and legal hurdles should be resolved at this juncture. Even heritage structures that came up after Swamiji's demise in the city, the Jayniwas Kothi, the Jaisingh School should be conserved in their traditional architectural lineaments, to keep the heritage elements in mutual consonance and correspondence. The Khetri river, once a most beautiful and life enhancing feature in the town, which would have been hallowed by the Swamiji’s gaze and steps, has been encroached, shrunk and reduced to a channel for carrying refuse and sewage. It must be rehabilitated through an urban regeneration plan, to be hosted for funding to the Ministry of Urban Development. Beyond Khetri is Hawamahal, in Khetri, Khatu Shyamji, Jinmata temple, Lohagigarh Shakambari in Sikar, Mahavir temples, Mandwa Havelis in or near Jhunjhunu, which were encompassed within Swamiji’s itinerary.

Among the shared architectural and aesthetic features for conservation of this region would figure the gajap???ha (elephant back, barrel/vault), bānglādār, chālā (curved), palanquin roofs, clustered, engaged fluted pillars and pilasters, the jail (lattice work) in jhārokhās (bal conies), the multi cusped, multi foiled, ogee arches, soffits, ceilings, decorated with overlapping medallions, caparisoned elephants, floral rhizomes, interwoven geometric designs, nāyikās of-the Shekhāwatī School of painting, the sandalwood doors, ventilator windows, battered buttresses and retaining walls, ramps for horses, labyrinthine passages, the excellent arrangements for maintaining the cardiovascular respiration of breathing organic buildings, through a flow of fresh, air-conditioned air.