Opinion: Why Other States Need To Emulate Bihar Museum Story

Bihar Museum was ranked No 9 in its list of the 100 best museums in the world by a travel journal. India's other cities need to catch up

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Indian authorities must realise that not only airports, but museums also benefit from stunning contemporary architecture and spur tourism

Bilbao. New York. Abu Dhabi. Cairo. What do these cities have in common? Great museums, housed in stunning modern architecture. The buildings are as much a cynosure for visitors as the priceless artefacts they contain. And these are not the only cities where marquee modern buildings and the collections they host have become powerful tourism magnets. Doha. Rio de Janeiro. Dundee. Fort Worth. Abu Dhabi. Berlin. Cape Town. Chicago. Even Washington DC.

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Including Rome, which despite having some of the grandest heritage edifices, also has cutting-edge modern buildings to display its treasures, such as the National Museum of the 21st Century Arts—which goes by its clever acronym MAXXI—designed by the legendary late Zaha Hadid. Therefore, no city in the world really has any excuse now not to opt for and invest in iconic modern structures when mulling premises for the display of great art and artefacts.

India made a promising start in that genre with the Bihar Museum in 2015, which is why many people now put Patna on their ‘must visit’ list, surprising even themselves. Designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki in collaboration with the Mumbai-based Opolis Architects, a decade on, the Bihar Museum is the only one from India to feature in an international journal’s list of the world’s best museums this week. But why should it remain a loner?

That modern architecture can be a force amplifier for any museum is not easily understood by the powers that be in India, though the Bihar Museum provides proof of the veracity of that assertion. The older Patna Museum, even when it housed the priceless Didarganj Yakshi, got just 700 to 1,200 visitors daily, or up to 3.5 lakh visitors yearly. Since 2017 that statue has been at the Bihar Museum, which gets double that number: 1,500 to 2,000........

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