Kolkata: If all goes well, Kolkata Municipal Corporation will set up a modern museum at Town Hall that will attract not only tourists but scholars and researchers as well. The digitised museum will showcase contributions of luminaries of the Bengal Renaissance, the Independence movement in Bengal, and the role of KMC in shaping the direction of India’s freedom struggle. Mayor Firhad Hakim on Thursday said both the state and KMC were keen on setting up such a museum at Town Hall, a grade-I heritage building that witnessed many historical events. “We roped in IIT Kharagpur to give a shape to the project. They came up with wonderful ideas. Now it is just waiting to happen,” said Hakim. IIT Kharagpur architecture & regional planning professor Joy Sen, who was the principal investigator of the 2018 Town Hall project, said, “After so many years, if the project matures and the museum is opened, it will be good for the future generation of students and scholars.”According to Sen, through the museum, they wanted to showcase the Renaissance of Bengal, which is actually the epicentre of the Renaissance of India. “In 1929, Father of Quantum Physics and Nobel Laureate Werner Heisenberg came to Kolkata to meet Rabindranath Tagore. He found the interaction with Tagore most fulfilling, solving some of the riddles of reality in light of quantum mechanics. This is what Heisenberg said later about the true nature of the Renaissance, when deep philosophy of Indian philosophy meets sciences. Another event is the work on the most advanced Bose-Einstein statistics that is even fetching Nobel prizes today, like professor Wolfgang Ketterle of MIT, USA. Ketterle had come to Kolkata and paid tribute to Satyendranath Bose during a talk at Vivekananda Hall at Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Golpark. Events like these are markers of the Bengal Renaissance that need to be showcased,” said Sen, chairperson of the School of Leadership at IIT Kharagpur. Purono Kolkatar Golpo, who was working with IIT Kharagpur as ‘content developer’, submitted the contents for the museum around March 2022. “The proposal was to set up 4 galleries on Town Hall history, evolution of KMC, Bengal Renaissance and Freedom Struggle movement,” said Swarnali Chattopadhyay, a group member associated with the project.
