Museum, Old and New

Recently, I got an email from someone involved in the design of the New Museum in Kashmir. He had stumbled across my blog, found it interesting and wanted to know if I would like to connect with their project. I was delighted. A new museum in Kashmir. I don’t know how things would roll on that front. But for now, I would like to share these photographs of the first museum of Kashmir:

In 1898, after a proposal from a European scholar, Captain S.H. Godmerry, Maharaja Pratap Singh converted the Ranbir Singh Palace in Srinagar into the Pratap Singh Museum [official website]. Most old-timers remember it as the museum near Bund. The  rare photographs of the building posted here are from around year 1905, a year of great flood and great winter,, and taken from a book called ‘The romantic East Burma, Assam, & Kashmir’ (1906) by Walter Del Mar. I had stumbled across it a couple of years back somewhere in the web, the images from this book stayed with me even as the details of the books got blurred after I lost my ‘bookmarks’ in a system crash. Last  night, as a browsed through a book at archive.org, I recognized the lost images.

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