The Akshay Kumar Maitreya Heritage Museum

Siliguri, April 22: If the painting that you had inherited from your great-grandfather has blackened over the years or termites are feeding on the newspapers of pre-Independence period, don’t scratch your head.

You can soon take them to a “hospital” and get them restored — just as you get cured when you are ill.

After a preliminary round of discussion between the Intach Indian Council of Conservation Institutes (IICCI) and North Bengal University, it has been decided that both will work towards setting up such a centre at the varsity. The IICCI is run by the Indian National Trust for Arts and Cultural Heritage (Intach).

“We have agreed to collaborate in setting up such a centre at the Akshay Kumar Maitreya Heritage Museum on the campus,” said vice-chancellor Arunabha Basumajumdar. “A proposal came from them and we readily agreed because we want to upgrade and expand our museum. We have already started preparing a master-plan,” he added.

Basumajumdar said a committee has been formed to work on the master plan. “We want to diversify the role of our museum. It will not just be a centre where rare collections are displayed, but a place for study and research as well. It should also serve as a link with the community.”

“There is no such conservation centre in north Bengal despite the fact that the region is a rich storehouse of artefacts,” said O.P. Agarwal, the director general of the IICCI. “A conservation centre is like a hospital where anybody can take their damaged artefacts and get them restored to the original form. The services will be against a payment, the amount of which will be decided later,” he added.

A tie-up will also help in starting a department of museology which will offer diploma and degree courses. “We have also offered the university faculty-members for the courses,” said Kanchana Mukhopadhyay, co-ordinator of the Kolkata Art Conservation Centre run by Intach.

“Even today, north Bengal has a lot of objects of the Pala and Sena dynasties buried under earth. Many homes have objects that are of tremendous interest to conservationists. We plan to create awareness among the people of the need to protect artefacts through preventive and curative conservation,” said Mukhopadhyay.

As the first step, IICCI today began a three-day workshop on preventive conservation of art objects at NBU.

The workshop was attended by people from different walks of life, including students and librarians.

While the preventive conservation is to ensure that art objects are protected, the curative conservation is the restoration of the damaged ones.