This comes, I suppose, in the ‘and another thing’ bracket, following my last piece that was written in India and before being overtaken, on my return to darker shores, by British alarums and excursions whether on the public or the domestic front.

Being in Calcutta, visiting the sites and scenes relevant to my current excursion into British imperial Indian history, wandering streets filled with endlessly fascinating buildings, old, historical, crumbling or shiny new, among the endlessly fascinating hurtling, rushing and busy life, gave me brief images as though taken on too short an exposure. I must return soon for a more leisurely, less snapshot view. I hope, meanwhile, that Mamata Banerjee fails to turn the city entirely blue although a cerulean Victoria Memorial is an appealingly surreal prospect.

The statues of the imperial officers of state of the 19th and early 20th centuries now stand in ranks in the beautiful gardens of Flagstaff House at Barrackpore, not at all a bad place to end up. It is somewhat remarkable that they have been treated with such respect when Bengal is so correctly proud of its nationalist history and its nationalist heroes. They are remembered with every step in Calcutta; Ghosh and Bose gild buildings and road junctions and are memorialized, with their colleagues and cohorts, in building and street names; their only rival the illustrious name of Tagore.

Calcutta is properly the repository of the great wave of Bengal nationalism that found outlet in literature and art as well as political activism. As the original seat of the British Indian government, that history, too, is inescapable and part of the Indian story, like it or not, and I don’t much when it appears to have done so much to dislocate the long history of Indian civilization and culture that tourists now glimpse only in part and usually out of all context. It seems sometimes that India is determined not to celebrate her ancient history, tucking its treasures away in the dustiest corners of state and national museums instead of showing them off in gleams of glory.

The imposition of forms of reactionary, foreign Christianity in northeastern India over the past hundred years or so has resulted in huge and, sometimes, a total loss of ancient cultures such as that in Nagaland. The realization that these cultures are of value to tourism is encouraging their revival and the attempts to rediscover ancient languages and customs. Unfortunately, this is more likely to work on paper than in a reality where ersatz versions of traditional life are created purely for tourist consumption. Perhaps better that than the sort of prurient people tourism that has been reported in the Andamans and the Amazon where tribal people are treated like objects. That denim dressed youth is unlikely to take up head hunting may be a relief, that education for that youth is more available and applicable to contemporary life is to be applauded. That their history in language, building, understanding and sense of time and place has been trampled down by a transforming belief system is a tragedy.

In other parts of India, the scenario may be less traumatic but the focus on what is important to the country today seems nonetheless keen to exclude, or at least marginalize, the distant past when it comes to displaying it to the world. The Victoria Memorial, aesthetically horrendous outcome of Lord Curzon’s otherwise aesthetically sensitive imagination, quite reasonably contains collections relevant to British India and nationalist Bengal. The stunning paintings by Zoffany, Tilly Kettle, William and Thomas Daniell and others are wonderful to behold and so barricaded from the desperate viewer as to be wonderfully impossible to see. Good grief, whatever the downsides of that monstrous building, it is full of fantastic space and should star in the Calcutta cultural firmament as so much more than a bizarre curiosity shop of ill-displayed pictorial history.

Elsewhere in the city, the Indian Museum may not display its collection to full advantage, its rooms appear to close at random and the collection, dare I say, could do with some more creative curating, a good deal of dumping of the moth-eaten and decayed and some energetic dusting. On the other hand, the building is splendid and whatever artefact culling might be worthwhile, the great rooms full of antique showcases are themselves a unique step back in time and a total delight.

The museum has a dimly lit shop with interesting enough literature but it is missing a trick recently rectified by the National Museum in Delhi, a less spectacular structure but full of true wonders if you can find them among its poorly displayed collections. Why on earth it can’t get this right — and please don’t tell me it is a question of money because new wealth loves having its name prominently plastered all over cultural institutions — when it has opened a museum shop to stand comparison with the Metropolitan in New York and the British Museum in London, albeit on a currently smaller scale, I can’t imagine. Calcutta would do well to follow this example; a good museum shop is a draw on its own for many tourists although a collection that is appealing and easy to view does, as a rule, help.

In the National Museum, beautiful miniatures plaster the walls in several rooms, lit in such a way that your shadow is permanently darkening the picture which is, in any case, hung at the height of your navel, and don’t tell me that everyone seeing it is that small either. Wonderful sculpture in stone and bronze is displayed according to period but in so casual a way that the uninformed viewer can hardly pick out the extraordinary from the relatively ordinary or get any sense of the cultural and civilizational history of a particular piece. I am sure those portable spoken commentaries are a help but, personally, I hate being told in what order to look at things and like the freedom to look at random at those delights that catch my eye and my soul. Then I want the facilitation to discover more of their story.

One evening in Delhi I listened to a government minister discussing India’s present strengths and selling points. Information technology, tick; sciences and engineering, tick, tick and rightly so, we all need them desperately to raise our games; service industries, tick; tourism, tick, but not, as we discuss here, by any means as well exploited as it might be for a country with cultures as old as the Egyptians; sports, especially the potential for skiing tourism, tick, when it happens and it appears to be a problematic one so far; and so on, so unsurprising. The minister was somewhat resistant to more esoteric and less concrete pluses such as the riches of Indian culture in the broader sense. There is no doubt that tourism in India offers remarkable pleasures from high-end luxury hotels and spiffy spas to the colours and romance of Rajasthan, the watery wonders of Kerala, national parks and wonderful wildlife; tigers, still, just, if you are lucky; sites of religious significance; cultural events from successful literary festivals to music and theatre; so many religions; something for the rich man dropping in by helicopter or the impoverished backpacker; a country big enough to move north or south according to the seasons; something for everyone.

At the same time, among these manifold resources and notwithstanding their delights, something is being missed. The individual snapshots, like those of my mind’s eye in Calcutta, are as bright as or brighter than anywhere in the world but they do not always join into a cohesive whole. In a country so huge, the complete story will always be elusive but culture or cultures could receive a much greater emphasis than they do in the list of India’s USPs. Without care and attention the stones and stories of the past will become dimmer, duller and increasingly irrelevant not only to passingly curious tourists and foreign onlookers but to domestic consumers, new generations all too keen to ditch the boring past in favour of the glittery consumption of immediate material wealth that has all too rapidly become the modus vivandi of some countries with far shorter roots than India. Gilded lark tongues on toast anyone and where’s my violin?