Down in a basement, on a lane in south Delhi, lie manuscripts by the most renowned writers of modern Indian history: Tagore, Faiz, Manto. They are accompanied by paintings and sketches, which also come from the sort of figures known by a single name: Souza, Raza. Then there are documents autographed by political leaders, including Jinnah and Nehru.
This hidden pantheon aims at comprehensiveness, but it also elicits surprise. A signature by the former prime minister VP Singh is accompanied by an abstract drawing of Ganesha. The physicist CV Raman adds to his signature a credo: “Light reveals the hidden soul of truth!” And Amartya Sen’s signature is featured alongside an unattributed caricature seemingly not available online—suggesting it might be a self-portrait.
The man who collected all these singular bibelots, Satnam Singh Hitkari—a former commissioner of India’s income-tax department—hoped to establish “the first exclusive Literary Museum in the world,” as he wrote in Immortals of Literature, one of at least six books he self-published. The National Museum, the Crafts Museum and a number of international institutions borrowed from his collection. But the Sahitya Akademi, the government body dedicated to promoting literature, did not acquire his holdings and make them the centrepiece of “an institution of great national significance,” as he had hoped.
Satnam and, after he died in 2008, his son, Jai Singh Hitkari, transformed their basement into something less prominent but more intriguing than that original vision. Walk to the side entrance of the Hitkari home, go down the stairs, and you encounter a profusion of corkboards, manuscripts, pamphlets, works of art, and stray objets d’art such as antique handguns—an organised selection from the astonishing array of things Satnam collected over the course of his life.
The most moving exhibit in the museum is the collection of letters and manuscripts of prominent Indian writers. They are displayed across three walls of the space and organised linguistically, with all 22 languages officially recognised by the constitution included. Those generally considered obscure, such as Dogri and Konkani, are treated as equals with Hindi and English. This was essential to Satnam’s vision. By “displaying manuscripts of poets and writers of all the States of India under one roof,” he hoped to “bring them together at [the] cultural level and thus create the feeling of Indianness—one people, one nation—amongst us.”
Satnam’s career as a scholar, writer, collector and curator typifies a strain of Indian nationalism—erudite but traditional, prideful but inclusive—that seems in many ways to be a thing of the past. Its inspiration came, tellingly, from Nandalal Bose, an artist whose status as a celebrated nationalist of the twentieth century is exemplified by the illustrations he provided for the official version of the Indian constitution. Satnam met Bose as a young boy and asked the artist for an autograph. Rather than a signature, Bose gave him a drawing. In Satnam’s memoir and collector’s manual, Autographs of Indian Personalities, he wrote that Bose noticed the “anguish” he felt at this turn of events and replied, “My dear son, an artist’s autograph is not merely his signature but is his drawing or painting through which he expresses himself.” Satnam never forgot this revelation of the allure of a unique object with a suggestive story.
He excelled as a student, earning the highest marks in his district in the eighth standard and later topping Lahore University. Soon after college, Satnam became a government tax officer. His youngest colleague was 45. The other members of the office curried favour with their boss, consumed liquor and “very rich fatty non-vegetarian” foods at dinners paid for by wealthy taxpayers, and woke up late every morning. “I once for all decided not to follow the above mentioned lifestyle,” wrote Satnam. His sober, punctual routine allowed him many unaccounted-for hours, which he occupied by collecting autographs. They offered “a means to an end which is of ennobling myself.”
Politics shaped Satnam’s collection. Returning to his home in West Punjab one day during the violence surrounding Partition, he discovered that 80 members of his Sikh family had been massacred. Satnam fled to India the same day. He stopped writing poetry, which had been a passion of his, and lost almost his entire collection of autographs. He gave up the hobby until 1950, when the promulgation of India’s constitution gave him the idea for what he would later call his “magnum opus.” After the publication of the document, some replicas of the original were put on sale. Satnam bought one and decided to collect the autographs of every signatory of the official copy. His antiquarian project and India’s national project were inextricably joined.
Satnam worked with patriotic fervour. Some framers of the constitution died soon after signing it, such as the academic and legislator Sachchidananda Sinha, who lived only another fortnight. Getting signatures of the dead was a challenge that, Satnam wrote, “brought out all my ingenuity.” He harvested them from old cheques he found at the Imperial Bank of India, and travel invoices issued by the Constituent Assembly.
Luminaries would receive Satnam, a man they did not know until then, at their offices and homes. They responded to the hundreds of letters requesting autographs or manuscripts he sent out every week. “Back then, India was a little child,” Jai said. “There was not so much population, people were not so much busy. There used to be response to any queries.” This applied even to the most powerful people in the country—including Jawaharlal Nehru. “You could go up to Panditji and say, ‘Can I please have your autograph?’”
Even Satnam’s acts of mild deception seem to belong to some lost age of innocence. In his manual, Satnam recommends flattery, birthday greetings, and befriending magazine editors as tactics for obtaining signatures. He tried, not always convincingly, to justify the intrinsic value of signatures, for instance by appealing to graphology, the study of how, he wrote, “handwriting can indicate the personality of a person.” Since “handwriting experts say that it is one’s brain and not one’s hand that writes,” he proposed that autographs be called “brain-graphs.”
In fact, Satnam’s passion lay less with autographs than with the picture of national glory they could form. The signature of KR Narayanan, the first Dalit president of India, called to mind “the robustness of our Democracy where anyone from any state of India can reach the highest position on merit.” The signatures of even relatively arcane figures gained their significance from their contribution to the nation. Bachendri Pal, who summited Mount Everest in 1984, “put Indian women on par with international climbers.”
The most profound way the collection furthered a twentieth-century conception of nationalism was in its implicit message that Indianness was a balance between national and regional, linguistic and religious, loyalties. The area of the museum with manuscripts representing India’s linguistic diversity constitutes the main event, occupying the most wall space and situated in the front of the museum. Only in the back can you find phulkaris, a Punjabi embroidery technique and an emblem of Satnam’s ancestral home.
Satnam’s greatest act of connoisseurship was demonstrating how phulkaris symbolise Punjabi history and identity. They became common in the late-eighteenth century—shortly after, he observed, Sikh warriors won Punjab’s independence, suggesting that military might stimulated the local economy and culture. Phulkari materials, he mused, embody perennial features of Punjabi character: “Punjabi is strong, rough and a little coarse like the Khaddar of a Phulkari, but quite simple and straight as the Darn stitch and very soft hearted and colourful like the Pat with which Phulkari is embroidered.”
Their designs are equally symbolic. Shawls pictured in Satnam’s book Designs and Patterns in Phulkaris include depictions of what were once sought-after luxury items, such as a cloth ceiling fan being pulled with a string; popular forms of entertainment, such as a performing monkey; and common routines, such as a woman carrying breakfast atop her head and a baby in her arms going to meet her husband working in the fields. “Whatever they experienced in the course of their day to day life,” he wrote of Punjab’s women, “found in their Phulkaris an imaginative reenactment. Thus their skilful hands have turned the prose of commonplace reality of the village life into poetry.”
Satnam sought to preserve the elements of Indian culture he admired through a combination of studying classics and embracing innovations. Along with friends, he organised a group of around a thousand women who took up the dying art of phulkaris. In his writing, he exhorted them to “address themselves to the present,” with motifs such as “trucks, air planes, telephones, radios, T.V., washing machines and other household gadgets.” At its core was a moral vision: “I have devoted myself wholly and exclusively to the service of the society through the medium of art and literature.”
Today, the fruits of Satnam’s labour consist mainly in his son squiring visitors around the museum in the family’s basement. Jai strikes the pose of a proud heir. “See the view from a distance,” he ordered after showing me one particularly beloved phulkari. “There is nothing commercial in it—this is all done by emotion.”
It is Jai’s responsibility to maintain the museum and conduct tours. There are around ten to twelve visitors a week. Some of them are “artistic, inquisitive people,” he said, primarily “hi-fi elder ladies” and “those who write their thesis.” But most appear to be Jai’s friends from the neighbourhood, “even though they have no interest. I say, ‘I am sitting here.’ They have to come.”
This represents a steep decline. When Satnam opened the museum in 1996, LK Advani attended the inauguration ceremony. Satnam had already held 15 annual exhibitions of his holdings. Albums in the museum show him giving Indira Gandhi tours. As income-tax commissioner, Satnam was nearly himself someone whose autograph he might have liked to collect.
Jai has not had such a distinguished career. He used to work in television manufacturing with his brother-in-law, but now manages the property his father bought. “I’m a nobody,” he told me. “He was the one who did everything.” Lacking his father’s stature and taste, he does not hold large gatherings or special events at the museum. Still, while others would have tried to profit from leasing the space—Standard Chartered offered Rs 125,000 a month—Jai, who is in his mid-sixties, never considered it. “I have to fulfil my father’s wishes,” he said. “Because I am the eldest of the family, you can say I am forced or compelled.”
There is some amount of resentment underlying this sense of duty. When Satnam met the then prime minister PV Narasimha Rao, Jai came too, but not to join his father. “I was his driver,” he said. “You know, I used to carry him from one place to another. I was not allowed inside 7 Race Course Road”—the prime minister’s official residence. “I waited in the parking lot.” Through looking after the museum, Jai feels he has found a dignity that he once lacked. “Earlier my father thought I was the most irresponsible person,” he told me, “but now I am responsible.”
Satnam lived up to his own high expectations, but the rest of the world tended not to. His books complain of the decline of elite institutions, the shallowness of young people and degrading changes in Indian culture. In Autographs of Indian Personalities, he described an antique letter he owned about a librarian of St Stephen’s College known as Panditji, who spent evenings massaging the “tired limbs” of Mohandas Gandhi. The significance of this letter, Satnam wrote, is that it shows “the fading greatness” of the college. It once “produced such persons like Panditji,” but “Alas! today’s Stephenians are a different species who are selfish to the core.”
The India of Satnam’s collection of autographs, sketches, and folk art was an idealisation; the real India had grown crass and superficial. His catalogue of phulkari motifs was a struggle against the apathy and ignorance that were extinguishing traditions he loved. Some motifs were no longer understood: the suber phulkari, for example, featured lotus flowers that symbolised blessings from friends, relatives, ancestors, and deities, yet recent versions of it had obscuring decorative flourishes or meaningless varieties of the flower. “People forgot the true significance of six-petalled Lotus,” he wrote, mournfully.
Even worse, many traditions around phulkaris vanished completely. The vari-da-bagh, a ceremonial wedding phulkari, consists of multilayered squares symbolising the biggest and smallest areas we live in: “mother earth,” a local block, a town, a home. During weddings, the groom’s mother would drape this shawl over her new daughter-in-law to recognise that she was now responsible for running the home. “Alas,” Satnam wrote, “with the change of values this beautiful and very significant gesture on the part of the mothers-in-law has totally gone out of fashion, which is a great cultural loss.”
Satnam preserved as much as he could, and Jai works earnestly to maintain the collection. Understandably, however, his devotion does not match his father’s. Going through a folder containing Bengali documents from the archives, he could not find a treasure: “This Rabindranath Tagore letter I must locate. It is lying somewhere.” I wondered if a fellow visitor, who was fluent in Bengali, could translate a handwritten manuscript of a story by Satyajit Ray, but Jai discouraged it. “Then he has to stay here for a month’s time,” he groused.
Gradually, my requests for information and visits started to bother Jai. He became concerned that my article would lead to “public harassment at odd hours.” Perhaps in an attempt to minimise the special aura of the basement space, he denied during my final visit that it was a museum at all, since there is no registration, no sign, and no fee.
Yet the worldview embodied by Satnam’s extraordinary collection is in dire need of promotion. Official and popular accounts of Indian culture increasingly conflict with the emphases of the museum. Recently published state textbooks and updates to federal textbooks offer a clear example. Instead of celebrating India’s various languages and folk traditions, there is blinkered regional loyalty. Instead of appreciating India’s Muslim writers and political leaders, there is glorification of Hindu militarism and vilification of Islamic rulers.
In Autographs of Indian Personalities, Satnam features an autograph by Indira Gandhi, which prompts him to sharply criticise Operation Blue Star. He was in no way a Congress partisan. His museum, nonetheless, represents an apotheosis of the vision of India’s founding fathers. It is the “dream of unity” that Nehru wrote about in his Discovery of India, a dream that “has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization … within its fold, the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practiced and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged.”
Jai has a grand inheritance. Yet in some moods, it seems to strike him as increasingly pointless. “When I pass away, hardly anybody would come here,” he told me. He hopes his son, Harpreet, will succeed him one day, but cannot be sure. The new generation has its own concerns. “Whether he performs his duty,” Jai said, “nobody knows.”