Christopher Kloeble’s novel, Das Museum Welt, translated from German to English by Rekha Kamath Rajan as The Museum of the World, is an extraordinary literary piece that takes its readers through an exhilarating journey of time and space.
The book serves as a chronicle of the lives of the Santal people in the context of their precarious existence in the current setting by bearing testimony to the different setbacks, socioeconomic and political, but most importantly, cultural transformations that have occurred over the past fifty years.
Where nationalism ceases to be the movement of citizens from across society and is reduced to one identity which is given priority, this becomes a denial of the very important component of nationalism, namely, democracy and the secular.
What Biggar has done is to pick up some aspects of the history of the British Empire on which there are writings that seek to dispute a particular point in critiques of colonialism, often taking the narrowest view of a complex historical phenomenon, to build his arguments in defence of British colonialism.
The most interesting portion of the book is the ‘Epilogue’. It primarily concerns the deliberations which took place at the administrative level. It underlines the long and intense tussle which took place between Lord Mountbatten, the incumbent Viceroy, and Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the Chairman of the two boundary commissions.
This slim volume is a sparkling crystal that could inform our celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of our nationhood.