Giant sculpture of Manipur’s mythical reptile on display at National Museum

42-day show lends Delhiites a rare peek at dragon-like Poubi Lai artwork

 

New Delhi, July 22: A refreshing inter-museum collaboration with focus on the fascinating heritage of a largely-ignored region has brought to the national capital a 21-foot-long wooden sculpture of a snake which is a celebrated icon in a remote belt of the country’s Northeast.

The one-object exhibition at National Museum (NM), which has just got on in a temporary gallery, throws light on a myth from Manipur’s Meitei tribe for whom the dragon-like hybrid animal has, for centuries been integral to their ethos but has only recently found shape in a tactile form.

‘Poubi Lai’, as the giant reptile is called by the ethnic group who speak a Sino-Tibetan language, is on a 42-day display at NM, courtesy the cooperation of Bhopal’s Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (IGRMS) which owns the work that had its origin around the sprawling Loktak Lake off Moirang city, 45 km south of Manipur’s capital.

The man behind the 2003-created sculpture carved from a single log of wood is no more. Wood-carver Karam Dineshwar died a decade ago in his middle age, but the pioneering work first made it to Imphal before it became a permanent exhibit at IGRMS up on the Shyamala Hills in central India.

 

 

Today, it gives Delhiites their debut opportunity to take a peek at the ethnic object that has found its way to the first floor of NM. The July 21-August 31 exhibition was formally inaugurated on Tuesday evening by K.K Mittal, Additional Secretary to the Ministry of Culture, in the presence of NM Director-General Sanjiv Mittal and and Prof Sarit Kumar Chaudhuri who heads IGRMS.

 The show, where the brown Poubi Lai with scales all along and a pair of horns above its head, is placed on a green turf spread across a longish off-white pedestal. The gallery also features two dozen recent paintings essaying various tales about the myth besides a related short film that runs on a loop in an adjacent chamber.

 

Inaugurating ‘Poubi Lai: The Story of a Giant Python’, Mr K.K. Mittal said the collaboration would be a turning point in the inter-museum dynamics in India. “It will bring about great synchronisation and interesting opportunities to unveil several archives of the country,” he noted.

The NM Director-General, welcoming the gathering, said the Poubi Lai show in Delhi has been a result of the 2009-initiated museum reforms and the Leadership Training programme with British Museum. “Inter-institutional collaborations aim at taking community heritage to people across the country. This one-object exhibition is a wonderful example of such an initiative,” he added.

 Prof Chaudhuri, who is the director of the 1977-founded IGRMS, pointed out that Poubi Lai is a “perfect example how intangible heritage can be transformed into an evident piece”.

 R.P. Savita, who is NM’s Director (Conservation), proposed thanks at the session that was followed by a 30-minute dance-drama by 22 Manipur artistes who essayed the story of Poubi Lai.

 As for the ‘Poubi Lai’ sculptor, Karam Dineshwar was one of the successors of the royal family-associated Karigar craftspeople of present-day Bishnupur district. The artist had a dream of the mythical reptile one night in 2003, following which he worked on the image and completed it in six months.

 

The sculpture had its inaugural exhibition the same year at Manipur State Museum at Imphal. At IGRMS, it was subsequently slotted as an ‘Object of National Importance’, having been registered under the ‘AA’ category of Museum Collections.

 The last time the 1949-founded NM hosted a major single-object exhibition was almost two years ago when the museum displayed for 18 days an exquisite 10th-century stone sculpture of a ‘Yogini’ in September-October 2013.