How would it be to connect something that very intimately links your own life and your experiences? Especially when the connection is inextricably interwoven with the fabric of human experiences and their repulses reflected in either a physical or a metaphysical medium, and when these are unfolded through interesting narratives.

It’s become more interesting and exciting to explore them in the collections and chosen from amongst them the objects displayed here in this exhibition. Here is a collection of narratives depicted in various physical and metaphysical themes.

Physical are those which are touched upon, and bear a dimension, shape, colour and above all a space and mass. However, metaphysical are those which are inaccessible, and those which neither you can touch nor see, and do not have any space or dimension.

In our own lifetime when we look all around us, visible is the physical world, and, therefore, we connect these objects easily and get ourselves acclimatised and also have a strong attachment with those things. And with the destruction or loss or decay, we feel emotional for their loss.

The real experiences

Since the non-physical or metaphysical are inaccessible through our sense organs, seldom we notice or feel their absence or loss. Philosophically, the real experiences are the metaphysical ones but not the mundane ones.

Talking about the journey in a metaphysical sense is that of the journey of human life from birth to youth, from middle to old age and eventually to death. A narrative associated with this journey of life to death is tangibly as well as intangibly experienced by Siddhartha, the enlightened one, or the Buddha, and which the Buddhist scholar describes as the fourfold truth. The same thing is described in the Gita as well.

The journey is not possible without a vehicle. Apparently right from the time of the invention of a wheel or a potter’s wheel or a rolling stone, the concept of transport originated.

In fact, journey means moving from one place to the other. This, as matter of fact, resultantly gave birth to the concept of journey, and to perform the journey you need a transport system; the purpose becomes more the relevant from the economic point of view, since the surplus needs to a be sent to a place where it is required.

Thus, trade, migration, acculturation, assimilation and contacts between states and nations, people, thoughts, ideas, philosophies, religion and cultural influx get linked with a journey in one way or the other.

The present exhibition “The Stories of Journeys: the physical and the metaphysical” envisages a collection of stories based on artefacts from the Indian Museum reserves and gives you a glimpse of various stories pertaining to the journey of life some of which are metaphysical in nature and others are the physical journey that led to the development of cross cultural relations as well as connection, between various ideas and thoughts.

Life lives on

Each of the artefacts displayed here in this exhibition is connected with the physical and the metaphysical stories of an eternal and unending journey.

The journey goes on, as does life. The only point where it looks as if it is ended when something abruptly changes with the rapidly changing world, though the passage of time does not indicate the terminal point.

In fact, the journey never ends there, rather it transforms itself into a new incarnation or an Avatar.

That is why it gives an illusion, as if it has ended since it gets a new form or shape or look.

However, as life goes on, the journey continues to be there, and that is why we call them the endless, or the eternal, journey.

The writer is the Director, Indian Museum

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