71 -year -old Cellim Khandkar has always dreamed of building a museum in his village, which he has collected in 50 years. A small part of that collection has now reached one of the best museums in the world – Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London – thanks to their artist niece, Ohda Khandkar.
31 -year -old Ohda has turned his uncle’s lifetime passion into an establishment and film – Dream your museum – Who won the prestigious Jamil Award for V&A for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic traditions. This work is not just a tribute that seems to call his uncle’s calling; It also challenges the colonial museum structures and asks if the common, individual goods are worth a place in museums. Can museums be flexible and inclusive spaces, which show the narratives of minority communities and customs? Are private collections rich have exclusive privileges?
Installation and Film at Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London, ‘Dream Your Museum’.
Cellim acted as a doctor’s compounder in Kolkata and began to collect random objects from the year 1970. A stamp exhibition earlier increased his interest, making him start collecting him. He also came to an exhibition of Vintage Objects, one of the homes of Kolkata’s heritage houses. “It was a record of which items were used in ancient times and how life was led,” Cellim tells me on a zoom call from his home in Kelpara, a village near Hooghly in West Bengal. “This inspired me that whatever was felt like a record of life and time of the common man started collecting it. To refill the pen from the bus tickets to the pen, I will not throw anything.”
A classification of rare and worldly objects creates a collection of cellim. Old clocks, God ceramic, vintage records and music players, partitions, perfume bottles, crystal rocks, hand fans, stamps, handbills, ink utensils, cameras, train tickets, receipts, even matriculation North Sheet Return in the 70s!
Cellim Khandkar is surrounded by items they have collected for years. , Photo Credit: Anand Kumar Ekboti
Gramophones for baby clothes
Most of Cellim’s collections are placed in tin tights and scattered in their home in Kelpara. It sometimes becomes a ‘traveling museum’ for the people of the village to detect and interact with objects carrying around Cellim. Curiosity, fear, some ridicule, some laugh, and have those who understand history and record, even encouragement.
Ohda’s film passed Saleim with his trunk passing through the village fields, stopping to rinse some crystal stones from the river and caught him to the sun. “Where do you find this, Nanu“Asks Maria, her grand-daughter, who appears in the film.
Cellim Khandkar passed through the village fields with his trunk. , Photo Credit: Anand Kumar Ekboti
Ohda, who studied art in Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata, and Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, says that sometimes it is difficult to understand what their uncle maintains. Is this hoarding, as his exaggerated family has often considered? He and Selim do not think so. Instead, he thinks that his collection is very much liked Dream your museumThe story is about telling. “Collecting is my way to show the people of my village to show a glimpse of things around the world,” Cellim Note. “Dating back into vintage perfume bottles from Mughal period or world like rare coins.
The house of Celim Khandkar which was destroyed after a cyclone .. | Photo Credit: Anand Kumar Ekboti
Once displayed in its modest earthen house, now was destroyed after a cyclone, Celim’s property came close to his family’s abandoning until the Ohda decided to digitally document it. When he got stuck at home during the epidemic, he re -introduced himself with both his uncle and his collection. For his artist’s eyes, it is a compelling, looking at its range – from gramophones to 80s to baby clothes. “It is also a bunch of nails [Selim’s own] In a box. This reminds me of the mate of Marcel Duchamp shower Show [1917]Where he displayed an inverted urinal. Such objects challenge the traditional assumptions of whatever they say in a museum. These items, including a broken plate, pass through generations, showing the power of storytelling through objects. ,
Saleim laughs when asked about the nails. “I once visited an exhibition, where I made art with nails and thought I would do the same with me. It made me eager, so I kept them.”
What does a museum create?
Behind the passion of Cellim has been the inspiration power of curiosity and this is what the position celebrates in its work. Maria, with Cellim in the entire film, asks a keen question about objects in her collection, trying to peek into her mind. Ohda started filming Dream your museum 2022 Berlin as an entry to Biennaale, where it was well received, finally received the V & A award.
Filmmaker Ohda Khandkar
Growing up in Kelpara, the position did not step inside a museum until he came to study art in Kolkata. “I had achieved my dream of studying art and moving from a village, where many women still had no voice and they were married early. It surprised me – was the limit of our dreams? Did my uncle, a rural, old Muslim man had limits?”
With the award from the award, the position is now hoping to build a museum for its uncle’s collection and a cultural place in the village. “We need accessible museums that serve as alternative places for the narratives of rural minority communities; as a safe place for women without opportunities; to attach those who usually cannot visit traditional museums due to lack of knowledge, distance or financial obstacles.”
In Dream your museumHis camera gently film Cellim in the middle of his collection in his collapsing ancestral home. He expresses disappointment when there is no permanent place even after 50 years to demonstrate his prized collection. “I will now make a museum on the moon,” he declares.
The author is a freelance journalist and co-writer of ‘Rhethink Aging’ (2022).
Published – April 18, 2025 10:14 AM IST
