A walk through history, with music as protagonist

On a rain-soaked Saturday morning in September, art and culture enthusiasts braved the unseasonal weather and traffic to visit the National Museum in Delhi. The custodians of this experience, titled Chime-ing With Musical History—Shaleen Wadhwana, arts educator and independent researcher, and Nymphea Noronha, behaviour science researcher—run The Chime Project, a platform that curates experiences centred around music and history, art and science at leading museums and archaeological sites in Delhi. She is a visiting faculty member at the MIT Institute of Design, Pune, and Somaiya School of Design, Mumbai, where she teaches a course on big history and design futures, and has worked with institutions like the British Museum, London, National Museum, Delhi, and Chemould Prescott Road Gallery, Mumbai. Explaining the Chime-ing With Musical History walk, Wadhwana says: “We narrowed in on these exhibits after three years of research based on our individual, decade-long knowledge of music and history. “For example, if a sculpture is in a dancer’s pose, we work with the audience to arrive at what the dancer may have been responding to, who might have created that music, what instruments may have been used, who might have commissioned those instruments, what were the social classes like at that time, how the sculpture might have been made and why, and so on.” Though the core of their content lies in the National Museum exhibits referred to here, “the permutations and combinations change when there are newer, temporary exhibitions at the museum to draw our content from, such as recent ones on Company paintings or the Central Asian gallery.