page_title: Edward Balfour
section_title: Museums, natural history and orientalism
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Balfour / Museums, natural history and orientalism
caption_attribution_description: Notice in museum at Madras Government Museum. The part saying admission free has been covered. The founder of the Madras Museum, Edward Balfour, sought donations of exhibits from the public and therefore believed that it would not be right to charge the public.
context_page_description: Edward Green Balfour was a Scottish surgeon, orientalist and pioneering environmentalist in India. He founded museums at Madras and Bangalore, a zoological garden in Madras and was instrumental in raising awareness on forest conservation and public health in India. He published a Cyclopaedia of India, several editions of which were published after 1857, translated works on health into Indian languages and wrote on a variety of subjects.
context_section_description: Balfour was keen on collections and education. He founded the Government Central Museum at Madras in 1850. He became the first officer in charge of the museum at Madras. By 1879 the museum was attracting 180,000 people each year and in 1886 as much as 230,000. Women visitors were encouraged on special days. He not only kept records of the visitors but also studied the response of visitors to exhibits. He noticed a marked increase in the number of visitors when a live specimen of a tiger cub and leopard was kept in the natural history section of the museum. This led him to propose a zoological garden and this led to the creation in 1856 of a small collection of animals in the People's Park which grew into the Madras Zoological Gardens. There was pressures to move the museum to the college premises but Balfour firmly believed that the museum needed to be "...open to all classes, and contains articles calculated to amuse and instruct all classes". Initially the museum displayed items of commercial value and focussed on economic geology and forestry. It later began to acquire items of archaeology and ethnology. He encouraged contributions to the museum stating that "every specimen that may be sent will be acceptable". Material could be sent free by post if marked for the museum and sent by "Banghy Dock". The Oriental and Screw Navigation Company permitted packages for the museum to be shipped free. Material flowed in at around 1000 items a month. He considered it inappropriate to charge an admission fee since the public was donating exhibits. In a letter to Oldfield of Roorkee College on 30 May 1854, Balfour wrote that "... if the Museum were limited in its objects, it would never be formed because the residents throughout the country, rendered, by the limiting, doubtful as to what would be acceptable, would refrain from sending anything and, If I attempted to be eclectic, I would lose all..." By 1853, the Museum was overflowing with more than 19,830 artefacts, mostly received from the public. Balfour believed that purchase would be needed only in the case of exceptional artefacts. In 1866 he started the Bangalore Museum in the state of Mysore. He was a secretary to the Madras Central Committee for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Paris Exhibitions of 1855 and 1868, the International Exhibition of London (1862) and the Vienna Exhibition (1872).
  Balfour took a special interest in languages and spent a lot of time learning local languages. In 1850 he published Gul-Dastah or The Bunch of Roses, a lithographed series of works by Persian and Hindustani poets. He also set up a Mohammedan Public Library in Madras and translated many works from Persian to English as well as English works (such as on astronomy) into Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. Based on his studies, he was sceptical of the state of indigenous scientific knowledge particularly in relation to health and in his Cyclopaedia suggested that Indians were so close to subsistence that they did not have the time or means to reflect accurately on their surroundings.
  When Balfour resigned from his position at the museum, he sought Edward Blyth as a suitable successor but was prevented by the Madras Government to enter into a correspondence on this. His position was then taken up by Captain Jesse Mitchell who worked as Commandant of the Madras Mounted Police.
caption: Old notice at the Madras Museum with the original "free admission" policy erased
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