The thing is...: Wknd interviews Selim Khandakar, an unusual collector of everyday objects

Hindustan Times

09-05-2025

Many have hobbies. Some have obsessions. What Selim Khandakar feels is a pure, unbridled desire for objects.
Just before a cyclone hit his mud house in Kelepara village in the Hooghly district of West Bengal in 2021, Khandakar spent hours checking on his collection, tucking hundreds of things — perfume bottles, transistor radios, gas stoves, toy cars, pens, plastic dolls, lighters, bead necklaces, miniature paintings, old newspapers, letters, cigarette boxes, albums of stamps and coins — into crevices and corners, desperate to keep them safe. (Most did survive the storm.)
He has amassed over 12,000 items over 50 years. Some (broken crockery and coins) date to the Mughal era. Others (ticket stubs and stamps) are from a few decades ago.
Each is precious to him, he says. Each item once served an important purpose; care went into making it.
It's an unusual way to curate a museum, but an informal museum is what Khandakar has put together. Parts of his collection have now made it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as part of a tribute to the fleeting nature of so many of the objects that make up human history.
The exhibit was put together by his niece, Ohida Khandakar, 31, an artist. Her installation consists of assorted items from his collection, and an 18-minute short film on her uncle's unusual journey, titled Dream Your Museum.
The film recently just won the Victoria and Albert Museum's prestigious Jameel Prize for contemporary art, an award only handed out every three years.
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'The film and installation… challenge the traditional authority of conventional museums,' Tristram Hunt, V&A director and chair of the Jameel Prize judging panel, said in a statement.
This is perhaps what is most interesting about Khandakar's horde: the way in which it reimagines the ideas of 'collection' and 'museum', ideas typically defined by power, status and wealth.
What Khandakar has ended up doing, with his vast collection, is creating a record of the common person's life and times. In highlighting his work, Ohida's film now raises the question: What defines our existing museums, and who are they for?
'Collecting is my way of showing people from my village a glimpse of things from around the world,' Khandakar says. 'Like rare coins from the Mughal era or vintage perfume bottles. Often people here do not get a chance to go to cities to see such things. Bridging that gap is what has always kept me going.'
It all started, for him, in 1973. He was 23 years old, working as a compounder at a clinic and living alone in Calcutta, when he wandered into Park Circus Maidan one day. 'There, I saw people showcasing their stamp collections and I was fascinated,' he says.
After that day, he began to collect too. In the evenings, when his friends were sipping tea at a market adda, he began to walk around Chowringhee, Park Street and Mullick Bazar. He saw how shopkeepers treasured their objects, he says.
He began to collect trunks full of bric-a-brac: some found, some given to him, some bought from general stores, antique stores and curio shops. Every weekend, he lugged a trunk full of these items back to his village, where he displayed them in his courtyard on Sundays.
Now 75, with a pacemaker helping regulate his heartbeat after two heart attacks, he is still collecting. 'Sometimes I dream that I'm picking up coins from the road, or I'm at an old bookstore where someone has dumped an old book and I'm eager to place a price on it. It's like collecting is in my DNA,' he says.
Over time, he toured other collections, including those at Kolkata's Victoria Memorial Hall museum and the Birla Industrial & Technological Museum. Marble Palace, an 1835 mansion, exquisitely preserved, became a beloved haunt. It resonated with his love for how we once lived.
'Such a collection will never exist again. No matter how wealthy or powerful you may be today, these objects simply aren't available,' he says.
It is this joy of preserving a physical object that once represented utility, luxury, history or the spirit of human ingenuity that has driven his collection. As he says, with pride, there aren't many other places today where one can find some of the earliest rupee coins minted, with the permission of the Nawab of Bengal, by the British East India Company.
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How close is he to having an actual museum of his own?
Ohida is currently working on a feature-length film on her uncle, and plans to help him digitally archive his collection, as well as showcase it better on-site.
He is happy to have her help in this. 'I love these objects. I don't ever feel like parting with them. But Ohida understands them,' he says.
Ohida admits she didn't always.
'Growing up, the art books and catalogues in my uncle's collection fascinated me, with their pictures of artefacts from the British Museum, and prints of works by Rabindranath Tagore,' she says. As an adult, though, the randomness of the collection baffled her.
When the pandemic struck and she returned home for a while, 'I would see him cleaning a broken antique plate or some other item. One day, I asked him, 'Why do you keep it all?',' she recalls. His answer struck her: 'Are you, an artist, really asking me this?''
Even in the absence of a museum, a museum has always existed in her uncle's mind. She has grown to understand this.
'People will start to look around, and each person is struck by something different,' he says. 'They ask me where I got a particular thing and I tell them about the places in Kolkata or elsewhere. I tell them about exhibitions, fairs, museums, places that people in the village haven't been to.'
'I want to spark curiosity in the people around me,' he adds. 'How will they appreciate new things if nobody ever shows them any?'