Police museum will become world’s best very soon, says curator Steve Borgia
Whenever Steve Borgia passes through Pantheon Road, the 178-year-old city police commissionerate catches his attention. A heritage enthusiast, he wanted to conserve the building and conveyed it to the higher officials. The then outgoing DGP JK Tripathy had a chat with Steve and they had the idea of developing a museum. When C Sylendra Babu became the DGP, he was equally enthusiastic about the idea of a police museum and set up a team. It took almost nine months to conserve the heritage building and Steve and his team took less than 50 days to put together the artefacts.
“Apart from the other police officers, ADGP/Director, Tamil Nadu Police Academy, A Amalraj has been instrumental in setting up the museum that you see today. It is a collective effort of the entire police department and I can proudly say that this is one of the best-conserved buildings in India. Once the conservation was done, we started collecting and restoring artefacts from across the country,” Steve Borgia, curator of the state-of-the-art museum, tells us.
The museum that is spread over two floors has various exhibits including vehicles used by police personnel, uniforms, music equipment, seized idols, counterfeit currency printing machine, bombs, explosive detection equipment, model lock-up room and guns used by the police personnel in the past and present. “The TN police department along with my team of ten architects pulled out and conserved all the exhibits. The world famous police museum in Prague is only half the size of Chennai’s museum. This museum is a winner mainly because of the vast space. In five years, this is going to be the world’s best museum and we are working towards it.”
There are many interesting exhibits at this museum — a few include the printing press used by
kallanottu Krishnan to print counterfeit notes, artefacts seized from smuggler Veerappan and LTTE Prabhakaran. “The museum houses an amazing rifle and sword collection. There was a band called Madras Presidency Police Music Band — for an event, around 4,500 musicians from both army and police performed together. A musical instrument was brought from Ireland for this. We have tried and restored many musical instruments as well. We have also collected automobiles used by the police personnel from 1870. Not just two-wheelers, we restored a blue Plymouth Belvedere that is now parked in the museum portico,” he explains.
Around 100 police personnel have been trained to guide the daily visitors. Steve and the team are expecting more artefacts to be added to the collection in the future. “Projects like this should be happening a lot more — a government-private partnership is the need of the hour. Museum of this caliber and quality cannot happen only with the private or government involvement; it should be a collaboration,” Steve sums up.