Convenors
Shreya Gupta - University of Exeter, UK and Ashmolean MuseumNiti Acharya - University of Lincoln, UK and The British Museum
Habiba Insaf - Humboldt University, Berlin
Long Abstract
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a large corpus of objects from South Asia1 entered museums in Europe, enabled by growing European colonialism and imperialism. Today these displaced objects are faced with one, the thorny issue of repatriation, two; demands to decolonise them from colonial knowledge systems and three, a pressing need to prove their relevance to South Asian diaspora and local communities.
However, discourses around these ‘in-between’ objects2 run into a cul de sac as little is known of how they were acquired, by whom and under what circumstances. How have these objects been understood? What role can these objects play today in fostering connections with their ‘source communities’ as well as conveying the complexities of South Asian cultures to audiences in Europe?
This panel will address questions concerning the history of acquisition, politics of display, and future of South Asian objects in Europe. We invite contributions concerning:
- Histories of collecting and transfer of these objects to Europe
- Histories of their institutional formation as part of European museums
- Life and biographies of collectors involved —European and South Asian —and their collecting praxis as mediated by intersecting identities including ethnicity, gender, and class
- Biographies of such displaced objects
- The display, interpretation, and exhibition of these objects in European museums in the past and today
- Insights into how museum documentation practices record knowledge of objects from South Asia and related challenges and opportunities
- The future of these collections in Europe with respect to concerns regarding restitution, relevance, and reinterpretation
