80. British Museum Curator Sushma Jansari Shares Stories and Experiments of Decolonising Museums Museum Archipelago

The British Museum’s South Asia Collection is full of Indian objects. Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum, does not want visitors to overlook the violence of how these objects were brought to the UK to be held in a museum.


So for the 2017 renovation of the South Asia Collection, Jansari, who is the first curator of Indian descent of this collection, made sure to create unexpected moments in the gallery. She highlighted artifacts bequeathed to the museum by South Asian collectors and presented photographs of a modern Jain Temple in Leicester, where she’s from.


In this episode, Jansari talks about giving visitors the tools to think about the colonial interest in items in the collection, why she started her excellent podcast, The Wonder House, and how not to let the decolonization movement’s momentum evaporate.


Topics and Links


00:00 Intro
00:15 Seleucid–Mauryan war
00:45 Megasthenes
01:30 Dr. Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia at the British Museum
02:00 How Events Are Transformed Through History
03:00 Decolonising Museums and Collections
04:21 39. Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum With James Delbourgo
04:50 Empire and Daily Life in the U.K.
05:46 Being the First South Asian Curator of the South Asia Collection
06:30 Working on the 2017 Renovation of the British Museum’s South Asia Collection
08:00 Creating Unexpected Moments in the Gallery
08:15 Mathura lion capital
09:30 Visitation Trends Since the Update
10:58 “Not Just One or Two Tweaks”
11:10 Why Jansari Started The Wonder House Podcast
12:10 “Every Movement Has Its Moment”
12:30 Subscribe to The Wonder House Podcast Apple Podcasts
13:30 SPONSOR: Pigeon by SRISYS
14:28 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖️


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Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 80. Museum Archipelago is produced for the ear and the only the audio of the episode is canonical. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.




View Transcript



[Intro]


There’s a way to look at history that focuses on the events themselves.


And then there’s a way to look at history that focuses on the fallout.


In the 4th century B.C.E., Seleucus who was one of Alexander the Great’s successors, and Chandragupta, who was the first Mauryan emperor in Northern India, met for the first time by the banks of the river Indus, and they had some kind of military encounter.


What kind of military encounter? Well we don’t really know. What we do know is that, following the encounter, Greek ambassador Megasthenes was s