80. British Museum Curator Sushma Jansari Shares Stories and Experiments of Decolonising Museums
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 🏖️ Museum Archipelago is a tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , or even email to never miss an episode. Sponsor: Pigeon by SRISYS 🐦 This episode of Museum Archipelago is brought to you by SRISYS Inc - an innovative IT Apps Development Company with its Smart Products like Project Eagle - an agile messaging platform and PIGEON - a real-time, intelligent platform that uncovers the power of wayfinding for your museum, enabling your visitors to maximize their day at your venue. Using SRISYS's Pigeon, the museum's management can gather real-time data for managing space effectively about visitors while improving their ROI through marketing automation. Visitors can navigate the maze of a museum with ease, conduct automated and personalized tours based on their interest, RSVP for events, and get more information about the exhibits in front of them. Pigeon is a flexible platform and can be customized to work for your museum. And because the platform takes advantage of low-cost Beacon technology, the app works offline as well! This means less data transmission costs for the museum and bigger savings for visitors when using this app outside their home territory. Click here find out how Pigeon can help your museum . 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 sent to the Indian interior for the first time. Sushma Jansari: And he wrote an ethnogr