Mumbai | Networks of the Past: A Study Gallery of India and the Ancient World opens at CSMVS

Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) has opened a daring experimentation successful however we teach, and feel, history. ‘Networks of the Past: A Study Gallery of India and the Ancient World’, which opened its doors today, assembles much than 300 archaeological objects from 15 Indian and planetary museums to reason a elemental but potent claim: past India was not isolated, it was cardinal to planetary exchange.

Designed arsenic a survey gallery, it strings unneurotic Harappan seals and pottery, Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian sculpture (even a feline mummy), Greek and Roman portraits, Chinese ceramics and jade, coins, inscriptions and mundane objects truthful students and the nationalist tin work antiquity arsenic evidence, not myth. The timeline runs from the Sindhu-Sarasvati (Harappan) civilisation, astir 5,000 years ago, to the Gupta property of the sixth period CE, and culminates by placing Nalanda and Alexandria — 2 large cognition economies of the past satellite — successful conversation, reminding visitors that ideas person ever travelled arsenic vigorously arsenic goods.

In a infinitesimal erstwhile humanities reasoning is progressively constrained by textbook revisions and shrinking abstraction for captious inquiry, this task creates an alternate way into the past: 1 grounded successful worldly evidence, shared quality questions, and a consciousness of intelligence play.

‘A past beginners’ toolkit’

Over 4 years, CSMVS co-curated the assemblage with spouse institutions including the British Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Benaki Museum (Athens) and others, supported by Getty’s Sharing Collections Programme. Indian and planetary curators jointly selected objects and co-authored interpretive frameworks aimed astatine Indian audiences.

That pedagogical ambition is explicit. CSMVS has built a neighbouring learning centre, Nalanda, and stitched the assemblage into assemblage partnerships. More than 20 institutions volition operation courses astir archetypal objects. Audio guides, abbreviated films, a dedicated website, and outreach done its Museum connected Wheels and Trunk Museum projects (outreach programmes featuring mobile museums and themed trunks filled with artefacts) committedness to instrumentality curated encounters beyond metropolitan elites and into schools crossed the country.

Crucially, galore of the loans are long-term: the assemblage volition stay connected presumption for 3 years, allowing sustained engagement. As Renuka Muthuswamy, Assistant Curator (International Relations), notes, this format “functions astir arsenic an past past beginners’ toolkit for Indian students”, bringing unneurotic what is often taught “in a chronologically dissonant manner” into a single, coherent experience.

The assemblage is besides a corrective to the aged depository grammar that placed the Mediterranean astatine the centre of past satellite histories. By foregrounding speech — commercialized networks, shared technologies, migratory motifs — CSMVS reframes India arsenic some contributor and beneficiary successful a pan-continental tapestry. “Stories successful museums are often presented successful a linear format to an assumed ‘homogeneous’ audience,” explains Nilanjana Som, curator (Art). “But audiences are diverse, Indian audiences adjacent much so.” This matters politically and intellectually: museums successful formerly colonised regions person agelong been arenas wherever authorization implicit the past is contested. Co-curation and shared custodianship, arsenic practised here, are pragmatic answers to that contestation. “By looking done each others’ eyes, we spot these objects afresh,” states Thorsten Opper, pb curator, Greek & Roman Sculpture, The British Museum.

Test lawsuit for Indian depository practice

There are limits, of course. No substance what a assemblage selects, omissions and emphases volition invitation debate. Still, the project’s standard and its explicit acquisition intent marque it a trial lawsuit for Indian depository practice: tin objects provoke nationalist reasoning alternatively than passive admiration? Can agelong loans, co-written labels and schoolroom partnerships displacement who gets to narrate the past?

For visitors, the contiguous pleasance is elemental: to basal earlier a seal oregon a coin and consciousness a enactment of quality choices widen crossed millennia. For educators and curators, the worth is structural: a exemplary for speech betwixt museums, scholars and the public. Networks of the Past does not adjacent the publication connected antiquity; it opens a desktop of questions that inquire to beryllium read, taught and argued over.

The essayist-educator writes connected culture, and is founding exertion of Proseterity — a literate arts magazine.