Museum Archipelago

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

May 4th, 2020  |  15 mins 25 secs

british museum

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.

39. Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum with James Delbourgo

April 2nd, 2018  |  12 mins 33 secs

british museum, james delbourgo

Over the course of his long life, Hans Sloane collected tens of thousands of items which became the basis for what is today the British Museum.