https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5774-3006
Abstract
In February 2023, the Manchester Museum opened its new South Asia Gallery. Co-curated by a collective - 'individuals from British Asian communities in and around Manchester and fellow experts', the gallery encapsulates a unique curatorial spirit, and challenges traditional spatial juxtapositions in museum spaces. This review explores the collection and spatial experience of the gallery, examining the relationship between content and curatorial priorities. The gallery stands out in its unique telling of a people's history of large-scale global events, in the ways it traces the relationship between the everyday and empire, and between belongings and artefacts. This however brings with it certain lacunas in the 'global' connections of South Asia, and the need for future opportunities to explore under-represented voices.
The first thing you encounter as you walk into the Manchester Museum’s new South Asia Gallery is a huge mural covering the entire entrance corridor. Executed in tapestry style, with Mughal and pop Hindu decorative motifs, the spectacular and highly descriptive panels draw you into interlaced narratives and brightly rendered iconography. The piece, entitled ‘Riches to Rags, Rags to Riches’ and created by the Singh twins, very much sets up what is to come. For the Gallery is somewhat less about South Asia in general and more specifically about South Asia’s relationship to the United Kingdom, or, as the descriptive label suggests - a meeting of East and West. Reading through the mural’s messages of belonging, loss, rebellion, discord, movement and triumph, it crossed my mind that you could spend a good half an hour simply studying this one set of images covering four centuries of history in one long gaze. There is humour and irony here – a resplendent Churchill above a stylised representation of a photograph of 1943 Bengal Famine victims (); St George fighting the dragon, dressed as a surgically masked South Asian doctor; a juxtaposition of a thinly-clothed Gandhi in front of Manchester mills; high society English women wearing Kashmir shawls, bandanas, calicos and chintz. Mixing historical imagery in miniature style with contemporary motifs, again, prepares the visitor for the gallery.
Figure 1. Detail from Singh Twins, 'Riches to Rags, Rags to Riches' (Source: Author's image)
This opening gaze also nicely encapsulates the unique curatorial spirit of the gallery: less a product of a typical in-house museum-professional curation, the South Asia Gallery interrogates ‘who’ gets to tell the stories. By its own account, ‘Co-curated by the South Asia Gallery collective, individuals from British Asian communities in and around Manchester, and fellow experts’, the gallery contains belongings as well as artefacts (the distinction here is important throughout) drawn from existing collections and the communities themselves. The team is almost entirely South Asian diaspora – mostly artists, historians and scientists – and work was started in 2018, continuing online through the pandemic. The gallery is divided into six sections or ‘anthologies’ which, the opening labels suggest, will be enriched over time.
There is no one way to walk through the Gallery, but its skillful arrangement from either side of its horseshoe shape immediately commits you to explore it in toto. You will rarely exit the way you entered and, as was clearly the intention of the co-curators, your exploration of the content will be neither linear nor circular. This fits with the co-curatorial team’s stated objective of breaking the conventional orders of timeline and geographical boundary (although as I will suggest later, it still imposes other kinds of frames). My own decision to travel in an (unconventionally non-British/South Asian) anti-clockwise direction was the result of learned habit and necessity: on my very first visit to the gallery on its opening ceremony evening, journalists had been interviewing the Chairman of the British museum, George Osbourne, on the left entrance side, and I didn’t want, on this occasion, to unnecessarily invade his space. More importantly, my son Dylan – a lover of all things South Asian – who was perambulating with me, was already pointing to items on the right side of the mural.
If you enter via the right side of the horseshoe, the first material within the anthology of ‘Movement and Empire’ touches on military service, war and Partition. Drawing a connection between the intimate and the international, many of these displays connect everyday lives to world war and Partition (). The eye-catching military posters in Urdu, Hindi and Tamil, medals and training manuals clearly indicate that the gallery’s presentation of South Asian pasts is rooted to a great extent in colonialism and its global flows. This creates a dichotomy in the descriptions of bravery or service on the one hand, and the tensions of exploitation or dispossession on the other. The repeated failure to acknowledge the Second World War Indian army as the UK’s largest volunteer force in its history (and possibly globally), is deftly picked up in the text. Also striking is the juxtaposition of war service with the material and displays describing personal histories during Partition. Movement for military or war-related service, then, is directly related to the biggest mass displacement of the twentieth Century, refocussing the non-specialist to the ways war has displaced decolonisation in western historical memory. From the scrapbook of Raja Mumtaz Ali – never spoken about to his family during his lifetime – to the empty display for ‘things left behind’, this is truly a people’s history of large-scale global events. Most poignantly for me, this is captured in the textual representations of intimate details and belongings, on formal documents of identity and movement, connecting the domestic and the lived, the formal and the international. This is especially clear in the cleverly labelled displays on the contents of passports of twice migrants between India, Kenya and the UK.
Figure 2. British Passports from the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya belonging to Noor Muhammad and Noor Bibi; Recruitment poster in Hindi (Source: Author's images).
Within a few minutes of moving through the gallery, not only are visitors shown how identities change or unravel, but also invited to see the projections of their own worldviews on the construction of identities. At one level the entire gallery is about this central message. In places the labels suggest that histories are hidden or deliberately erased. While this claim might be considered outdated in some respects, it is certainly the case that the South Asian presence in the UK has predominantly been associated with a particular type of ‘South Asian’ or ‘British Asian’: the post-war migrant, who is not often connected to longer-term histories of the isles, a trend identified by Rozina Visram in 1997. The dominant worldview too, as the gallery points out with a small but significant display, has not usually taken into account Anglo-Indian communities – those who might prefer to see themselves less as ‘mixed’ or ‘half’ but more ‘double’ in identity. Perhaps most powerfully in the gallery, as one nears the back wall, it has tended to place women into a position of victims, pawns, or vessels of cultural tradition. Azraa Motala’s powerful and eye-catching [self?] portrait immediately challenges, captures your gaze and tears apart these pre-conceptions, juxtaposing Indian bridal garb with street-wear tracksuit and odd trainers ().
Figure 3. Portrait by Azraa Motala (Source: Author's image).
By the time I had reached the back wall of the gallery, I began to realise how I was being beguiled into a seamless movement between the themes. It is not clear whether this is deliberate but if so, for me it was quite a welcome mistake, as it allows the visitor to draw connections between the different over-arching ideas of the gallery. This means that the often slightly discordant details (for example the small photographic section on Rohingyas and persecution), does not necessarily matter. It allows the viewer to find connections and synergies – for example situating the internationally curated rickshaw installation from Bangladesh () to its surroundings, including the end-wall anthology/theme of ‘British Asian’, which emphasises heterogeneity, complexity and fluidity. Displayed scrap-book like in one end cabinet are a collection of zines and posters exploring the LGBTQ + experience, with an emphasis on the idea of ‘queer space’ as an inclusive arena of advocacy and support. Near to this display there is celebration and eclecticism as well as introspection – food, bhangra, the jungle of UK Apachi, all connect Southall, Birmingham and Manchester out to other global contexts – South Africa, Iraq and the Caribbean. Juxtaposed to the 1980s-2000s innovations in rap, bhangra and jungle is a display on the history of musical performance and dance in South Asia itself, focussing not only on Qawwali and the gharana in cities such as Lucknow, but also on music played in the pre-colonial royal courts, the transforming world of Bollywood hits, and the material culture of South Asian music: from the tabla and conch to the use of guitars to the sound of santoors, as in the work of Aziz Ibrahim (one of the gallery’s co-curators) in Lahore to Longsight. I was really pleased to see that this was not just about the content of culture but its lived experiences and realities. Labels described the institution of ustad (master), shishya (student) and the assumed stigma of mirasi (performer), including the implications of either following or breaking with those traditions. It made sense that just along from the music, which had already embraced the relationship between modernity and tradition, was a fascinating anthology entitled ‘Science and Innovation’. The meteorology and physics of Anna Mani was written up by co-curator Saira Qureshi with an emphasis on women scientists in a male dominated world. Einstein’s collaborator, the physicist S N Bose, brought out the drive to promote science education in Indian languages, and Srinivas Ramanujan, the highly innovative but formally untrained mathematician once again connected to the gallery’s themes of uncovering the hidden.
Figure 4. Rickshaw made in Dhaka, Bangladesh and decorated by Daya Bhati, Saheba Shabnum and Helen Abdul under the mentorship of Syed Ahamed Hossan and Z.A. Saleh Zebermai (Source: Author's image).
If the rickshaw was not attention grabbing enough, one of the most immersive parts of the gallery can be found in the central part of the horseshoe room: A large multi-screen display that you can sit or walk inside which showcases a changing collage of video-based exhibits (). On our visit, my first thought was that the images, accompanied by 1960s-80s film music, was simply a display of record/tape sleeves relating to the history the mid twentieth Century Indian and Pakistani film industries: Chaltey Chaltey, Shaitaan, Quawalis from the Films, From Lata with Love, Sunil Ganguly, and others. But the interviews and narrative on the central screen soon established that this extraordinary exhibit covered the UK’s oldest South Asian music store and label in Birmingham, the project of saving its huge archive of records and other filmi materials supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, and the early radio and television broadcasts catering to listeners and fans of South Asian music, especially hits connected to films. This ranged from the early shows, such as BBC1’s Nai Zindagi-Naya Jeevan presented from 1966 by Mahendra Kaul and Saleem Shahed, to other radio programmes, which received hundreds of song requests. Some of the letters and postcards from requesters, including organisations running large events, are also displayed on the main screen, and give a strong indication of how music requests related to important family birthdays, weddings and other rites of passage for local communities.
Figure 5. The gallery's multi-screen video display, here showing a South Asian music archive and an album by Sunil Ganguly (Source: Author's image).
The final part of our walk through the gallery brought us to what I felt contained some of the most innovative displays, that are not typically explored in an exhibition of this kind. The ‘Lived Environment’ anthology explores the meeting point of culture and landscape, moving us into approaches to the Anthropocene in the physical spaces of South Asia. The section is expansive by space and period: The many-named sacred mountain of central Sri Lanka, the statues of ancient Gandhara on the Silk Road, Mughal arts, crafts and coinage, the new forms of trade and exchange brought by European expansion into the region, including the appropriation of land for plantations, the colonial degradation of local agri-industrial production and small scale manufacturing, and cash-cropping’s distortion of local economies to produce such things as indigo. The focus here, as in other parts of the gallery, is colonial exploitation. Although ‘resistance’ is well documented in the anti-logging Chipko movement and Dhaka based Bengal Muslin movement, it would have been interesting to get a broader sense of what happened to cultures of production and consumption after independence in 1947, especially in the new era of planning, abolition of large landed estates and increased industrial production, not least because this era would have more clearly been the context for the majority of South Asian migrants to the UK.
But other longer-term impacts of human life on environment are also interlaced here, such as Ganesh murthi – the immersion of Ganesh idols in India’s rivers. The central motif in this display was not religion or even the river, but clay: Alongside descriptions of how use of clay has lessened the environmental impact of idol immersion, is a section on the production and use of clay chai cups, paper bags from recycled newspaper and leaf plates (). The term ‘jugaad’ was in my mind as I looked at these familiar objects of everyday innovation and so it was a really pleasant surprise to see that the curators had also mobilised that word. The newspaper bag is the classic example of this distinctively South Asian practice. The bag could contain anything (belongings or artefacts), and as well as providing a glimpse at important old news, it could for example be presented as a cone for nuts on local transport, with young sellers handing out 10 rupee cones of ‘time pass’.
Figure 6. Some examples of jugaad -paper bags made from recycled newspapers (Delhi) and clay cups use by chai wallahs (Gujarat) (Source: Author's image).
The newspaper bags and leaf plates are also a means of providing a livelihood and income to poorer small-scale producers and workers. For example, leaf plates are typically made from Sal tree leaves in jungle areas of Nepal and the Himalayas and are hand stitched by women living in poorer rural areas.
Jugaad was another way for the gallery to weave the politics of local production back into the overall narrative, and the second word in my mind – again to be anticipated by the displays was ‘swadeshi’. Its early proponents in 1900s-40s India promoted hand spun Indian cloth and other manufactures in reaction to British imported goods. But here we have another peculiar juxtaposition that takes us away somewhat from the political narratives surrounding that term in India: photographs of Gandhi, apparently enjoying the company of textile workers in Darwen, Lancashire in the early 1930s, in the midst of one of his large-scale movements of civil disobedience and foreign cloth boycotts. The image is well known but a perfect example of the contradictions and complexities surrounding anti-colonialism and manufacturing, transnational workers’ solidarity, and especially the brokering strategies of M K Gandhi.
No museum exhibition of this kind, focussing strongly on the effects of colonialism or the colonial connection on South Asia, could be complete without addressing what some might view as the elephant in the room. The collections policies of UK museums and others around Europe and the rest of the global north, not least the British Museum – a partner in this gallery – is also clearly a history of appropriation. For at least two decades, discussions of repatriation or restitution of tangible objects and intangible artefacts or research collections have been a vital concern in museum studies, and at the forefront of curatorial practice. The South Asia gallery contains a short narrative about the division of materials from the (largely plundered) collections of the India Museum. Perhaps here there was an opportunity to represent conversations or connections to some of the older museums in South Asia – particularly those of Delhi, Kolkata, Dhaka and Lahore, but no doubt curators can take up that opportunity with additional installations as time goes on.
In such a rich and well curated display, it is difficult to critique the gallery for what it doesn’t contain, but perhaps there were some important omissions as well as homogenising trends. Towards the end of my visit, I noticed the label exploring the term ‘South Asia’ itself. I had probably travelled the gallery in the wrong direction. But more importantly, I was surprised that the term was only associated, again, with the British presence rather than its more direct etymology in relation to regional concerns of US foreign policy from the late 1940s. Much of the gallery is dialogically situated between India and UK. Empire and its degradations are a repeated theme. Equally, embedded in most of the sections of the gallery, is the idea of South Asian contributions to British institutions, culture and the sciences, as well as the rich connections to crafts and industrial work and production. Arguably, this misses a number of other powerful and exciting developments that situate South Asia multilaterally, in relation to a wide range of global changes: trade, religious and military routes across different parts of Asia, India as part of the Islamic world, the connections East towards Myanmar and China (the China gallery is after all just across the hallway), or the more recent trends of labour migration to the Middle East and professional migration to north America. The idea of the ‘global’ South Asia, if crafted in a museum situated in one of its nation-states, I felt, would look quite different.
But this is, after all, a gallery in Manchester, UK. Arguably other British Asian perspectives, therefore, might also be considered in future. With the exception of one song request letter that is briefly displayed in the video collage section from the Ambedkar Buddhist Society, Birmingham, there was no reference to the growing Dalit and Ambedkarite organisations in the UK (which were particularly strong in Bedford, Wolverhampton and London) and their connection to the Dalit movement in India. Although implicit in some sections, such as the displays on music and environment, religion is not taken up as a coherent theme – something that might have provided powerful sonic opportunities as well as another way of thinking through trans-national connections between South Asian diasporas. Finally, perhaps the notion of ‘South Asia’ in the gallery tends to play to some of the obvious stereotypes of the region on the one hand (the dominance of a freedom movement narrative), and many of the usual tropes surrounding the UK’s South Asian connections. But in the end galleries such as this have, as their primary objective, the purpose of exposing all kinds of visitors, whatever their knowledge, experience of background, to the importance of the region in the contemporary world. It is also, finally, a powerful reminder of the truth Singh Twins have emblazoned, in their mural for the gallery, around the image of the Asian St. George: ‘We’re Here, Because Britain Was There’.
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William Gould
William Gould is Professor of Indian History at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on 20th Century political, social and cultural history of India, and South Asian Diasporas. He is currently working on a history of post-independence Indian anthropology