Decolonizing Collections: Investigating Knowledge Formation Networks in Colonial India with specific reference to Numismatics

'Decolonizing collections' intends to study the history of four collections of Indian coins, currently held in major museums of the UK, including the Ashmolean, the British Museum and the Fitzwilliam. The aim of the project is to uncover the role of indigenous Indian scholars and collectors in creating the collections, and in producing expert knowledge about the Indian past on their basis. We are aware, because of large privately funded studies, of how numismatics played a crucial role in understanding key cultural developments in South Asia and associated regions, such as Afghanistan - Charles Masson's contribution to Gandharan studies in a case in point. However, such collections, and scholarship around them, remains focussed on single male European collectors, whose heroic scholarly personas obscure the enormous amount of skill, labour and resource invested by their Indian collaborators, in a process that we can see as an unacknowledged 'knowledge creation and transfer'. As these crucial collections of artefacts remain housed in UK museums, it is incumbent upon us to respond to calls to 'decolonize' museums by telling a fuller story of the history of collections. In this project, a doctoral student guided by supervisors with complementary expertise, will study handlists of the collections, the archival materials consisting of detailed correspondence among collectors - European and Indian - in order to reconstruct the collectors' networks that lie obscured behind these collections. While focussing on four collections, they will link these to further collections and networks, enabling richer and more inclusive narratives for UK cultural repositories.