For the latest instalment of our interview series, Dr Andrea Potts sat down with Dr Kajal Meghani whose research sheds light on how individuals of South Asian heritage have contributed to museum collections in the UK. Together, they discuss Kajal’s approach to provenance research and how she translates her research into museum practice.   

Andrea: What is the focus of your PhD research? 

Kajal: I look at how individuals of South Asian heritage have contributed to the British Museum’s collection. Through my research, I found that at least 150 people from the late 19th century onwards were contributing objects to the museum’s collection and that they were doing so for a range of different reasons. Some of those reasons are highly personal. Some of them are rooted in professional agendas. I trace how these contributions were received by the museum and shaped by the museum, and I’m also tracing the agency of these individuals in this process. 

A: How did you go about that? What were your main sources? 

K: I started off using the museum’s database.  Each institution records information that it finds specifically interesting, and the British Museum has a reputation, at least internally, of being ‘a collection of collections’ that records a lot of detail about the collectors that contributed to the museum, including their nationality. So, I was able to search the database for the nationalities that come under the South Asia umbrella. And through that I found just under one hundred individuals. And so that was the initial starting point. Next, I started to look at the museum’s archival materials. I was looking for names that sounded specifically South Asian to me. This is a rather biased method, but my own South Asian heritage proved to be useful here. I was able to pinpoint more individuals through that process. So, for example, I found discussions in meeting minutes of individuals who wanted to donate a collection to the museum or references to purchases that the trustees needed to sanction. My project was a collaborative doctoral award, so I was very much based in the museum. This meant that curators knew of my research and if they encountered people of South Asian heritage in their own work, they would highlight them to me.   

A: When the project was set up, how much did the museum know about these collectors? 

K: They initially thought that there were ten collectors of South Asian heritage, and within the first month of my project that number was at ninety people! That was a great position to be in, but it changed the nature of my project somewhat. I had to really try to juggle all these individuals and their personalities. I wanted to make sure that as many of them could be foregrounded as possible given that they just don’t feature anywhere else. I ended up having an initial chapter that adopts a macro view of these collectors. So, there are data visualisations to show which part of South Asia collectors came from and which departments in the museum they mostly contributed to, things like that. The subsequent chapters investigate some of these observations in more detail and are more rationale focused. So, for example, one chapter looks at how grief affected how three people collected and how they contributed to the museum. By doing that, I sought to move away from looking at these individuals as colonial subjects. I wanted to show they were real individuals that were grappling with certain emotions that rarely get noted in collecting histories, and certainly not in relation to collectors of South Asian heritage. 

A: This sounds fascinating. I’d love to know more about how grief motivated collecting.  

K: That’s my favorite chapter actually. I look at three men. One man is called P.H.D.S. Wikramaratna. I’m unsure of his first name. He was from Sri Lanka, and he was later based in London, and he married a lady from the Netherlands called Nancy. They jointly developed a collection of mostly East Asian ceramics. Nancy sadly dies in the 1980s and then subsequent donations are made in her memory. So, his donations to the British Museum, as well as other museums in the UK, were commemorating their relationship. That really struck me because a lot of collecting histories that focus on this practice of donating in memory of someone tend to focus on women. As I investigated him further, I found that he had experienced illness himself, and he was dealing with his own mortality. I tried to map how his donations were quite publicly in memory of his wife but were also affected by his own health concerns. And that’s so relatable. We all go through it. Yet collecting histories don’t really touch upon this, especially those that are presented in museum displays. I think that’s a missed opportunity, as it’s a way of connecting with visitors.  

I also look at a man called Percival Chater Manuk, who is of Armenian heritage but lived in India, was educated at Cambridge University, became a barrister and was then a High Court Judge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He develops this interesting collection of Indian manuscript painting called Patna painting which isn’t collected by many individuals at the time. His collecting is interesting because he’s sensitive to the imagery in the paintings, which are mostly linked with Hindu mythology. He annotates the paintings in his catalogue, which suggests that he worked with a Hindu pundit or priest to understand what was being depicted. Percival was married to a woman called Nelly, who seems to have had mental health issues. She is eventually admitted into a hospital, I think, based in the UK. It’s been hard to track what happened to Nelly. Percival organises for his collection to be bequeathed to museums in the UK, not in memory of his wife, but jointly with his companion called Gertrude Coles, who was initially hired to look after Nelly. He clearly struck up a relationship with Gertrude and there are accounts that suggest society was very disapproving of this relationship. I investigate how this bequest provided a way to legitimise or validate this relationship with Gertrude. I also found from Percival’s will that he left a lot of objects to the people who were caring for him at the end of his life: his cooks, cleaners, chauffeurs. He was leaving them jewelry, for example. So, that helped me to understand that for Percival, objects weren’t just part of a collection. They had another value that allowed him to connect with people. 

The final person I look at in relation to this theme of grief is a Bengali collector called Achinto Sen-Gupta who was born in what’s now Bangladesh and moved to Germany in the 1950s to study and eventually settled there. He married a German woman called Irmgard and together they built a collection of contemporary Indian paintings and drawings. They set up their own gallery in Hamburg to promote contemporary Indian painting. Their relationship disintegrates, and by the late 1980s, they’ve divorced. What’s interesting is that he donated his personal archive to the British Museum and it includes letters he wrote to artists that he was collecting based in India. He was meticulous, so along with the letters he received from the artists, he had carbon copies of the letters he sent out. So, he wanted to document these relationships. This was an important element of his collection. And there’s a gap in archive for when the divorce happens. It has been removed from the record, and from what he wanted the British Museum to receive.   

What’s interesting about collecting histories is that you often look at documents that are highly personal. I found it quite tricky, as I wanted to be respectful to these individuals while also academically rigorous. These people were dealing with such difficult emotions. It was also a balancing act of focusing on the grief of these men and how this shaped their donating, while also attempting to understand how these three women influenced what they were doing with their collections as much as possible.  

A: It sounds like you developed your own close relationships with these people through undertaking this research.  

K: Yes, I think that’s fair to say. Through this process, I’ve gone through various things myself which allowed me to connect with how they might have felt.  It’s difficult to ever really know what someone was thinking and why they were doing certain things, but it made me develop this connection which I’m glad to have. One argument could be that I wasn’t critical enough about the way that they were writing in or writing out women in their collecting, but I wanted to give enough room for the sources I was working with to speak.  

A: Yes, and I think your analysis is wonderful. I think that collecting histories can be quite impersonal. It’s about the ‘collector’ and their rather blunt actions. You have done a brilliant job at foregrounding the humanity of these people and directly connecting that to their collecting practices.  

K: Thank you. It was something that really came together towards the latter stages of the research after taking a few breaks from the thesis and really thinking about how I wanted to talk about these individuals. Prior to that, I was more focused on trying to get whatever I deemed as facts down on paper. But actually, what interests me is the personal element to collecting. Sir Hans Sloane is noted in every single British Museum collecting history. I kept reading about him and thinking: what did his wife make of all these objects in their home, given that she financed most of his collecting?  What was it like sharing a home with someone and having to deal with having all these objects? I would be pretty irate! I wanted to move away from these narratives of grandeur and infallibility. I like the nitty gritty stuff. 

A: Yes. And to imagine these people actually holding these objects and engaging with them, rather than simply displaying and donating them. You’ve brought it to life. 

K: And, you know, of course the British Museum was collecting to fill gaps in its collection in order to develop this universal collection. But, actually, someone lived with these objects. Someone touched them, someone handled them. Perhaps this is something future researchers may want to think about or even museums in the way that they write these narratives about collections.  

A: Yes, would it be possible to incorporate your in-depth collecting histories into a museum gallery?  

K: So, I’ve recently worked on an exhibition at the British Museum called ‘Ancient India: living traditions’ (May – October 2025). I was working on collecting histories for the exhibition and it was an interesting challenge to work within the confines of a word limit! Where possible, I tried to insert memory and relationships and to write it as prose. One collector I researched for the exhibition was Bhagvanlal Indraji who bequeathed his collection of coins and a sculpture to the museum in 1889. He is interesting because he felt that he could make demands regarding how these objects were displayed in the museum, which I love! He sets out those demands in his will and through an article in a journal that was widely read by Oriental art specialists. I don’t know how the sculpture was displayed historically, but currently it’s displayed on a pedestal by itself, which is what he demanded. After doing a bit more research, I learnt that he had found this sculpture being prayed to by a local group of people in Mathura, north India: they were actively worshiping this sculpture, and he paid them off to take it. So, it’s this idea of who has power and who doesn’t, and it shows that South Asians weren’t a homogenous group.

 

Pillar capital bequeathed to the British Museum by Bhagvanlal Indraji in 1889 on display in the British Museum’s South Asia Gallery

A: What’s next? 

K: I’m going to reflect upon what I’ve learnt doing the PhD. What might this practice look like in the future? I do want to explore grief and emotion more and how these can be brought to the fore in museum displays. I’ve become really interested in the idea of care and caring, and whether museum spaces can facilitate that connection through their displays.