Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) has opened a daring experiment in how we teach, and feel, history. ‘Networks of the Past: A Study Gallery of India and the Ancient World’, which opened its doors today, assembles more than 300 archaeological objects from 15 Indian and international museums to argue a simple but potent claim: ancient India was not isolated, it was central to global exchange.
Designed as a study gallery, it strings together Harappan seals and pottery, Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian sculpture (even a cat mummy), Greek and Roman portraits, Chinese ceramics and jade, coins, inscriptions and everyday objects so students and the public can read antiquity as evidence, not myth. The timeline runs from the Sindhu-Sarasvati (Harappan) civilisation, roughly 5,000 years ago, to the Gupta age of the sixth century CE, and culminates by placing Nalanda and Alexandria — two great knowledge economies of the ancient world — in conversation, reminding visitors that ideas have always travelled as vigorously as goods.
In a moment when historical thinking is increasingly constrained by textbook revisions and shrinking space for critical inquiry, this project creates an alternative route into the past: one grounded in material evidence, shared human questions, and a sense of intellectual play.
Harappan storage jar
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy CSMVS
A harp owned by Queen Puabi of the Sumerian city of Ur
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy CSMVS
“It is only when we see the Harappan civilisation in the broader context of its wide, far-reaching trade connections with Mesopotamia, do we realise the true achievement of our predecessors… India is part of a much larger story, and only with such a perspective can we see how astonishingly great its contribution is to the world.”Joyoti RoyAssistant Director (Projects & PR), CSMVS
‘A history beginners’ toolkit’
Over four years, CSMVS co-curated the gallery with partner institutions including the British Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Benaki Museum (Athens) and others, supported by Getty’s Sharing Collections Programme. Indian and international curators jointly selected objects and co-authored interpretive frameworks aimed at Indian audiences.
That pedagogical ambition is explicit. CSMVS has built a neighbouring learning centre, Nalanda, and stitched the gallery into university partnerships. More than 20 institutions will structure courses around original objects. Audio guides, short films, a dedicated website, and outreach through its Museum on Wheels and Trunk Museum projects (outreach programmes featuring mobile museums and themed trunks filled with artefacts) promise to take curated encounters beyond metropolitan elites and into schools across the country.
Funeral statue of a Roman boy
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy CSMVS
A rhyton with a caracal cat, a Parthian-era silver drinking vessel
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy CSMVS
A dragon pendant
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy CSMVS
Crucially, many of the loans are long-term: the gallery will remain on view for three years, allowing sustained engagement. As Renuka Muthuswamy, Assistant Curator (International Relations), notes, this format “functions almost as an ancient history beginners’ toolkit for Indian students”, bringing together what is often taught “in a chronologically dissonant manner” into a single, coherent experience.
The gallery is also a corrective to the old museum grammar that placed the Mediterranean at the centre of ancient world histories. By foregrounding exchange — trade networks, shared technologies, migratory motifs — CSMVS reframes India as both contributor and beneficiary in a pan-continental tapestry. “Stories in museums are often presented in a linear format to an assumed ‘homogeneous’ audience,” explains Nilanjana Som, curator (Art). “But audiences are diverse, Indian audiences even more so.” This matters politically and intellectually: museums in formerly colonised regions have long been arenas where authority over the past is contested. Co-curation and shared custodianship, as practised here, are pragmatic answers to that contestation. “By looking through each others’ eyes, we see these objects afresh,” states Thorsten Opper, lead curator, Greek & Roman Sculpture, The British Museum.
A Mithuna statue
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy CSMVS
A bust of Ptolemy II, the king of Egypt
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy CSMVS
Test case for Indian museum practice
There are limits, of course. No matter what a gallery selects, omissions and emphases will invite debate. Still, the project’s scale and its explicit educational purpose make it a test case for Indian museum practice: can objects provoke public reasoning rather than passive admiration? Can long loans, co-written labels and classroom partnerships shift who gets to narrate the past?
For visitors, the immediate pleasure is elemental: to stand before a seal or a coin and feel a line of human choices extend across millennia. For educators and curators, the value is structural: a model for conversation between museums, scholars and the public. Networks of the Past does not close the book on antiquity; it opens a desktop of questions that ask to be read, taught and argued over.
The essayist-educator writes on culture, and is founding editor of Proseterity — a literary arts magazine.
Published – December 12, 2025 06:18 pm IST
