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

“非殖民化收藏”旨在研究四个印度硬币收藏的历史，这些硬币目前存放在英国的主要博物馆，包括阿什莫林博物馆、大英博物馆和菲茨威廉博物馆。该项目的目的是揭示土著印第安学者和收藏家在创造收藏品和在其基础上产生关于印第安过去的专业知识方面的作用。由于大量私人资助的研究，我们意识到钱币学如何在了解南亚和相关地区（例如阿富汗）的关键文化发展方面发挥着至关重要的作用--查尔斯·马松对甘道夫研究的贡献就是一个很好的例子。然而，这样的收藏，以及围绕它们的学术研究，仍然集中在单一的男性欧洲收藏家身上，他们英雄般的学术人物掩盖了他们的印度合作者投入的大量技能，劳动力和资源，我们可以看到一个未被承认的过程“知识创造和转移”。由于这些重要的文物收藏仍然存放在英国博物馆，我们有责任通过讲述更完整的藏品历史来回应“非殖民化”博物馆的呼吁。在这个项目中，一名博士生将在具有互补专业知识的导师的指导下，研究收藏品的手册，档案材料包括收藏家之间的详细通信-欧洲和印度-以重建隐藏在这些收藏品背后的收藏家网络。在专注于四个藏品的同时，他们将把这些藏品与更多的藏品和网络联系起来，为英国文化宝库提供更丰富、更具包容性的叙述。

'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.