A collaboration between a century-old museum in south Mumbai and the Getty Foundation hopes to inject new energy into the debate about how to share the world’s common heritage
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitask, which opened to the public in 1922, now regularly welcomes 1m visitors a year. In 2023 it will launch the Ancient World Gallery Project, with a $2.2m grant from the Getty Foundation in California and featuring multiple exhibitions and educational schemes for university students and schoolchildren. A number of museums from across the world will take part in the initiative.
The world’s great encyclopaedic museums are still mainly in Europe and America, and their histories of global cultures tend to begin in the Mediterranean or the Near East. Retelling the story from the point of view of Mumbai—or Mexico City or Shanghai, as is expected in future—will provide different perspectives on world history.
In the first phase, which is due to open in the autumn of 2023, sacred sculptures from London and Berlin will take their places alongside the Indian deities in the rotunda of the—gods such as Lakshmi who, like Mercury, is a god of prosperity, or Mumba, the goddess of Mumbai . The display will also highlight how actively gods are still worshipped in India, in contrast to Europe and America. “Indian audiences [like] to treat the Indian sculpture gallery as a temple,” says one Indian curator.
The Ancient World Gallery Project will allow the Getty to expand its collection-sharing programme. At a time when calls for restitution are growing louder, the project hopes to inject new energy into the debate about how to share the world’s common heritage.This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition of