A room with a view: Inside Manchester’s new South Asia Gallery

Ahmed, 54, is now coordinator of the UK’s first permanent gallery of South Asian art and artefacts, and is helping to reflect this vast, diverse region in ways that feel contemporary and relevant.

The South Asia Gallery (SAG), six years in the making, opened at the Manchester Museum in February. It was set up in partnership with the British Museum, and features ancient artefacts from the permanent collections of these two institutes as well as new works of commissioned art and objects on loan from members of the community. It warrants mention here that the British Museum in particular continues to make news for holding valuable and culturally significant artefacts – including African bronzes, ancient Indian statuary and the Rosetta Stone – that were pillaged during colonial rule, and that it has consistently refused to return to their home countries.

Now, in an effort to ensure that this gallery is relevant to and reflective of the large South Asian community in Manchester, a collective of 30 community leaders, educators, artists, historians and journalists has helped curate the collection, at the request of Manchester Museum director Esme Ward.

The result is a 400-sq-metre space that features both a vibrant mural by living Asian-British artists on the interconnectedness of British and South Asian cultures and 4,000-year-old wheat grains found at Mohenjo-daro; an ancient emerald brooch from Sri Lanka and a mixed-media art work on what it can feel like to be a Muslim woman in the world today. Take a look.

“Ralli Brothers, Manchester” declares this brightly coloured label from the early 1900s. The brothers owned a mill in the English textile hub, and an associated outlet in India. The text, repeated in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and English, indicates where and among which communities this material likely sold most.

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This artefact is on loan from journalist and broadcaster Talat-Farooq Awan, a member of the South Asian Gallery Collective that helped curate the exhibits. It was worn by Awan’s great-grandfather in World War 1. He found it in an old trunk and decided to contribute it as a symbol and reminder of the often-forgotten South Asian contribution to efforts to resist fascism and uphold democracy in the last century.

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The debut album of British Muslim musician Aziz Ibrahim describes his family’s journey from Lahore in Pakistan to Longsight, his birthplace in Manchester. Ibrahim’s “Asian Blues” style involves twanging the guitar to elicit from it sounds that are reminiscent of traditional Indian instruments such as the sitar and santoor. Lahore to Longsight features lyrics in Punjabi, Urdu and English, and music by the tabla players Inder Goldfinger and Talvin Singh.

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These 4,000-year-old grains were found at Mohenjo-daro, the Indus Valley site now in Sindh, Pakistan. Wheat was grown here as food, these grains an evocative reminder of the ancient history of a crop still grown widely in the region. It was grown, even then, as a commodity to be traded with other civilisations of the time, such as Persia, Mesopotamia and China.

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This 17-metre-long mural by the Singh Twins (Amrit Kaur Singh and Rabindra Kaur Singh), a commissioned work, reflects their identity and experience as British artists of dual Indian and English descent. It touches upon aspects of their ancient heritage as well as their membership of a vibrant and thriving community today. It spotlights elements of institutionalised prejudice and misperceptions. The “emotional map” has three narrative threads running through it, reflecting on the South Asian experience in its transition from ancient, through the colonial and into post-colonial modern times. The mural sets the tone for the gallery, as these narratives are also visible through the rest of the displays.

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I Beg You to Define Me (2018)

This 7-ft-tall self-portrait by Azraa Motala, a multidisciplinary artist, merges the Western tradition of portraiture with photography, to explore culturally inherited expectations and her own identity as a young British South Asian Muslim woman. Her garments act as the most noticeable markers, the ornate lehenga falling away to reveal track pants and sneakers; her stance is one of grace and defiance. The title challenges the viewer to fit this person into a box; it is also a reminder of the many layers of marginalisation that South Asian Muslim women face, in a social and political system that sees them as pawns, stereotypes and upholders of restrictive definitions of honour.

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Green is the colour of good fortune, health, and the gardens of paradise in Islam, so emeralds were in great demand in the Mughal era. The finest of these gems came from what is now Colombia in South America, making the journey on Portuguese trading ships. Acquired by Mughals and other royals as keepsakes, they were often engraved with symbols or lettering. Engraving is visible on this large Colombian gem, which changed hands over the centuries and ended up with the Maharaja of Patiala Bhupinder Singh. In 1911, Singh met the French jeweller Jacques Cartier on a visit by the latter to Delhi, and asked if he would help modernise the royal jewellery collection. And so, in the 1930s, Cartier turned the emerald into a brooch with a diamond-and-platinum Art Deco-style clasp. It is on loan from the British Museum.

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The inscriptions on these carved stone seals are probably the oldest form of writing in South Asia. Unlike ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, these pictograms have never been deciphered. What we do know is that the civilisation had ties with distant cultures. Indus Valley seals, beads and sculpture, among other goods, have been unearthed across the then-known world — the swathe from the Far East to Western Europe. This seal was found in modern-day Iraq.

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A physicist and meteorologist from India, Anna Mani was the only woman to participate in the World Meteorological Organization’s international meet in Switzerland, in 1956. A series of photographs captures her time at the event. Mani would go down in history for adapting existing instruments to create an ozone sensor, in the 1960s. Her innovation would later help scientists study the effects of manmade pollutants on the ozone layer.