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Hindustan Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
The thing is...: Wknd interviews Selim Khandakar, an unusual collector of everyday objects
Many have hobbies. Some have obsessions. What Selim Khandakar feels is a pure, unbridled desire for objects. Just before a cyclone hit his mud house in Kelepara village in the Hooghly district of West Bengal in 2021, Khandakar spent hours checking on his collection, tucking hundreds of things — perfume bottles, transistor radios, gas stoves, toy cars, pens, plastic dolls, lighters, bead necklaces, miniature paintings, old newspapers, letters, cigarette boxes, albums of stamps and coins — into crevices and corners, desperate to keep them safe. (Most did survive the storm.) He has amassed over 12,000 items over 50 years. Some (broken crockery and coins) date to the Mughal era. Others (ticket stubs and stamps) are from a few decades ago. Each is precious to him, he says. Each item once served an important purpose; care went into making it. It's an unusual way to curate a museum, but an informal museum is what Khandakar has put together. Parts of his collection have now made it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as part of a tribute to the fleeting nature of so many of the objects that make up human history. The exhibit was put together by his niece, Ohida Khandakar, 31, an artist. Her installation consists of assorted items from his collection, and an 18-minute short film on her uncle's unusual journey, titled Dream Your Museum. The film recently just won the Victoria and Albert Museum's prestigious Jameel Prize for contemporary art, an award only handed out every three years. *** 'The film and installation… challenge the traditional authority of conventional museums,' Tristram Hunt, V&A director and chair of the Jameel Prize judging panel, said in a statement. This is perhaps what is most interesting about Khandakar's horde: the way in which it reimagines the ideas of 'collection' and 'museum', ideas typically defined by power, status and wealth. What Khandakar has ended up doing, with his vast collection, is creating a record of the common person's life and times. In highlighting his work, Ohida's film now raises the question: What defines our existing museums, and who are they for? 'Collecting is my way of showing people from my village a glimpse of things from around the world,' Khandakar says. 'Like rare coins from the Mughal era or vintage perfume bottles. Often people here do not get a chance to go to cities to see such things. Bridging that gap is what has always kept me going.' It all started, for him, in 1973. He was 23 years old, working as a compounder at a clinic and living alone in Calcutta, when he wandered into Park Circus Maidan one day. 'There, I saw people showcasing their stamp collections and I was fascinated,' he says. After that day, he began to collect too. In the evenings, when his friends were sipping tea at a market adda, he began to walk around Chowringhee, Park Street and Mullick Bazar. He saw how shopkeepers treasured their objects, he says. He began to collect trunks full of bric-a-brac: some found, some given to him, some bought from general stores, antique stores and curio shops. Every weekend, he lugged a trunk full of these items back to his village, where he displayed them in his courtyard on Sundays. Now 75, with a pacemaker helping regulate his heartbeat after two heart attacks, he is still collecting. 'Sometimes I dream that I'm picking up coins from the road, or I'm at an old bookstore where someone has dumped an old book and I'm eager to place a price on it. It's like collecting is in my DNA,' he says. Over time, he toured other collections, including those at Kolkata's Victoria Memorial Hall museum and the Birla Industrial & Technological Museum. Marble Palace, an 1835 mansion, exquisitely preserved, became a beloved haunt. It resonated with his love for how we once lived. 'Such a collection will never exist again. No matter how wealthy or powerful you may be today, these objects simply aren't available,' he says. It is this joy of preserving a physical object that once represented utility, luxury, history or the spirit of human ingenuity that has driven his collection. As he says, with pride, there aren't many other places today where one can find some of the earliest rupee coins minted, with the permission of the Nawab of Bengal, by the British East India Company. *** How close is he to having an actual museum of his own? Ohida is currently working on a feature-length film on her uncle, and plans to help him digitally archive his collection, as well as showcase it better on-site. He is happy to have her help in this. 'I love these objects. I don't ever feel like parting with them. But Ohida understands them,' he says. Ohida admits she didn't always. 'Growing up, the art books and catalogues in my uncle's collection fascinated me, with their pictures of artefacts from the British Museum, and prints of works by Rabindranath Tagore,' she says. As an adult, though, the randomness of the collection baffled her. When the pandemic struck and she returned home for a while, 'I would see him cleaning a broken antique plate or some other item. One day, I asked him, 'Why do you keep it all?',' she recalls. His answer struck her: 'Are you, an artist, really asking me this?'' Even in the absence of a museum, a museum has always existed in her uncle's mind. She has grown to understand this. 'People will start to look around, and each person is struck by something different,' he says. 'They ask me where I got a particular thing and I tell them about the places in Kolkata or elsewhere. I tell them about exhibitions, fairs, museums, places that people in the village haven't been to.' 'I want to spark curiosity in the people around me,' he adds. 'How will they appreciate new things if nobody ever shows them any?'
Forbes
08-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Nutanix Visualizes ‘Truly Portable' Cloud Applications
LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 02: A 1980 Sony Walkman 'Stowaway TPS-L2' is pictured during a press ... More preview for the Victoria and Albert Museum's new Toshiba Gallery of Japanese Art on November 2, 2015 in London, England. The gallery will officially open on November 4 and features items including a Hello Kitty! rice cooker, toaster and kettle and the first ever portable Sony Walkman. (Photo by) Data is distributed. Because we now work with data resources spread out across an inherently distributed topography, we need mechanisms that work with data in its various formats, locales, systems and workflows. Information resources today are spread across different databases, data warehouses, data lakehouses and a variety of different data repositories in remote edge computing units, across mobile devices (starting with, but not limited to smartphones) and through an increasing number of AI engines and the language models that serve them. There's a direct knock-on effect here, with the impact felt most directly in the cloud. Because data exists in so many places, we need to have extremely flexible cloud computing applications that are capable of operating across bare metal (physical cloud server hardware with no virtualization layer), virtualized environments (that form the bulk of cloud services stemming from datacenters) and all shapes of containerized environments spanning the composable computing world of Kubernetes orchestration. Combine these factors with the ever-competing nature of the three major cloud service provider hyperscalers - and the fact that many businesses will be customers of AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure - and it's easy to see why cloud applications need to be inherently portable so that they can run anywhere. The above reality provides some of the backdrop for how hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure management vendors are now aligning their services. The quest for the truly portable cloud application is perhaps typified by developments now happening at Nutanix. Aiming to elevate itself beyond competing offerings from Microsoft with its Azure Arc (Redmond's take on making Azure management tools work outside of Azure), Google Anthos (multi-cloud tooling for various infrastructure locations) and the Red Hat OpenShift hybrid cloud application platform, Nutanix has now announced its Cloud Native AOS. This is technology which extends Nutanix enterprise storage and advanced data services to hyperscaler Kubernetes services and cloud native bare metal environments, without requiring a hypervisor. As data becomes more distributed, IT teams are looking for a consistent way to protect, replicate and restore data across Kubernetes infrastructure in datacenters, bare metal edge locations and cloud native hyperscalers. This new service promises to simplify day two operations for Kubernetes applications and their data. Cloud Native AOS extends the company's AOS software (which can be said to be the backbone of its platform for data, Platform-as-a-Service and AI) to stateful, native Kubernetes clusters in the cloud and bare metal environments. Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami has said that Nutanix today is built around a mission to provide freedom of choice at every level of the computing stack with mission-critical security so that the platform becomes the long-term choice for enterprises who want to operate with cloud-native technologies. When it comes to firms that need to modernize their IT infrastructure, Ramaswami says he knows that IT departments need to have freedom of choice to use the hardware of its choice… and many of course have their own installed base of machines. The technology analyst, advocate and evangelist community has a lot to say on Nutanix. Enterprise Strategy Group's (now part of Omdia) Scott Sinclair identifies the need for organizations to be able to run their cloud workloads on the hardware of their choice in a hybrid cloud deployment format. This is a message which resonates very clearly with Nutanix's cloud portability mantra. Sinclair suggests that this is part of Nutanix's ploy to 'chip away' at the VMware customer base i.e. providing customers with an eminently flexible approach to cloud portability. The ESG analyst thinks that this move is key for Nutanix in the face of the company having a comparably and understandably smaller partner and ecosystem. 'Nutanix understands what it will take for the company to reach the next level, but the journey will not be easy. Nutanix will need to accelerate the already rapid pace it has been on expanding their partner ecosystem in order to help reduce potential showstoppers within brownfield opportunities. In addition, businesses have sunk tremendous levels of investments in people, processes, and tools in managing and automating their existing hypervisor environments, making it costly to switch. The opportunity is there, but with each percentage point of share that Nutanix is able to take, the next one becomes increasingly more difficult,' said Sinclair, who is practice director for infrastructure, cloud, DevOps and networking at ESG. Thomas Cornely, SVP of product management at Nutanix proposes the view that the company has built a 'complete platform' for enterprise-grade infrastructure with advanced data services in virtualized datacenters. He notes that Cloud Native AOS provides resilience for Kubernetes infrastructure by protecting containerized applications and their data with integrated disaster recovery between availability zones, clouds and on-premises. He reminds us that customers can build and deploy cloud-native applications with seamless migration of applications and data optimally located across sites, including the ability to move applications back to on-premises containerized environments. The services here are said to allow software developers to use Kubernetes APIs to automate and provide self-service control over all aspects of data management for their applications. So does all this make a compelling argument for leaving VMware in favor of Nutanix, a subject that has been so widely discussed over the last year? 'More important than just being some 'offramp' for VMware, Nutanix now has to demonstrate an intrinsic value to customers looking to make a move. I am a fan of the company's Dell PowerFlex and Pure Storage partnership announcements around disaggregated storage. Partly because this allows Nutanix to play in the larger, more business-critical application space - where it has been less than competitive. This can be attractive to a large enterprise IT executive because with VMware - they have to buy into the whole VMware Cloud Foundation experience - and that's very closed and very expensive,' detailed Matt Kimbal, vice president & principal analyst for datacenter compute & storage at Moor Insights and Strategy. But can Nutanix innovate like it did back in 2011 when it first started claiming to be a 'VMware killer', a headline which it positively encouraged and jumped on. 'There are always going to be products and solutions that are more 'pointy' in nature and deliver greater capabilities in a specific area. For instance, I think it's fair to say that Red Hat OpenShift is deeper from a cloud-native perspective relative to Nutanix Kubernetes Platform. But does this mean a company should choose OpenShift over NCP with NKP? Well, that is highly dependent on an IT staff that is capable of deploying, optimizing and supporting over time. There is the balance that IT tries to strike between cost, complexity and performance (capability) - that fulcrum point is different from company to company,' added Kimbal. 'I think Nutanix has succeeded on the stability front. NCP has a lot of capabilities and is supporting organizations of all sizes and across all verticals - and external storage support deepens its position.' RedMonk co-founder James Governor comments in line with Kimbal and agrees that there is movement in the market right now, but that we need to consider all the moving parts in this equation. 'Nutanix is executing reasonably effectively, certainly in selling into customers concerned about Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. It moved faster than some competitors such as Red Hat, for example. But in general, cloud repatriation [and so-called cloud portability] seemed more like vendor hope and hype than reality until recent geopolitical events pushed data sovereignty dramatically forward as a concern for global customers. Now, a strong hybrid cloud story is absolutely a selling point,' said Governor. 'Nutanix doesn't have the same breadth of ecosystem offerings as competitors and pricing transparency or lack of it can be an issue for clients, but if an organization is migrating from Broadcom that's less of an issue.' In terms of why cloud portability is really something that enterprise IT departments actually require, can Nutanix justify this practice and validate the requirement for it in real world operational environments? Happy to be voluble on this topic is Induprakas Keri in his role as SVP and GM of hybrid cloud at Nutanix. Having previously worked at TurboTax maker Intuit, Keri reminds us that in practical terms, US citizens really only use this annual tax app and its service layer across around four key days per year. 'Those spikes in usage meant that Intuit's estate of IT hardware was 95% idle for 95% of the time. That made it a perfect scenario for public cloud, where maximum service flexibility could be exploited for a more cost-effective deployment,' noted Keri. 'But let's be realistic, most applications don't operate like that. The vast majority of enterprise apps will go through an initial development phase where an organization is working to assess the value it can potentially extract from the app once it's live. - and this initial stage needs to feature really fast [development] cycles.' Keri leads us into the second phase of enterprise application deployment, a period where an enterprise that sees value in an app then needs to work out how many resources the app itself needs (is it an app suited for 10, 100 or 10,000 users?). Which leads us to the third stage, which can be referred to as the 'steady state' when an application's value, shape and size is known. 'The first two stages are once again well-suited to public cloud deployment for flexibility during prototyping and experimentation,' clarified Keri. 'But in that third stage, the organization should know enough about their application use case to determine whether it should stay in the public cloud, or can be moved to an on-premises deployment. In other words, the third stage enables the company to see whether it is paying too much. The degree of application elasticity and data intensity will in turn dictate the degree to which portability is needed and affordable from a cost-effective analysis perspective.' The affordability quotient here will be dictated by how much it costs to repatriate data out of a cloud service. Data uploaded to a new cloud service is typically very cheap or free; the cost comes when an organization wants to move its data and be portable. Keri calls it the Hotel California conundrum i.e. you can check out, but you can never leave, because cloud services providers always operate on this totally flexible but pay-to-leave basis. All of which operational mechanics means, cloud does sometimes need to be portable… and when it does, it needs to be very portable. 'Today's data is increasingly distributed - it's not just in one data lake, warehouse or application, which means it's crucial that companies have flexibility with their cloud infrastructure and have a 'true multi-cloud' infrastructure environment that supports 'cross-cloud' deployments. This is more than just a convenience; it is a transformative capability that eliminates the boundaries between cloud providers and creates one unified cloud environment that removes the operational complexity of managing data replication and full migrations between providers. With a true multi-cloud environment, the hardest part of any application to move - the data - now becomes the easiest,' said Ben Flast, director of product management at MongoDB, an open source data platform company that works on best practice deployments with Nutanix and others in the cloud infrastructure business. Flast follows up by saying that multi-cloud not only enables the creation of application architectures that exploit the best services from multiple cloud providers simultaneously, it also delivers resiliency. With cross-cloud failover, in the event of an outage, the MongoDB product leader says that data can be 'automatically switched' to another cloud provider in the same geographic region, ensuring uninterrupted service. Finally, multi-cloud allows companies to meet regional and cloud provider preferences making it easy to meet customer demands or comply with local regulations using a single database. There has been a lot of talk surrounding Nutanix and its apparently favorable position in relation to VMware customers in the wake of VMware's acquisition by Broadcom. As detailed here on Forbes and as noted above, this space is rich in competing technologies, although as Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami has stated, not all customers will feel the need to move away from VMware, initially at least. Since its inception in 2009, Nutanix has attracted software engineering teams that want software-defined storage and virtualization-centric cloud management tools. Long associated with hyperconverged infrastructure services (a technology methodology that brings compute power alongside network and storage into a single space), the large installed base of VMware vSAN and vSphere deployments isn't going away this decade. Dell also works at the level with its VxRail services, software designed to offer pre-configured and pre-tested hyperconverged infrastructure services, which some users will find simpler to use. Comparable technology also exists with the now-discontinued Cisco HyperFlex. Looking at the vendors Nutanix sits up against, it's fairly clear which brands are bigger. While that shouldn't be taken as a direct measure of competency or scope, it would often suggest that the larger firms have more expansive R&D budgets. Let's also remember that Nutanix has sought to reposition itself as a wider multi-cloud player and not just a hyperconverged infrastructure specialist, but the company's HCI legacy will likely hang on to its coattails for a while yet. As Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also gains some traction on the periphery of this space, market watchers will need to start their analysis of cloud repatriation services with Nutanix alongside those public cloud offerings from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform. Where the cloud hyperscalers naturally have the ability to offer deeper native integration depth, they will generally also narrow themselves to their own cloud when compared to Nutanix's inherent portable cloud message and platform agnosticism, which it currently gravitates its corporate message set and platform capabilities around. As AI-driven operations functions now start to service across all vendors in the multi-cloud infrastructure market, the winners in this arena will arguably need to take on a portion of the cloud portability ethos that Nutanix now champions. In the composable, containerized, compartmentalized and contextualized world of cloud computing, the need to get a 'carry out' and move is real.
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Business Standard
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Standard
Why did Cartier refuse Diljit Dosanjh the Patiala necklace for Met Gala?
Indian actor-singer Diljit Dosanjh turned heads on Tuesday with a bold and culturally rich debut at the Met Gala, fashion's most iconic night. Dressed in an ivory sherwani embroidered with the map of Punjab and Punjabi Gurmukhi script, he brought global attention to his heritage — merging traditional pride with high fashion. Dosanjh's look was completed with a jewelled turban and ceremonial sword, delivering a powerful message about identity and cultural roots. His ensemble paid homage to Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, with elaborate jewellery inspired by the royal's legendary 'Patiala necklace'. However, what began as celebration soon gave way to controversy. Cartier controversy While Dosanjh's Met Gala presence was widely praised, many took to social media to express outrage after learning that French luxury brand Cartier allegedly refused a request to loan the original Patiala Necklace for his Met Gala appearance. His stylist, Abhilasha Devnani, told The New York Times, she 'tried to borrow that iconic Cartier necklace for the night' but was informed it 'sits sealed in a museum'. The choker necklace, created by Cartier in 1928 for Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, is a storied artifact of colonial-era opulence. Designed with 2,930 diamonds and featuring the world's seventh-largest diamond—the De Beers—the piece vanished in 1948 and was later recovered, though stripped of most of its precious stones. Currently, the necklace is part of an ongoing Cartier exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, running from April 12 to November 16, 2025. It remains unclear whether the request to borrow it was made before or after the exhibition arrangements. Social media erupts over cultural bias The backlash gained momentum online when users compared Dosanjh's denial with YouTuber Emma Chamberlain's 2022 Met Gala appearance. Chamberlain had worn a Cartier choker believed to be part of the original Patiala necklace. 'So Diljit Dosanjh had to wear jewels inspired by Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala's Cartier collection, as he wasn't allowed to wear the original necklace. But Emma Chamberlain wore the original Cartier Patiala Choker in 2022 #MetGala. Talk about cultural appropriation!' wrote a user on X. So @diljitdosanjh had to wear jewels inspired by Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala's @Cartier collection, as he wasn't allowed to wear the original necklace. But Emma Chamberlain worn the original Cartier Patiala Choker in 2022 #MetGala. Talk about cultural appropriation! — Jaspreet Singh (@jas_reports) May 6, 2025 Another post reads: 'Diljit Dosanjh was denied permission by Cartier to borrow Maharaja of Patiala's choker. But they happily gave it to a white YouTuber a few years ago.' Diljit Dosanjh was denied permission by Cartier to borrow Maharaja of Patiala's Chokher. But they happily gave it to a White youtuber few years ago — Mr. Sushi (@Barasimgha) May 6, 2025 Fashion influencers and commentators also weighed in, questioning Cartier's refusal and pointing to what many perceived as a selective honouring of history. Some argued that allowing a South Asian icon like Dosanjh to wear the necklace would have shifted the narrative—from Cartier as a restorer of heritage to one of a colonised identity reclaiming it. ALSO READ | View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sufi motiwala (@sufimotiwala) 'They don't want to acknowledge the colonial past of this art piece and Cartier. Meanwhile, a white YouTuber gets to wear the original, while Diljit—whose roots actually belong to this necklace—has to settle for an homage. Shame on Cartier,' a viral Instagram comment reads. Diljit makes an impression Despite the controversy, Dosanjh's Met Gala moment remains one of the event's most talked-about highlights in India. Styled by Abhilasha Devnani and dressed by designer Prabal Gurung, Dosanjh completed his look with pieces from Golecha Jewels and Cartier. He wore a Panthere de Cartier watch, bracelet, and ring. In an Instagram post, he thanked Cartier, along with Anna Wintour, Devnani, Gurung, and Golecha Jewels for helping bring his vision to life.
Business Insider
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Princess Diana wore a lingerie-inspired gown for her only Met Gala appearance. It was the ultimate 'revenge' dress.
Princess Diana only attended one Met Gala, but she sure knew how to make an entrance. In honor of fashion's biggest night, which returns on Monday with the theme "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style," we're diving back into the Met Gala archives. And it'd be hard to find an A-list attendee who made a bigger splash than the people's princess. Diana walked the famous Met steps on December 9, 1996, four months after she finalized her divorce from then-Prince Charles. The 1996 Met Gala theme paid tribute to Christian Dior, so Diana wore a dress designed by John Galliano, who had just become head designer of the legendary French fashion house. Diana wore a navy-blue, lingerie-inspired slip dress decorated with black lace, as well as a matching robe. She accessorized the slinky ensemble with sapphire earrings and a sapphire choker necklace that matched her iconic engagement ring. In the 2024 Hulu docuseries "In Vogue: The 90s," Galliano revealed that he tried to convince Diana to wear pink to the Met Gala. "We went to Kensington Palace and discussed drawings. I was trying to push for pink, but she was not having it. 'No, not the pink!' That was real, real fun," he recalled. Galliano's dress originally had a corset, but he said Diana removed it without letting him know before she arrived at the Met Gala. "Fast-forward to the event, and I just remember her getting out of the car," Galliano said. "I couldn't believe it. She'd ripped the corset out." "She felt so liberated. She'd torn the corset out. The dress was much more… sensuous," he added. Eloise Moran, author of "The Lady Di Look Book: What Diana Was Trying To Tell Us Through Her Clothes," told Yahoo during a 2021 interview that Diana's Met Gala ensemble was a "revenge" look following her divorce from Charles. "That was one of her most shocking dresses," Moran said. "But I thought she looked fabulous. She just looks so happy and confident." "I think she was embracing it and enjoying it," the author added. "She knew she could never get rid of the attention and the spotlight on her, but I think she was positioning it in a different way, as a kind of international megastar, Marilyn Monroe-type icon rather than a member of the royal family. And I think the dress really reflected that." Diana did have some reservations about the dress. Royal biographer Katie Nicholl, who wrote "William and Harry," revealed that the princess was worried it might embarrass her eldest son, Prince William, who was 14 years old at the time. But her gown has now become a part of fashion history, even going on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Scroll.in
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘Great Mughals' show in London reinforces colonial perspectives that museums claim to be questioning
' The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence ', on display at London's Victoria and Albert Museum until May 5, reanimates a familiar narrative in the historiography of South Asian art: one centred on visual luxury, courtly grandeur and imperial aestheticisation. While these themes are undoubtedly central to the Mughal repertoire, their uncritical recapitulation within the framework of a major museum exhibition invites serious scrutiny. The continued privileging of opulence – isolated from the complex political, intellectual, and religious histories that undergird it – risks reiterating the very colonial imaginaries that museums now claim to be interrogating. The exhibition's title alone signals a retreat into a historiographical mode that foregrounds aesthetic excess as the defining feature of the Mughal period. This is, of course, not without precedent. British colonial scholarship long deployed the visual richness of the Mughal court as a rhetorical device to simultaneously admire and diminish – to portray it as decadent, ornamental, and politically effete. By reproducing this frame without critical engagement, the Victoria and Albert Museum misses an opportunity to reframe Mughal visuality within the evolving debates around decolonial museology and postcolonial historiography. Closing soon - The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence @V_and_A and The 80s: Photographing Britain @Tate Britain, both in my #TopPicks for @Londonist >> #LondonArtCritic #LondonExhibitions — Tabish Khan (@LondonArtCritic) April 28, 2025 Structurally, the exhibition is organised around the conventional imperial triad of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan – figures who have long dominated narratives of Mughal art. Yet this familiar periodisation reproduces a monolithic view of dynastic succession, marginalising other regions, actors, and modalities of artistic production. Moreover, the geographical framing remains opaque: a gesture toward Gujarat by dedicating a section on objects that point towards the proliferation of trade and cultural exchange in this region during the Mughal period, for instance, acknowledges the region's importance in early modern global trade but fails to meaningfully connect it to the broader Mughal visual economy. The result is a fragmented inclusion that appears more curatorial convenience than conceptual necessity. The exhibition design, while visually restrained, offers little in the way of critical provocation. A linear spatial logic and uneven lighting suggest an aestheticised encounter rather than an interpretive one. While many of the objects on display – albums, textiles, architectural fragments – are remarkable in their own right, the interpretive framing tends to rely on their intrinsic beauty rather than on a nuanced curatorial argument. This places undue weight on the objects themselves to 'speak', without sufficient engagement with the methodological questions their display should raise. More of the The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence show at the V&A. Pieces of the pietra dura panels from the Taj Mahal show this arduously intricate technique of filling carved surfaces of marble panes with semi precious stones. — Nasser Rabbat (@nasserrabbat) January 5, 2025 Notably absent are holdings from major collections of Mughal painting and manuscript culture in Iran and Russia, which could have complicated the national and imperial boundaries often presumed in exhibitions of this kind. In this sense, 'The Great Mughals' presents a selective and at times insular vision of a profoundly transregional empire. The absence of such material not only limits the exhibition's scholarly reach but also undermines its claim to comprehensiveness. For audiences in the Global North, the exhibition may pass as a well-appointed foray into South Asian splendour. But for scholars attuned to the politics of cultural representation, the elisions are conspicuous. As decolonisation becomes a watchword across museums in Europe and North America, it is no longer sufficient to mount exhibitions that celebrate aesthetic brilliance while leaving intact the systems of knowledge that rendered those aesthetics legible through colonial frames. To do so is to focus on cosmetic changes instead of questioning the underlying structure.
