I am a scholar working on the material culture of South Asia, especially India.

I was a curator at the British Museum for more than thirty years, retiring in 2018 as Head of the South and Southeast Asia Section in the Department of Asia.

My work there involved the mounting of many exhibitions and permanent displays, as well as the research into, publication of and addition to these outstanding collections. I have written extensively, both for public and for scholarly readers.

I live in London, but continue to travel to the subcontinent, to conduct research and write about it.

About

I arrived in India for the first time at the age of eighteen, having hitchhiked overland to Himachal Pradesh, to teach in a Tibetan refugee camp.

The experience changed my life. I returned to the UK with a realisation of the huge variety and interest of Asia. The colour, vibrancy and sheer difference of the subcontinent had dramatically affected me, and the lure of India remains to this day.

Exhibitions

Voices of Bengal

Of the many exhibitions I curated at the British Museum, one of the most elaborate was in 2006. This was a sequence of exhibitions, public programming, education – and an installation in the heart of the Museum; this was the Voices of Bengal season.

At the centre of this project was a collaboration between the Crafts Council of West Bengal. Two master-craftsmen, under the direction of Ruby Palchoudhuri, came from Krishnanagar to construct a temporary image of the goddess Durga in the Great Court of the Museum. This image was of the type produced every year at the spectacular celebration of the goddess in Kolkata, Durga Puja.

At the early Buddhist site of Amaravati in Andhra Pradesh, southern India in December 2022
Standing in the circumambulatory walkway around the ruins of the great stupa (left) with fragments of stone railing pillars (right). These range in date from the late centuries BC to the early centuries AD.

The 1978 Kandahar excavation team:

Bottom row, seated on the left: Me
Middle row, second from left: eminent Dutch archaeologist Willem Vogelsang (with water-pipe), now based in Leiden
Midddle row, second from right: Margaret ‘Kim’, Lady Wheeler (widow of Sir Mortimer Wheeler), who ran the study of the ceramics from the excavations
Top row, far left: Warwick Ball, Middle East archaeologist and writer, the late Svend Helms, director of the excavations and (just visible) Alison Betts, now professor of archaeology in Sydney
Top row, second from right: George Willcox, now a renowned archaeo-botanist

Image of the goddess Durga in the Great Court of the British Museum.