Event Details

In conjunction with the book launch of Transcultural Imaginations: Revisiting the 1959 Donation from the Government of India to Malaya, this panel discussion features Priya Maholay-Jaradi (PhD, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Art History, Department of History, National University of Singapore), Kathleen Ditzig (PhD, Curator, National Gallery Singapore), and Gyanesh Kudaisya (PhD, Associate Professor, South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore). Together, they will explore the historical and cultural significance of the 1959 donation from the Government of India, focusing on its impact on Singapore’s art and museum landscape and India’s cultural diplomacy during the mid-20th century. Moderated by Kwa Chong Guan (Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of History, National University of Singapore), the discussion examines the transcultural exchanges that shaped these narratives and their continued relevance today. The publication follows earlier publications from NUS Museum’s Anniversary Lecture series, About Michael Sullivan by T.K. Sabapathy (2016) and William Willetts & The Practice of Asian Art History by Kwa Chong Guan (2020).

About the Publication
In 1959, the University of Malaya Art Museum received a donation of fifty-five objects and one hundred photographs from the Government of India. Archival sources hint at the donation’s expression of a growing India-Malaya partnership in a new third world order. But amid the overlapping political, institutional, and personal contexts of the mid-twentieth century, what else might have motivated the donation?

Priya Jaradi explores the many threads complexly woven into the fabric of the 1959 donation in this third published edition of the NUS Museum’s Anniversary Lecture series. This work considers the donation from a variety of perspectives that supersede its apparent diplomatic and geo-political connotations. Instead, we are introduced to diverse, previously understated vantage points—including those of the recipients, arbiters, and donated objects themselves—and thus the multivalent, simultaneous motivations guiding all parties involved. In turn, the donation reveals itself to be an index of transculturality, not just of the border-crossings and cultural exchanges which underwrite any artefact’s changing of hands, but of an even larger India-Malaya partnership going back centuries.

About the Author:
Priya Maholay-Jaradi (PhD), Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Art History Programme, National University of Singapore

Priya Maholay-Jaradi is Convenor for Art History, a collaboration between National University of Singapore (NUS), the National Gallery Singapore, and the Singapore Art Museum. Jaradi served as assistant curator (South Asia) at the Asian Civilisations Museum (2005-2007). She is the author of Fashioning a National Art: Baroda’s Royal Collection and Institutions (1875-1924), Oxford University Press (2016), and volume editor of Baroda: A Cosmopolitan Provenance in Transition, Mumbai: Marg Foundation (2015). Jaradi’s ongoing research uncovers the contributions of collections, curricula, and pedagogies to revisionist art histories and historiographies of South and Southeast Asia, particularly, India and Singapore. Jaradi is the author of Transcultural Imaginations: Revisiting the 1959 Donations from the Government of India to Malaya and speaker for NUS Museum's Anniversary Lecture with the same title in 2021.

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