South Asia is a huge region covered by eight separate countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and home to a huge variety of cultures, languages and religions.
Many different South Asian people and people with South Asian heritage are represented in our galleries and wider collections. This includes famous figures such as Kandyan monarch Vimaladharmasūriya I, Mughal aristocrat Zeenat Mahal and former Greenwich mayor Gurdip Singh Dhillon. Many unidentified people also feature, from ‘Afghan’ cameleers in Australia to Indian nannies (ayahs) looking after children.
Our free, downloadable South Asian History research guide is currently under development and will be posted on this webpage soon.
This guide will help you search our collections for images and objects. It also details the topics covered by our collections, from British colonisation of the Indian subcontinent and resistance it provoked to the various different Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Zoroastrian (Parsi) communities represented in our holdings.
Royal Museums Greenwich is working hard to find and digitise more images covering this area, as part of a major research project.
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Who is represented in our collections?
Discover the array of cultures represented in Royal Museums Greenwich's collections