Introduction: decolonisation and reassessment

This study stems from my small but enlightening role within a decolonisation project at V&A Dundee, for which I helped to re-write some of the object labels in the Scottish Design Galleries. On its website, V&A Dundee shares a quotation from Anoushka Khandwala, which explains that decolonisation is ‘an acknowledgement that in the West, society has been built upon the colonisation of other nations, that we exist within a system of privilege and oppression, and that a lot of the culture we’ve come to see as ours has actually been appropriated or stolen’. The Transnational Scotland team worked with V&A Dundee as one of its project partners, bringing together a cross section of representatives from academic and arts institutions, to address the gaps and silences in the Western narratives in museums and galleries. To this end, V&A Dundee reopened in August 2020 after the COVID lockdown with some rewritten labels which showcased new narratives in order to acknowledge that ‘there is the other side, always’. Transnational trade engendered the links between Scottish products and Indian raw materials, and museums like V&A Dundee have now begun to document the complex and even murky history of its acquisitions and collections, addressing some of the silences behind the journeys their artefacts have made and the influence they have had on Scottish designs.