Museum of material memory gives family heirlooms a digital home, from cat kettles to lost histories
New Delhi: There’s a cat-shaped kettle that’s been in my family for generations. Shaped like a Persian feline with an elongated bone china tail for a spout, ‘kitty’ has played the role of timekeeper, guarded fiercely by each generation.
As children, we weren’t allowed to play near the cabinet in which she lived, for fear that a stray ball would smash the glass and she’d suffer a tragic death. At every family function, stories were exchanged around ‘kitty’. Everyone had something to contribute.
That’s the thing about heirlooms. They outlive certainty but hold on to memory. They gather meaning not from where they were born, but from the lives they witness along the way.
And in 2017, two friends gave such heirlooms a space to speak. Oral historian Aanchal Malhotra and social impact consultant Navdha Malhotra started the Museum of Material Memory, a digital repository that archives family objects and the stories tied to them.
The online museum collects photographs, audio recordings, and personal essays from people across the subcontinent. From a cat-shaped kettle to a Partition-era trunk to a grandfather’s wristwatch, each entry preserves the emotional history of an object that might otherwise be lost.
“We wanted to map the subcontinent through its materials,” said Aanchal Malhotra. “Because objects travel, and they remember.” Eight years on, the Museum of Material Memory has archived over 500 heirlooms, turning private nostalgia into public history, one story at a time.
