Returning India's colonial treasures

The list of Indian artifacts that were stolen in colonial times and are now in the United Kingdom is long. After all, the British Empire was the largest colonial power in its time, and India was its biggest colony, the "jewel" of the crown.

Artifacts that the British seized, looted or took away as "gifts" include the 105.6-karat "Koh-i-noor" diamond, which adorned Queen Victoria's brooch and following that, the Queen Mother's crown; the Buddha's shrine from the Amaravati monument, in southeast India; and a wooden tiger that was seized from Tipu Sultan, a southern Indian ruler, after he was defeated by the British in the 18th century.

Today they are displayed, among other places, in the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), which also has an impressive collection of bronze statues from Benin. These were acquired by the British during a punitive expedition in the late 18th century to the Kingdom of Benin, located in present-day Nigeria.

Many of these statues landed in Germany, which recently announced it would return them to Nigeria .

Global volunteers trying to get back stolen art

Many Indians are still sensitive about artifacts that were stolen during the British conquest of India and have yet to be returned. "You took our lives. You took our natural resources. You took our heritage. You can't give back our lives and natural resources. At least give back our heritage," said Anuraag Saxena, who founded the India Pride Project (IPP) in 2014 to bring back historical artifacts that were taken from India during colonial times and after the country's independence in 1947. 

"You haven’t really decolonized a nation, unless you’ve given back what’s theirs," he added.

Since its founding, the IPP has initiated many projects — some of which have been controversial. For example, in 2018, members of the group went to British museums and snapped pictures of Indian statues with speech bubbles carrying statements like "How did I get here?" and "I'm a deity, not a showpiece."

In a written statement to DW, Saxena said the IPP was a network of global volunteers who have built "the case for India's stolen heritage to be brought back home." According to the activist, who believes "history belongs to its geography," nations, museums, citizens and officials need to understand why this is the right thing to do.

"We have taken an academic issue and made it into a social movement," he says, adding that debating the issue solely from an academic perspective would be "glorifying the diagnosis, but ignoring the treatment."

So far, the IPP has successfully traced stolen statues to countries including Australia and the US, but most of these have been artifacts that were stolen from Indian temples after 1947. For example, a statue that was stolen and later emerged in Germany was returned to India in 2019, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited New Delhi.

Returning the works of art

The "Koh-i-noor," whose name means "mountain of light" in Persian, has been claimed by at least four countries, including Iran and Pakistan. While India has always claimed the diamond as its own, the story behind the coveted gemstone got a new twist in 2016:

That year, Ranjit Kumar, India's solicitor general, the country's top lawyer, stated at a Supreme Court hearing in New Delhi that the diamond "was neither stolen nor taken away … It was given voluntarily by Ranjit Singh [the king of Punjab] to the British as compensation for help in the Sikh wars [in the 19th century]."

The statement appeared shortly after Prince William and his wife Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, visited New Delhi and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Should Prince William one day ascend the throne and the Duchess become queen consort, she is expected to wear the crown with the diamond. Incidentally, the diamond is traditionally considered "unlucky" for men.

The Indian government's declaration triggered a public outcry, and four years later, the government again appealed to the UK to return the treasures. Subsequently, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office replied, "The British Museum Act 1963 prevents our national museums from removing items … the government has no plan to change the law."

According to the act, museums cannot dispose of the objects in their collections, except in a few special cases and unless it is necessary to remove them "temporarily for any purpose connected with the administration of the Museum and the care of its collections."

Decontextualizing art

Despite the legislation, some UK institutions have gone ahead and returned historical objects to former colonies. They include the University of Edinburgh, which returned nine skulls of the Vedda people to Sri Lanka in 2019, and Manchester Museum, part of Manchester University, which returned 43 objects to Indigenous groups in Australia in the same year.

However, others, like the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Museum, claim they cannot return historical artifacts, either because of the Museums Act or because keeping the objects in the UK would be in the interest of the global community. 

While the V&A Museum did not react to DW's requests for statements, the museum has been very clear about its attitude towards returning colonial artifacts.

In a 2019 essay for The Guardian newspaper, Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, argues why museums should not automatically give in to demands for restitution of exhibits that were procured in former colonies. For Hunt, a discussion on the restitution of colonial exhibits is particularly important for the V&A museum, which he said expanded "in line with the growth of the British empire."

"In Britain's colonies and spheres of influence, the practice of collecting was closely tied to the dominating psychology of colonialism," he wrote. Regardless, Hunt's argument is that one needs to separate the artworks from their context for decolonization to be successful.

He therefore advocates the creation of "universal museums," not only in Europe, but also in Africa and Asia, which would separate "the universal, encyclopedic museum from its colonial preconditions and reimagine it as a new medium for cultural understanding."

Problems in India

The road to restitution is tricky not only in the former colonial power but also in India, where there are no established processes to take back artifacts and some experts claim Indian authorities do not take care of such items properly.

Heritage theft also remains a rampant problem, with UNESCO, the UN agency for culture, saying poverty in the country fuels the theft of antiquities, and poor protection of historical monuments also adds to the problem.

In Blood Buddhas, a documentary on stolen historical treasures, filmmaker Nikhil Singh Rajputt touches upon the handling of objects that have been returned to New Delhi. Most of the 28 or so artifacts that were returned between 2014 and 2018 by the US, Australia, Canada and Germany have been handed over to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), a government agency responsible for cultural monuments.

They are stored at an ASI warehouse in Delhi's Purana Qila ("Old Fort") without proper protection against theft or atmospheric stressors.

But in some people's eyes, these are hardly reasons that speak against restitution. As Indian member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor says in Blood Buddhas: "The fact that these things are protected only at a certain standard in India doesn't entitle somebody else to steal them and say, 'We can look after them better.' In any case, they didn't steal them because they could look after them better; they stole them first and found the justification later."

Saxena of the India Pride Project also agrees that the Indian government's standards for safekeeping heritage assets is not up to the mark. But there's hope: "Piecemeal legislation exists, but not a holistic framework. We'll get there," he says.