Why the showcase of Indian idols at The British Museum should spark debate on colonial loot

Have you ever puzzled how Indian deities got here to have their signature bodily options? The British Museum in London lately delved into this query, in an exhibition titled Ancient India: Living Traditions.

The practically five-month-long exhibition, supported by Reliance Industries and Reliance Foundation, concluded on October 19, and traced the evolution of idol crafting in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism throughout a interval of greater than 2,000 years. It promised guests a sweeping journey by means of centuries of Indian spiritual artwork. The concepts of training and making an attempt to elucidate the worth of those objects was a superb step in the direction of accountability and collaboration however the lingering irony remained: of this story being instructed, not in Varanasi, Amravati, or Nalanda, however in Britain, a rustic whose colonial file contains the wholesale elimination of those idols from their properties in India.

Given the celebrities in attendance on the museum’s inaugural fundraising gala, the glamorous Pink Ball, co-chaired by businesswoman Isha Ambani, to coincide with the conclusion of the exhibition, one wonders whether or not in some unspecified time in the future there was a surreal realisation of the incongruity as curators and artwork critics debated the “aesthetics of devotion”. Many of the idols on show probably arrived by means of legally and morally doubtful channels of the British Empire and its well-oiled cultural loot equipment.

Exhibitions like these are cultural scholarship layered over cultural dispossession. They provide a chance to replicate on what occurs when non secular icons grow to be everlasting migrants; when they’re moved out of their heat Indian properties to cities the place their names are unknown and sometimes mispronounced. However, as with different such efforts, the exhibition has largely missed the possibility to start out a considerable dialogue on restitution and the methods wherein constructive communication round this concept might be developed.

Devotion versus wealth and show

The presence of Indian idols in Britain will not be an accident of probability. Both throughout and after colonial rule, numerous artefacts have discovered their approach to the U.Ok., both looted, “gifted” below duress, or smuggled. Many such artefacts have been merely catalogued as curiosities by colonial directors who handled Indian artwork as anthropological knowledge moderately than residing religion. By the late nineteenth century, Indian deities have been as prone to be encountered in Bloomsbury as in Bodh Gaya.

The London exhibition, with its scholarly catalogues and shiny posters, sanitised that story. It introduced idols as aesthetic milestones. Although the exhibition served an academic function, its location betrayed its meant bona fide. It confirmed idols in an surroundings divorced from the adoration of devotees who as soon as anointed them with sandalwood paste or garlanded them with marigolds. The acts of worship, sweat and penance, have been changed by acts of show, wealth and privilege. That is the legacy of cultural loot: not solely bodily displacement but in addition the transformation of that means.

In this gentle, The British Museum’s lengthy corridors, and the latest London exhibition, resemble nothing of a shrine and the entire spectacle of a cupboard of curiosities. The idols, as soon as central to residing spiritual observe of thronging devotees, at the moment are objects of indifferent admiration. To see an idol of Lord Vishnu in a sterile glass case within the coronary heart of an air-conditioned and humidity-controlled room with monochrome partitions is to witness not continuity however interruption. A narrative damaged in transit. 

Monetising the sacred

The deeper irony is that these idols usually are not merely being preserved; they’re being monetised. Visitors in London pay for entry, buy catalogues, maybe even decide up idol-inspired souvenirs on their approach out. These idols, as soon as objects of communal providing, have been transformed into income streams for establishments removed from their origins. While many museums in India, particularly within the extra distant elements of the nation, battle with funding and the federal government finds it tough to guard village shrines from theft, The British Museum continues to show colonial acquisitions into cultural and precise capital. 

This is the place the exhibition revealed greater than it meant. It was not nearly “the evolution of idols” however in regards to the evolution of possession. 

Their return should show the reverence for tradition, creativeness and foresight of the judges of the Court of Appeals for England and Wales who determined the Bumper Development Corporation v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis and Others [1991] EWCA Civ J0213-5 case in 1991. In this case, searching for to determine possession of a stolen Nataraja idol, the judges dominated that the temple in South India from the place the Nataraja was stolen might be a juristic individual within the U.Ok., and likewise that the idol may ‘converse’ by means of the temple priest and assert its ‘craving to go residence’.

Lessons for India

The Ancient India: Living Traditions exhibition has, little question, been thought-about successful as a cultural occasion. But it additionally served as a quiet indictment of a system that also income from colonial acquisitions, with out regret, and of Indians with incomplete data of their very own historical past. To debate the “evolution” of idols whereas refusing to return them to their properties is an act of selective reminiscence.

For India, the lesson will not be solely about making a clear framework for demanding restitution. It is about constructing dialogue and actual training. Idols are greater than stone and bronze; they’re embodiments of religion, historical past, and identification. They have to be allowed their authentic contexts, to have the ability to get again in contact with their authentic environments and till then, given the proper clarification for them. Every exhibition overseas will carry with it the overbearing and looming shadow of dispossession.

India’s generosity of collaborating in redundant establishments just like the Commonwealth also needs to allow the nation to stability the concepts of the world as one household with the significance of cultural identification. There are some indications from worldwide organisations that recognition of cultural dispossession should take priority over show. In September 2025, UNESCO unveiled its digital database of stolen objects. However, it’s nonetheless very naked, containing solely three objects submitted by India. To be really efficient, the database would additionally should replicate the understanding of UNESCO’s 1970 ‘Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property’ and create a complete database of colonial era-looted cultural objects. 

For now, gods might journey throughout continents, however sensibility has been left behind.

Sahibnoor is Lecturer, Jindal Global Law School, and Lavanya is Lawyer, RFKN Advocates.