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

Have you ever wondered however Indian deities came to person their signature carnal features? The British Museum successful London precocious delved into this question, successful an accumulation titled Ancient India: Living Traditions.

The astir five-month-long exhibition, supported by Reliance Industries and Reliance Foundation, concluded connected October 19, and traced the improvement of idol crafting successful Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism crossed a play of much than 2,000 years. It promised visitors a sweeping travel done centuries of Indian spiritual art. The ideas of acquisition and attempting to explicate the worth of these objects was a bully measurement towards accountability and collaboration but the lingering irony remained: of this communicative being told, not successful Varanasi, Amravati, oregon Nalanda, but successful Britain, a state whose assemblage grounds includes the wholesale removal of these idols from their homes successful India.

Given the celebrities successful attendance astatine the museum’s inaugural fundraising gala, the glamorous Pink Ball, co-chaired by businesswoman Isha Ambani, to coincide with the decision of the exhibition, 1 wonders whether astatine immoderate constituent determination was a surreal realisation of the incongruity arsenic curators and creation critics debated the “aesthetics of devotion”. Many of the idols connected show apt arrived done legally and morally dubious channels of the British Empire and its well-oiled taste loot machinery.

Exhibitions similar these are taste assistance layered implicit taste dispossession. They connection an accidental to bespeak connected what happens erstwhile spiritual icons go imperishable migrants; erstwhile they are moved retired of their lukewarm Indian homes to cities wherever their names are chartless and often mispronounced. However, arsenic with different specified efforts, the accumulation has mostly missed the accidental to commencement a important dialog connected restitution and the ways successful which constructive connection astir this thought could beryllium developed.

Devotion versus wealthiness and display

The beingness of Indian idols successful Britain is not an mishap of chance. Both during and aft assemblage rule, countless artefacts person recovered their mode to the U.K., either looted, “gifted” nether duress, oregon smuggled. Many specified artefacts were simply catalogued arsenic curiosities by assemblage administrators who treated Indian creation arsenic anthropological information alternatively than surviving faith. By the precocious 19th century, Indian deities were arsenic apt to beryllium encountered successful Bloomsbury arsenic successful Bodh Gaya.

The London exhibition, with its scholarly catalogues and glossy posters, sanitised that story. It presented idols arsenic aesthetic milestones. Although the accumulation served an acquisition purpose, its determination betrayed its intended bona fide. It showed idols successful an situation divorced from the adoration of devotees who erstwhile anointed them with sandalwood paste oregon garlanded them with marigolds. The acts of worship, sweat and penance, were replaced by acts of display, wealthiness and privilege. That is the bequest of taste loot: not lone carnal displacement but besides the translation of meaning.

In this light, The British Museum’s agelong corridors, and the caller London exhibition, lucifer thing of a shrine and each of the spectacle of a furniture of curiosities. The idols, erstwhile cardinal to surviving spiritual signifier of thronging devotees, are present objects of detached admiration. To spot an idol of Lord Vishnu successful a sterile solid lawsuit successful the bosom of an air-conditioned and humidity-controlled country with monochrome walls is to witnesser not continuity but interruption. A communicative breached successful transit. 

Monetising the sacred

The deeper irony is that these idols are not simply being preserved; they are being monetised. Visitors successful London wage for entry, acquisition catalogues, possibly adjacent prime up idol-inspired souvenirs connected their mode out. These idols, erstwhile objects of communal offering, person been converted into gross streams for institutions acold from their origins. While galore museums successful India, particularly successful the much distant parts of the country, conflict with backing and the authorities finds it hard to support colony shrines from theft, The British Museum continues to crook assemblage acquisitions into taste and existent capital. 

This is wherever the accumulation revealed much than it intended. It was not conscionable astir “the improvement of idols” but astir the improvement of ownership. 

Their instrumentality indispensable show the reverence for culture, imaginativeness and foresight of the judges of the Court of Appeals for England and Wales who decided the Bumper Development Corporation v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis and Others [1991] EWCA Civ J0213-5 case successful 1991. In this case, seeking to found ownership of a stolen Nataraja idol, the judges ruled that the temple successful South India from wherever the Nataraja was stolen could beryllium a juristic idiosyncratic successful the U.K., and besides that the idol could ‘speak’ done the temple clergyman and asseverate its ‘yearning to spell home’.

Lessons for India

The Ancient India: Living Traditions accumulation has, nary doubt, been considered a occurrence arsenic a taste event. But it besides served arsenic a quiescent indictment of a strategy that inactive profits from assemblage acquisitions, without remorse, and of Indians with incomplete cognition of their ain history. To statement the “evolution” of idols portion refusing to instrumentality them to their homes is an enactment of selective memory.

For India, the acquisition is not lone astir creating a transparent model for demanding restitution. It is astir gathering dialog and existent education. Idols are much than chromatic and bronze; they are embodiments of faith, history, and identity. They indispensable beryllium allowed their archetypal contexts, to beryllium capable to get backmost successful interaction with their archetypal environments and until then, fixed the close mentation for them. Every accumulation overseas volition transportation with it the overbearing and looming shadiness of dispossession.

India’s generosity of participating successful redundant institutions similar the Commonwealth should besides alteration the state to equilibrium the ideas of the satellite arsenic 1 household with the value of taste identity. There are immoderate indications from planetary organisations that designation of taste dispossession indispensable instrumentality precedence implicit display. In September 2025, UNESCO unveiled its virtual database of stolen objects. However, it is inactive precise bare, containing lone 3 objects submitted by India. To beryllium genuinely effective, the database would besides person to bespeak the knowing of UNESCO’s 1970 ‘Convention connected the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property’ and make a broad database of assemblage era-looted taste objects. 

For now, gods whitethorn question crossed continents, but sensibility has been near behind.

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