Repatriating culture
After a 10-year investigation, on 11 July 2025, officials from the Belgian Public Prosecutor’s office attended a ceremony, handing back an ancient wooden sarcophagus, dating back to third century BCE, to Ahmed Abu Zeid, Egypt’s ambassador in Brussels. Many museums in Europe and elsewhere hold similar significant collections from erstwhile colonies – some with questionable provenance, some legitimate and some with none. Often, museums and cultural institutions make the case that, given the utmost curatorial care and sensitivity to display objects that are sacred and of historic significance, these artifacts are safer, better preserved and would have otherwise been destroyed or sold and smuggled to private collectors through black trades. Often, in addition to the perception that the countries of origin do not have facilities, expertise or resources to preserve artifacts, it is claimed that their movement may cause irreparable damage to their fragility and protected curatorial and conservation stability.
According to some estimates, the illegal trade of cultural property averages north of $2.6 billion annually. A study undertaken in 2023 puts the value of nearly half a million illicit artifacts traded in Europe alone in the $500 million threshold. Many art markets remain undetected and work within the strict parenthesis of trust, with regard to provenance and invitation only conflated transactions that are camouflaged as gifts, exchanges and bequeaths, with transactions avoiding financial institutions in direct sales.
Though the UNESCO Convention of 1970 established the international law designed to tracking illicit trafficking of cultural property and repatriating cultural and sacred objects as well as human remains, there is a need to strengthen both the law and instruments of enforcement. The UNESCO Convention of 2003 focussed on intangible heritage, including living traditions, languages, rituals and practices that communities, groups, or individuals inherit and pass on, beyond material culture. Article 49 of the Indian Constitution mandates protection of monuments, palaces and objects of national importance, particularly those of artistic or historical significance, from deterioration, disfigurement, destruction, removal, disposal or export.
India lost countless cultural and sacred artifacts, deities and statues during the British colonial rule, with thousands ending up in museums or with private collectors and public institutions. The most famous and the most controversial among them is the 105.6 carat (originally weighing in at 191 carats) Koh-i-Noor, ceded to the British Crown after the annexation of Punjab in 1849. While India’s call for its return has not yielded traction, success in repatriation has steadily trickled in on a number of other fronts.
Last year, the US returned 297 stolen artifacts to India, including statues, pottery, ivory, ornaments and other works of art and antiquities, spanning 4,000 years. From bronze Jain Thirthankars to Lord Buddha in stone, these priceless artifacts are priceless edifice of Indian civilisation. As the repatriation process becomes better co-ordinated across various agencies, the Interpol launched and ID-Art App that allows NGOs and Individuals to upload, track, identify and receive alerts on theft and illicit trafficking. The app lists over 150 works of Indian origin on its visual database.
Perhaps one of the most dramatic cases of an ongoing controversy is what is referred to as the Birmingham Buddha. Discovered during railway construction in Sultanganj, Bihar, this exquisite 2.3-metre-tall copper statue of Buddha in abhayamudra dates back to circa 500 AD from the Gupta-Pala transition period. Discovered by an engineer E.B. Harris in 1861, the exquisite massive one-metre-wide statue weighing 500 kg was shipped to Birmingham to be housed in a museum there in 1867. With an estimated value in the millions, it now resides in the faith gallery of the Art Museum, with no intent for repatriation to India.
Museums, which house artifacts and iconography of classical years of a bygone era, are souls of civil societies and repositories of our collective thought. The sheer diversity of India and its incredible insights into the micro and macro of the material and mirage of maya has made its association with cultural collective intrinsically porous and osmotic. The very essence of its detachment has the power to bring back what is essentially its karmic justice – way beyond the frame work of laws, lamentations and litigations. In an ironic continuum of provenance, people still bestow faith in the power of the puranic Karthaviryarjuna mantra to recover stolen goods, misplaced items and find lost souls!
The author is an India-born world-renowned Canadian museologist, Commonwealth Scholar and an advocate of Cultural Repatriation. He is the founding director of several stellar museums across continents, and author of numerous books on the future of museum practice