Western countries must return Indian antiquities.

Western countries must return Indian antiquities. They are India's wealth

THE Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India Dr Gautam Sengupta recently said that India will launch a "diplomatic and legal campaign" to retrieve India’s stolen and looted antiquities that adorn western museums now. Top in the list are the Koh-I-Noor diamond, the Sultanganj Buddha (over 1500 years old), the idol of goddess Saraswati from Raja Bhoj’s temple, and Amravati railings, he said. Sengupta rightly said that the list of items looted, stolen and forced out of the country is too long to handle. And yet, India must make a beginning. The efforts made till now have not borne fruit. Now India has decided to seek the help of UNESCO and the support of other nations like Mexico, Egypt, Greece and China who are also victims of colonial loot.

Routinely Indian artefacts come up for sale in international markets both open and underground. These are mostly precious items taken from India by the colonisers as and when they found it. Any number of idols, made of metals, alloys, stones and crystal have been snatched out of temples and shipped out. There was the classic case of the idol of Nataraja, installed at the Puttur temple in Tamil Nadu, which was traced at London. It was returned to India and restored to the temple after a long drawn legal battle.

One of the rarest of rare Atharva Veda manuscript in Sharda script (dated 900 BC) is now located in the Tubingen University Library, Germany. The library presented a digitised version of this manuscript to India a few years ago. Visitors and scholars to various museums in western countries speak with wonder about the precious manuscripts of India being preserved there. No price can be calculated for these lost antiquities. That they belong to India is not in doubt. That they were taken out of their places of origin by plunder, pillage and theft is also true. Hence these museums cannot claim ownership over these items.

While this issue is undisputable that the precious artefacts should be returned to the countries of origin, it is equally important to ponder over our own track record in caring for the remnants of our great cultural past. Smuggling antiquities is a multi billion business. Almost once a week the police stop idols from being transported out of the country. These are only the cases caught and stopped. There is a law that says that any article of more than 75 years old cannot be taken out of the borders of India. The ASI has the responsibility to give approval for any antiquity to be taken out. The law is never applied in spirit.

Dr Subramanian Swamy had filed a case in the Supreme Court against antiquity smuggling with the collusion of senior politicians. He had sought to expose how the nexus worked. The ASI had a few years ago buried the case of serious allegations against a very senior archaeologist, who was excavating a site. He was accused of giving free access to smugglers into the site even before the excavated objects were registered. More recently Ms Maneka Gandhi, as Culture Minister discovered to everybody’s horror that the master catalogue of the National Museum had not been updated for over a decade and during her visit to the museum found hundreds of non-catalogued art objects lying in the corridors of the museum. It meant that if anybody walked away with any object, the museum would not be even able to complain.

The state of our museums is pitiable. Except the few national museums, the state museums are all badly maintained. The recent theft of Tagore memorabilia and his Nobel Prize medal only highlight the plight of the museums. Again, it had come to light recently that some of Raja Ravi Verma’s paintings were missing from the Trivandrum museum. It was later, explained away as ‘mistakes’ while cataloguing. The truth is not known.

India must make a strong case for the return of the smuggled art objects. No other country suffered such loot as India did, also because no other nation had this treasure of precious things. From Babur to Nadir Shah to Gazni to Khilji to Robert Clive to Dalhousie, it has been one raid after another. That we have withstood them all and continue to flourish is in itself a miracle. And hence our case becomes stronger. The western countries should have the conscience and the grace to return all the material in their possession that once belonged to India. Let them not look at it as assets. They had been the caretakers till now and we are grateful for that. But now, it is time they returned home.