Indian treasures at home and abroad

Historically significant sites, artefacts and papers in India and the UK should be made accessible to wider audiences

In the first week of August 2021 there were media reports that the National Gallery of Australia located in Canberra had decided to return 14 ancient Indian paintings and sculptures, including a 12th century sculpture of a dancing child-saint called Sambandar. These pieces were smuggled out of India by a former New York art dealer called Subhash Kapoor. The full details about all the treasures, including the peacock throne of Mughal kings, looted from Delhi in March 1739 by Nadir Shah of Persia, may never be available. Comparatively, there is better accounting of Indian art and other valuables acquired by the likes of Robert Clive of the East India Company and subsequently between 1858 and 1947 by India-based British government administrators. 

Robert Clive, credited with crafting East India Company’s victory over Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah in June 1757, took back many objects of high artistic and monetary value. His son Edward Clive, who was appointed governor of Madras in 1798, also sent back possessions acquired during his stay in India. These invaluable items are now available for viewing in the Powis Castle in Wales, which came under the care of the United Kingdom’s National Trust in 1952. The exquisite items in the Powis Castle collection date back mostly to 1600-1830s and include statues, ivory, jewellery and ceremonial armour.  

Illustration: Binay Sinha

Many precious works of art and sculpture carried away during the period of British colonial rule over India are exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. The India section of the V&A houses thousands of art objects dating from 2nd century BC to the 15th century. An exquisite Shiva Nataraja sculpture in the V&A is made of a copper alloy and listed as a 12th century piece from Tamil Nadu. This piece was “donated” in 1935 by Lord Ampthill who was the Governor of Madras from 1900-1906. Another representative piece on display at the V&A, which was part of treasures excavated at Coimbatore, dates back to the 15th century. This item was “bequeathed” to the V&A in 1927 by Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India from 1898-1905. During my visits to the V&A between 2012 and 2013, I remember admiring several near thousand-year-old pieces “gifted” by comparatively junior Deputy Commissioner level Indian Civil Service officers.   

The Royal Geographical Society, located again in London, has priceless drawings of India’s east and west coasts. These were done by surveyors on board British ships going up and down the east and west coasts of the Indian peninsula in the 17th and 18th centuries. Separately, the British Library in London holds archives and records of the East India company (1600-1858), the Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India (1784-1858) and the India Office (1858-1947). It is likely that the most sensitive of these papers are not available to the public. In my visits to the British Library, I was struck by the wealth of written record on the deliberations among the East India Company Military Board members about roads, buildings and irrigation works and later within the Central Public Works Department. These include engineering and funding details for bridges on the Grand Trunk Road to Peshawar and digging of the Upper Ganges Canal close to Roorkee in 1842. Despite my efforts, no interest was shown by the Indian government to research the engineering nuggets of wisdom buried in the British Library. There are innumerable valuables and papers of historical interest stored in public and private collections in other parts of the UK, including Scotland. 

Invaders by land and sea from India’s North-West and West respectively with misplaced zeal against idolatry have had many works of Indian art defaced or destroyed. In Sarnath, visitors can see the noses and faces of most of the stone carvings chipped away or mutilated. Another sampling of disfigurement of sculptures can be seen in the Elephanta caves located 11 kilometres off the coast from Mumbai. These caves date back to about the 5th century AD and one Shiva statue is 7 metres tall. Many exquisite art pieces in temples and palaces in South India were systematically taken out of India and in the North invader-rulers often plundered or defaced works of high artistic merit. A number of imposing structures of considerable engineering excellence and works of aesthetic significance were damaged or destroyed in internecine warfare in India. For example, the ruins of palaces and temples of the magnificent and sprawling Vijayanagar empire (1336 to 1646) can be seen at Hampi in Karnataka.  

Many Indians cannot afford to visit the UK or even historically important sites within India and are inadequately informed about their own artistic and engineering heritage. The prospects of the Indian government being able to persuade British museums to return objects sourced from India are negligible. As for inter-museum loans across continents, these take place rarely because of the challenges of safe transportation and exorbitantly high insurance costs. Even today in many sought-after English medium schools in India, the history curriculum usually covers only the British colonial and Mughal periods. Consequently, many in Indian decision-making circles continue to have only a nodding acquaintance with the country’s history and little knowledge about the “The wonder that was India” —to use the title of A L Basham’s 1954 book.  

An affordable corrective would be for the Indian government to push for a 10-part, one-hour each documentary series, with three-dimensional holographic images of historically significant Indian sites, valuables, maps and documents, including those held in the UK and elsewhere in the world. Such an initiative should preferably be entrusted to a collaborative private sector effort, including marquee names such as Infosys, the Tata group and Reliance Industries. This cooperative effort could involve the British Council and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The documentaries should be in English plus dubbed in all Indian languages and if done imaginatively, would be of immense interest within India and abroad. 

j.bhagwati@gmail.com. The writer is former Indian Ambassador, Head Corporate Finance World Bank, and currently Distinguished Fellow at Centre for Social and Economic Progress