The recent news that the Netherlands will return 484 valuable artefacts it looted from Indonesia and Sri Lanka during the colonial period — it includes the fabled “Lombok treasure” of precious stones, gold and silver jewellery to Indonesia and the exquisitely-decorated bronze-and-gilt cannon of Kandy to Sri Lanka — once again puts the focus on an issue that will not go away. Should colonial countries continue to hold on to cultural artefacts and precious objects that were stolen during the period of imperial domination, or acknowledge their misappropriation and return them to their original homelands?
The British have stubbornly refused for decades to return the so-called Elgin Marbles, a collection of classical Greek marble sculptures purloined by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon temple in Athens, or the Rosetta Stone taken from Egypt in 1802. But they had shown more generosity in repatriating some of the Benin Bronzes (looted by British forces in 1897) to Nigeria. Yet, when it comes to their extensive treasure trove of Indian artefacts, from the Kohinoor diamond to the sculptures from the Amaravati stupa, they dig in their heels, fearful of starting a haemorrhage that, in the words of former Prime Minister David Cameron, would soon leave the British Museum empty.
We cannot blame the British for everything that is wrong in our country today; nor should we see the return of such looted items as a panacea to cure all the ills and wrongs of colonialism. One can even accept that there is a statute of limitations on colonial wrongdoings, but there is none on human memory, especially living memory, for as I have pointed out in my book, An Era of Darkness, there are still millions of Indians alive today who remember the iniquities of the British Empire in India. History belongs in the past; but understanding it, and doing whatever we can about it, is the duty of the present.
A trauma that lingers
Equally, we must understand that the return of stolen property is not a substitute for the trauma and the horrors caused by colonialism, because the agony suffered can never truly be removed through such belated restitution. The same holds for financial reparations, since the value of the human lives lost because of colonial indifference or brutality can never be accurately computed. The return of cultural artefacts is rather a moral obligation which the West owes to its colonies, just as reparations can be morally justified as the wealth and the economic success of these former colonial powers were built on the broken backs of their colonies. The return of cultural items offers a semblance of justice as well as expiates a legal and moral obligation which cannot and should not be ignored.
The return of some of the treasures looted from India in the course of colonialism is also a much easier solution than financial reparations would be. The money exacted by the British from India in taxes and exploitation has already been spent, and cannot realistically be reclaimed. But individual pieces of statuary sitting in British museums could be, if for nothing else than their symbolic value. After all, if looted Nazi-era art can be (and now is being) returned to their rightful owners in various western countries, why is the principle any different for looted colonial treasures?
Flaunting the Kohinoor on the Queen Mother’s crown in the Tower of London is a powerful reminder of the injustices perpetrated by the former imperial power. Until it is returned — at least as a symbolic gesture of expiation — it will remain evidence of the loot, plunder and misappropriation that colonialism was really all about. Perhaps that is the best argument for leaving the Kohinoor where it emphatically does not belong — in British hands.
Need for true atonement
Of course, the process should not end with a few pieces of statuary or jewellery alone. I have argued for some time that the question of retrospective justice for colonialism is not answered by financial reparations alone, but by moral atonement.
This, in my view, should take three forms aside from the (still improbable) return of looted colonial-era artefacts: teaching unvarnished British colonial history in schools in the United Kingdom, setting up with British tax money a museum to the horrors and iniquities of colonialism in the Imperial capital. And, above all, expressing an apology to the victims of colonialism.
When Willy Brandt was Chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologise to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a Socialist was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologising. But in doing so — with his historic ‘Kniefall von Warschau’ (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recognising the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as Chancellor. That is precisely why, when I released my book, Inglorious Empire, in the United Kingdom, I called for atonement, rather than financial or other compensation for India.
What Britain could do
While no British government of 2023 bears a shred of the responsibility for the horrors of colonialism, as a symbol of the nation that once allowed it to happen, the British government could atone for the past sins of the nation. That is also what Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did in 2016 when he apologised on behalf of Canada for the actions of his country’s authorities a century earlier in denying permission for the Indian immigrants on the Komagata Maru to land in Vancouver, thereby sending most of them to their deaths. Mr. Trudeau’s Willy Brandt moment needs to find its British echo.
It is unlikely to happen. Britain continues to persist in its intransigence. The U.K. is still well behind the Dutch on the issue of the restitution of colonial artefacts. It shelters behind de-accessioning laws that prevent anything currently in a British Museum from being returned to the place it was looted from. Since pretty much every museum in London is a chor bazaar, the British do stand to lose a lot, from the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum to the mechanical tiger devouring a British redcoat (commissioned by Tipu Sultan) in the Victoria & Albert Museum. It is safer to say no to everything than to return one item and unwittingly prise open the floodgates.
But while they say no, they are not prepared to say sorry. An apology — an act of genuine contrition at, ideally, Jallianwala Bagh, like Mr. Trudeau’s over Komagata Maru — might work best as a significant gesture of atonement. And building a Museum of Colonialism would show a determination, in the metropolitan country, to learn the lessons of Empire — to teach British schoolchildren what sources of loot, pillage and profit built their homeland, just as German children are shepherded to concentration camps to see the awful reality of what their forefathers did.
If all this is done, then true atonement — of the purely moral kind, involving a serious consideration of historical responsibility rather than mere admission of guilt or payment of money — might be achieved. Is that really too much to hope for?
Shashi Tharoor is third-term Lok Sabha Member of Parliament (Congress) from Thiruvananthapuram, and the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning author of An Era of Darkness and of The Battle of Belonging. His most recent book is Ambedkar: A Life
