Just Like That| British museums: Curators of plundered Indian wealth, culture

Among the most evocative looted object is Tipu Sultan’s mechanical tiger, a wooden automaton depicting a tiger mauling a British soldier

To be honest, I don’t like to visit British museums. This has nothing to do with any aversion to British aesthetics, or some of the genuinely beautiful things displayed in them. My reservation stems from the fact that so much of what is there is part of the wanton plunder and loot of priceless Indian artefacts, and indeed, from other countries so colonised or conquered.

In 1937, the Kohinoor, the ‘pride of India’, pared down to European tastes, was embedded in the British crown. (AP File Photo)

This was my reaction when many years ago I visited the Tower of London Museum. There, the centre of attraction is the famed Kohinoor diamond, rightly described as the ‘mountain of light’. The 105.6 carat flawless diamond once adorned the Peacock Throne in Delhi. In 1849, following the Anglo-Sikh war, a young Maharaja Duleep Singh of Patiala was coerced to surrender it to Queen Victoria as part of the Treaty of Lahore in 1849. In 1937, the Kohinoor, the ‘pride of India’, pared down to European tastes, was embedded in the British crown.

The Kohinoor was not the only priceless stone that came to Britain from India. In 1701, Thomas Pitt, while Governor of Madras, helped himself to a diamond from the Golconda mines of the Moghul emperor, unbelievably weighing as much as 410 carats. Christened the Pitt diamond, it was valued even then at British pounds 125,000. Pitt later sold it to the Prince Regent of France, who made it a part of the French crown.

Another glaring example is the Amaravati marbles, a collection of exquisite Buddhist sculptures from the 2nd century BCE, originally from Andhra Pradesh. These artefacts were part of the stupa at Amaravati, one of the most significant Buddhist sites in India. In the 19th century, British officials, including Sir Walter Elliot, dismantled the stupa and shipped over 120 sculptures to London.

Today, the majority of these marbles are housed in the British Museum. The Indian government has repeatedly requested their return, but the British Museum, like many Western institutions, hides behind the argument of “preservation” and “universal access,” as if theft can be legitimised by curation.

The Sultanganj Buddha, a 1,500-year-old copper statue weighing over 500 kg, is one of the finest examples of Gupta-period artistry. Discovered in Bihar during railway construction in 1861, it was immediately shipped to Britain and sold to the Birmingham Museum.

Among the most evocative of looted objects is Tipu Sultan’s mechanical tiger, a wooden automaton depicting a tiger mauling a British soldier. This was not just a toy but a political statement by Tipu, the defiant ruler of Mysore who resisted British expansion until his death in 1799. After the fall of Srirangapatna, the British ransacked Tipu’s palace and took the tiger as a war trophy. Today, it sits in the Victoria & Albert Museum, a mute witness to the brutal suppression of India’s resistance.

The Lion Capital of Ashoka, the national emblem of India, was originally part of a pillar erected by Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE. While the capital remains in Sarnath, other Ashokan pillars were broken and taken by British antiquarians. Fragments of these pillars are now scattered across British museums, their dismemberment symbolic of how colonialism treated India’s history—piece by piece, until the original context was lost.

These are only some major examples of the plunder. The fact is that, economically, Britain impoverished India beyond all degree. Before the Britishers came, India had the largest economy in the world accounting for 25 per cent of global GDP; after they left, we were down to 2 per cent. An Oxfam report of January this year, estimates that Britain robbed India of $64.82 trillion between 1765 to 1900. Of this, the top 10 % of British society took 33.8 trillion, enough to carpet the entire surface of London today in Pound 50 notes four times over. This was looted by a country for whose defence 60,000 Indians gave their lives in the First World War, and two and a half million served it in the Second World War, in conditions where an Indian soldier was paid a salary of ₹18 and a British soldier 75.

At 45, Berkeley Square in London, stands a house with a blue plaque stating: ‘Clive of India, Soldier and Administrator, lived here (1725-1774)’. One day, standing before it, I was consumed by deeply conflicted thoughts. I had no grievance against the present generation of the British. But I could not erase from my mind what their ancestors had done. The Bengal Famine, a result of deliberate British callousness, claimed 3 million lives. Winston Churchill, for whom Indians were ‘a beastly people with a beastly religion’, said: ‘The starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks’. Robert Clive, was among the founder plunderers of India. His wealth was so immense that to conceal it he converted most of it into priceless diamonds which he carried back to England. Less than half of one of those nuggets would have financed the grand four-storeyed house before which I stood.