SHYAM BHATIA
Two nations at the ends of Asia — India and Greece — are now bound by a common quest: to reclaim the soul of their civilizations. Both are demanding the return of treasures taken in the age of empire and still displayed in London’s marble halls. The Chola bronzes, the Amaravati sculptures, the Parthenon Marbles, all plundered, all praised, all imprisoned behind glass.
In New Delhi, curators, diplomats and civil society groups are pressing for the return of Ashokan relics and Chola bronzes that left India under imperial rule. Their campaign finds an echo in Athens, where Greece continues its long fight to recover the Parthenon Marbles. Both nations, heirs to ancient civilizations, face the same polite deflections from the same British institution.
That institution is the British Museum, the world’s grandest trophy room. Earlier this year it hosted a £2,000-a-ticket “Pink Ball”, billed as London’s answer to New York’s Met Gala. Beneath the Great Court’s glass dome, celebrities sipped champagne within sight of the Parthenon sculptures, the Benin Bronzes and the Amaravati friezes, fragments of three continents bound by one history of removal.
Among the star guests were India’s Isha Ambani and Anoushka Shankar, their presence widely photographed and dissected in London’s society columns. Some claimed Isha outshone Anoushka; others insisted it was the other way around. It hardly mattered. Both women — symbols of modern Indian success and artistry — found themselves drawn into a spectacle that sought to raise money, and legitimacy, for an institution built on stolen heritage.
Outside, protesters called for restitution. Inside, trustees toasted ‘diversity through culture’. The contrast was grotesque: Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Marie Antoinette ate cake while the French starved; and the British Museum dined while India and Greece watched their heritage paraded as decoration.
Only months earlier came one of the Museum’s worst scandals. A senior curator from its Greek and Roman Department, Peter Higgs, was dismissed after allegedly stealing and selling small antiquities online over many years. For Greece, it was injury after insult: the same institution that refuses to return the Parthenon Marbles was revealed to have been looted from within and from the Greek section itself. The plunderer, plundered.
Hartwig Fischer, then director, resigned, admitting the Museum “did not respond as comprehensively as it should have” to early warnings. The episode shattered the claim that London alone could be the unimpeachable guardian of the world’s heritage.
India’s cultural establishment has followed the saga closely. New Delhi’s National Museum and Tamil Nadu’s heritage department have quietly documented dozens of sacred bronzes traced to London dealers or British institutions. For Indian officials, the theft scandal merely confirmed what history had already shown: that colonial guardianship was never about protection, only possession.
The Greek minister of culture, Lina Mendoni, condemned the Pink Ball as “offensive to cultural assets and endangering the exhibits themselves”, adding that “the safety, integrity and ethics of the monuments should be the primary concern of the British Museum”. Her words could easily have been spoken in Delhi.
Nicholas Cullinan, the current director, told The Times that guests “want to walk in on a pink carpet”. He defended the event as inclusive and cosmopolitan. The contradiction was glaring: pink carpets and colonial ghosts beneath the same roof.
Cullinan speaks of a “third way” — reciprocal loans rather than permanent returns — calling the Museum “a forum where we are all brought together and confronted with different histories”. Yet that rhetoric conceals a familiar hierarchy. The British Museum still decides who borrows, who visits, who interprets. It is the broker of history, not its penitent.
A recent disclosure under Britain’s Freedom of Information law showed the Museum spends £13 million annually on security and £1.2 million on communications. Its director earns £215,000 — more than the British Prime Minister — while gallery guards take home a fraction of that. The symbolism is stark: the guardians of the Empire’s spoils live among them on public expense, housed like viceroys within the palace of plunder.
For both Delhi and Athens, the battle is about moral vision, not just legal ownership. The British Museum Act of 1963, forbidding disposal of any object, has become a shield against ethical repair. Critics say it converts guardianship into possession by another name.
India’s position is clear: artefacts removed under colonial coercion belong morally, if not legally, to the communities that created them. Greece argues the same for its marbles: sculptures carved for a single temple, mutilated by removal. Both nations see restitution as restoration, not revenge.
Each has built modern museums — the new galleries in Chennai and Delhi, and the Acropolis Museum in Athens — ready to receive their heritage. Both view return as an act of friendship, not hostility. As Melina Mercouri told UNESCO in 1982, “the Parthenon Marbles are a tribute to the democratic philosophy … They are the essence of our Greekness.” Her appeal for Greece now resonates in India’s own call for the return of its sacred bronzes and relics.
The British Museum’s predicament mirrors earlier hypocrisies. In the 1970s, British companies justified staying in apartheid South Africa as “reform from within”. Today, trustees talk of “dialogue” while halls remain filled with trophies. The language of reform again masks the practice of retention.
Beyond Bloomsbury — the central London district that houses the British Museum and once symbolized the literary heart of empire — Britain still hesitates to confront its imperial past. India and Greece, by contrast, have learned that dignity requires persistence.
When Willy Brandt, then Chancellor of West Germany, knelt before the Warsaw Ghetto memorial in 1970, he offered a wordless act of atonement that transformed Europe’s conscience. It was a gesture of humility from a leader who personally bore no guilt but accepted moral responsibility on behalf of his nation. No British leader — or British Museum official — has yet bowed before the victims of colonial plunder. The silence has itself become part of the national heritage.
For India, restitution is not about erasing history but completing it. Each act of return — a bronze, a relic, a marble — chips away at the myth that empire was a civilizing gift. When the British Museum finally finds the courage to return what it took, it will not diminish Britain. It will dignify it and affirm that the guardianship of history belongs equally to those from whom history was once taken.
Shyam Bhatia is the London correspondent of The Tribune