Have you ever wondered how Indian deities came to have their signature physical features? The British Museum in London recently delved into this question, in an exhibition titled Ancient India: Living Traditions.
The nearly five-month-long exhibition, supported by Reliance Industries and Reliance Foundation, concluded on October 19, and traced the evolution of idol crafting in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism across a period of more than 2,000 years. It promised visitors a sweeping journey through centuries of Indian religious art. The ideas of education and attempting to explain the value of these objects was a good step towards accountability and collaboration but the lingering irony remained: of this story being told, not in Varanasi, Amravati, or Nalanda, but in Britain, a country whose colonial record includes the wholesale removal of these idols from their homes in India.
Given the celebrities in attendance at the museum’s inaugural fundraising gala, the glamorous Pink Ball, co-chaired by businesswoman Isha Ambani, to coincide with the conclusion of the exhibition, one wonders whether at some point there was a surreal realisation of the incongruity as curators and art critics debated the “aesthetics of devotion”. Many of the idols on display likely arrived through legally and morally dubious channels of the British Empire and its well-oiled cultural loot machinery.
Exhibitions like these are cultural scholarship layered over cultural dispossession. They offer an opportunity to reflect on what happens when spiritual icons become permanent migrants; when they are moved out of their warm Indian homes to cities where their names are unknown and often mispronounced. However, as with other such efforts, the exhibition has largely missed the chance to start a substantial dialogue on restitution and the ways in which constructive communication around this idea could be developed.
Devotion versus wealth and display
An exhibit at the ‘Ancient India: Living Traditions’ exhibition at The British Museum.
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The British Museum
The presence of Indian idols in Britain is not an accident of chance. Both during and after colonial rule, countless artefacts have found their way to the U.K., either looted, “gifted” under duress, or smuggled. Many such artefacts were simply catalogued as curiosities by colonial administrators who treated Indian art as anthropological data rather than living faith. By the late 19th century, Indian deities were as likely to be encountered in Bloomsbury as in Bodh Gaya.
The London exhibition, with its scholarly catalogues and glossy posters, sanitised that story. It presented idols as aesthetic milestones. Although the exhibition served an educational purpose, its location betrayed its intended bona fide. It showed idols in an environment divorced from the adoration of devotees who once anointed them with sandalwood paste or garlanded them with marigolds. The acts of worship, sweat and penance, were replaced by acts of display, wealth and privilege. That is the legacy of cultural loot: not only physical displacement but also the transformation of meaning.
In this light, The British Museum’s long corridors, and the recent London exhibition, resemble nothing of a shrine and all of the spectacle of a cabinet of curiosities. The idols, once central to living religious practice of thronging devotees, are now objects of detached admiration. To see an idol of Lord Vishnu in a sterile glass case in the heart of an air-conditioned and humidity-controlled room with monochrome walls is to witness not continuity but interruption. A story broken in transit.
A view of the exhibits at ‘Ancient India: Living Traditions’ at The British Museum in London.
| Photo Credit:
The British Museum
Monetising the sacred
The deeper irony is that these idols are not simply being preserved; they are being monetised. Visitors in London pay for entry, purchase catalogues, perhaps even pick up idol-inspired souvenirs on their way out. These idols, once objects of communal offering, have been converted into revenue streams for institutions far from their origins. While many museums in India, especially in the more remote parts of the country, struggle with funding and the government finds it difficult to protect village shrines from theft, The British Museum continues to turn colonial acquisitions into cultural and actual capital.
This is where the exhibition revealed more than it intended. It was not just about “the evolution of idols” but about the evolution of ownership.
‘Gaja-Lakshmi’, circa 1780, at The British Museum.
| Photo Credit:
The British Museum
Their return must display the reverence for culture, imagination and foresight of the judges of the Court of Appeals for England and Wales who decided the Bumper Development Corporation v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis and Others [1991] EWCA Civ J0213-5 case in 1991. In this case, seeking to establish ownership of a stolen Nataraja idol, the judges ruled that the temple in South India from where the Nataraja was stolen could be a juristic person in the U.K., and also that the idol could ‘speak’ through the temple priest and assert its ‘yearning to go home’.
Lessons for India
The Ancient India: Living Traditions exhibition has, no doubt, been considered a success as a cultural event. But it also served as a quiet indictment of a system that still profits from colonial acquisitions, without remorse, and of Indians with incomplete knowledge of their own history. To debate the “evolution” of idols while refusing to return them to their homes is an act of selective memory.
Ganesha made in Java from volcanic stone, 1000-1200 CE.
| Photo Credit:
The British Museum
For India, the lesson is not only about creating a transparent framework for demanding restitution. It is about building dialogue and real education. Idols are more than stone and bronze; they are embodiments of faith, history, and identity. They must be allowed their original contexts, to be able to get back in touch with their original environments and until then, given the correct explanation for them. Every exhibition abroad will carry with it the overbearing and looming shadow of dispossession.
India’s generosity of participating in redundant institutions like the Commonwealth should also enable the country to balance the ideas of the world as one family with the importance of cultural identity. There are some indications from international organisations that recognition of cultural dispossession must take precedence over display. In September 2025, UNESCO unveiled its virtual database of stolen objects. However, it is still very bare, containing only three objects submitted by India. To be truly effective, the database would also have to reflect the understanding of UNESCO’s 1970 ‘Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property’ and create a comprehensive database of colonial era-looted cultural objects.
For now, gods may travel across continents, but sensibility has been left behind.
Sahibnoor is Lecturer, Jindal Global Law School, and Lavanya is Lawyer, RFKN Advocates.
Published – October 24, 2025 04:09 pm IST
