Symposium on Confronting Colonial Objects: Beyond the Performance of Restitution – An Unexpected Tale of Minority Disenfranchisement and Political Conflicts in Tamil Nadu

[Raghavi Viswanath and Jessica Wiseman are PhD candidates at the European University Institute (EUI)]

In the opening chapter of his book ‘Confronting Colonial Objects: Histories, Legalities, and Access to Culture’, Carsten Stahn promises to “present both the different facets of colonial violence and their enduring effects, and possible avenues to renew relations” (page 8). In the first six chapters of his book, Stahn traces the entanglements of colonialism, international law, and “heritage” with admirable conciseness. What Stahn does in these chapters is valuable on its own, making a much-needed contribution to discourse and scholarship on colonialism which, as he admits, has traditionally marginalised conversations about restitution and cultural heritage (preface, page v). It is in the final three chapters, however, that Stahn makes an even more innovative contribution. Through a wide range of case studies – spread across geographies, temporalities, and disciplines – Stahn asks whether –and indeed how–we might move beyond diagnosing the so-called entanglement of colonialism and culture, to embracing a more ethical and relational paradigm for cultural justice (chapter 9). 

In chapter 8, Stahn teases the idea of opening up legal frameworks for responsibility for colonial taking of cultural objects to diverse epistemologies. Stahn nudges readers to think about the different connotations of “restitution” and “return”, of “objects” and “ownership” (chapter 8.4), all of which point to his commitment towards respecting self-determined epistemic choices of marginalised communities (pages 36-37).

While Stahn’s critique is valuable and important, we argue for an even more ambitious dismantling of colonial grammars within the restitution debate. Central to Stahn’s argument is the need to move beyond inter-State heritage relations (chapter 6.2.2). Stahn emphasises on the dissonance and the challenges posed by the demands of local communities to State interests in repatriation claims (pages 452-455). He acknowledges that States tend to use heritage for political gains and to prioritise the interests of some sub-state communities over others.

However, from our reading, it seems that Stahn unwittingly uses the same binary analytical grammars that he proposes to discard through his relational justice critique (pages 56, 235). We propose that by predominantly focusing on the conflicts between the heritage demands of colonisers and colonised people (chapter 8), rather than scrutinising the assumptions underlying that binary, he replicates some of the problematic colonial grammars on which the original “heritage relations” were built (page 390). 

One such assumption is the homogenous and universal nature of the heritage desires of sub-state communities. In the sections that follow, through a study of ongoing restitution claims in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, we show how Stahn’s critique both captures the political realities of heritage restitution and yet fails to address a perhaps more fundamental issue that underlies the restitution debate: namely, that all communities everywhere want such cultural objects and desire to have them repatriated.

1. Setting the Scene in Tamil Nadu

The Hindu-majority state of Tamil Nadu is home to over 48,000 temples. Over the course of decades and perhaps centuries, many of the idols and artefacts were removed from their original homes and found their way into private collections and museums abroad. 2016 marked an important resurrection of the debate concerning the restitution of Tamil Nadu’s temple treasures. In a highly publicised opening of its new Asian wing, the Philadelphia Museum of Art unveiled 64 intricately carved stone temple pillars as part of a reimagined 16th century Nayaka temple. While the reimagining was hailed by many as meticulous and creative, for some, it prompted questions as to whether these pillars – removed from the Temple in 1912 by an American collector and later acquired by the Philadelphia Museum  – continued to belong on American soil. Despite the vociferous demands for restitution by the Tamil Nadu government at the time, the pillars remain at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the meantime, the Tamil Nadu government’s advocacy for restitution has only grown louder, successfully negotiating many high-profile repatriations of temple artefacts. The Tamil Nadu government’s advocacy forms part of a broader initiative of the federal ruling party Bharatiya Janata Party, a self-proclaimed Hindu nationalist outfit.

2. Disenfranchisement of Minority Communities 

In 2023, Prime Minister Modi identified restitution of cultural heritage as a key theme during India’s Presidency of the G20, making several highly publicised calls for the return of India’s tangible heritage and inviting attention to the several thousands of repatriations that his party BJP had successfully negotiated since their coming to power in 2014. Modi’s comments contained a consistent refrain of unification and assimilation of India’s national identity through heritage.

He also “announced the upcoming launch of the PM Vishwakarma Yojana, with an initial outlay of 1.8 billion dollars, aimed at supporting traditional artisans and preserving India’s rich cultural heritage.” This scheme followed in the heels of several other similar high-budget initiatives, aimed at enlarging the list of protected archaeological sites and sanctioning the renovation of several monuments and statues. 

Modi’s repatriation efforts have also been seen as a political win for the repatriating States, enabling countries like the UK to share credit and present themselves, as Stahn observes, as engaged in meaningful decolonising work.

Despite this transnational laudatory political narrative and Modi’s overt reassurances that heritage serves to unite and economically empower all Indians, such moves are more complex than one would expect. As Lefèvre notes, underpinning these initiatives is a large-scale political policy that ultimately aims at “emphasising the Hinduness of India’s public space and at expurgating from the latter all material traces related to the pluri-secular presence of non-Hindus (especially Muslims) in the subcontinent”. This has also led to an alarming blurring of the boundaries between what is cultural and what is religious, conflating Indian-ness with Hindu-ness. 

In contrast, the heritage of India’s many minority communities – both those marginalised by religion and those marginalised by caste – struggle to find patronage within India’s heritage policies. Recent lists of the monuments identified as eligible for adoption under Modi’s celebrated ‘Adopt a Heritage’ scheme as well as the ‘heritage circuits’ prepared by the Ministry of Tourism show an overwhelming bias towards conservation and publicization of Hindu heritage over even highly popular Islamic heritage sites such as the Taj Mahal which have for years been plastered on India’s heritage promotional material. 

Hindutva promotion in the name of heritage protection is particularly obvious in India’s repatriation strategies. For instance, amongst the artefacts returned by the United States to India in September 2021, over 130 belonged to Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions. Even the famed Mughal era Koh-I-Noor diamond, which Stahn rightly notes remains India’s most infamous and well-discussed looted object (chapter 3.2.3), has been glaringly absent from India’s restitution programme ever since the Modi government came to power. Only recently has the Koh-I-Noor has come back onto the BJP’s docket, almost certainly as a result of India’s renewed ties with the new Indian-origin British Prime Minister. 

One could even argue that the emphasis on a repatriation agenda by nature, or perhaps by design, invisibilizes certain cultural and religious traditions, like many within Islam, that do not centre their religious worship around idols. By foregrounding art and artefacts currently found in Western museums, India’s efforts replicate the same colonial fetishization of particular kinds of “oriental” objects, while sidelining others. In so doing, they demonstrate Stahn’s wider critique of Statist models of restitution and their tendency to disenfranchise sub-state communities.

3. Problem of Plenty

While Stahn touches on many of these issues in arguing to expand the ways in which sub-state communities can exercise their right to own “cultural objects” (chapter 8.3), we propose that there is value in extending the scope of inquiry to examine and perhaps even contest the assumption that all communities desire to have their cultural objects returned. Our inquiry is inspired by Immler’s call to move beyond the simplified identity of postcolonial recognition politics in the context of repatriation. We borrow Immler’s frame of the “dialogic self”, which not only foregrounds the multivocality of perspectives, but also recognizes the multiple voices that live within the otherwise monolithic self that are “in dialogue and sometimes even in conflict with each other.”

A closer study of the afterlife of the 2016 Tamil Nadu controversy reveals that in many cases, repatriated heritages are received with far less enthusiasm by receiving communities than usually presumed. Illustratively, several temple officials and members of community-led temple boards in Tamil Nadu complained that they were left with far too many objects than they had capacity to take care of. To an extent, this is a direct result of the endemic problem of under-resourcing. As Rajasekaran notes, the state government allots meagre amounts to local temples for their daily services, forcing temples to stretch themselves financially to care appropriately for newly repatriated objects. This, however, is not simply a question of scarcity of resources. As Chao comments, in many cases, repatriating cultural objects to their “place of origin” conflicts directly with contemporary and lived stewardship practices relating to these objects. In Tamil Nadu itself, while the historical Brahmin temple rules – called the Agama rules – call for restitution of all temple artefacts found outside temple premises, in practice, damaged and corroded temple objects are frequently discarded and moved to private exhibitions in order to make way for newly repatriated objects. With the growing inventory of repatriated objects, temple authorities have started to frequently vocalise their concerns that they are unable to take care of these objects in an appropriate manner. As Madurai-based temple archaeologist C. Shanthalingam notes “it’s easy for private collectors and museums to keep, preserve and exhibit a piece or two in an ideal and safe environment”, as opposed to temples which are already struggling to maintain the pieces they already host. In fact, many receiving communities in Tamil Nadu have asked the State to desist from repatriation demands and allow for heritage to be retained in private collections and museums in order to keep them in “robust health”. 

The Tamil Nadu case study points to the fact that the restitution debate has come to recognize the importance of community-authored notions of value of cultural objects. Nevertheless, it continues to chain communities to neoliberal, capitalist, and inherently Statist ideas of how this value must be honoured. In so doing, despite its liberal dressing, the revamped restitution debate leaves no room for the heritage desires of communities that do not conform to State-prescribed metrics of rightful possession, heritage desire, and stewardship.