62 years ago, the small Indian town of Thanjavur woke up to devastating news. A 2,000-year-old temple in the city was ransacked, losing its beloved deity. Police in India say the centuries-old statue of the dancing Hindu god Shiva (Nataragar) is now more than 2,000 miles away, within the walls of the Asia Society and Museum in New York.
Throughout museums in the United States and Europe live deities that werestrippedSome of these gods are on display, some hidden inside forgotten storage boxes. But the gods are finally coming home — to Asia and Africa — thanks to citizen-led movements for cultural restoration .
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Vijay Kumar, of the India Pride Project, who played a large role in defining the Nataragar statue, said in an interview with ARTnews That museums often forget these artifacts are also important religious and ritual symbols of the source countries.
“Many of these are not just random things, but deities that were actively worshiped or items used in culturally meaningful rituals by different societies,” he said. “Empty temples and fervent devotees await their return in villages and small towns. Colonial robbery and looting have left huge holes in our religious and cultural identity.”
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Social media push
While the recovery process itself is often government-led, social media campaigns have played a large role in bringing discussions about a return to the fore. One of the first high-profile movements began amid Sotheby’s 2016 auction of a bronze Prakhon Chai. In 2016, a series of social posts went viral on Facebook with photos of Prakhon Chai sculptures in museums outside Thailand, fueling public interest in their provenance.
As a result, heritage activism forums were established, and homecoming cries increased. Buriram district social groups organized group cycling expeditions and made custom T-shirts with slogans calling for the return of Thai cultural property, while Thai students in New York wore these in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The movement has effectively led professional and amateur historians, as well as cultural tourists visiting museums in Europe and the United States, to transform themselves into online observers.
Other social media movements have blossomed since then – and brought success to activists. Work by Sylvie Ngobati, a Cameroonian who started #BringBackNgonnso, eventually led to the return of the Nso statue and the Benin Bronze NFT Exchange project. Mexico’s #MiPatrimonioNoSeVende (#MyHeritageIsNotForSale), while initiated by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and supported by the government, is a public movement to discover plundered Mexican heritage around the world. More than 9,000 items have been recovered as part of the campaign, including a pair of recently discovered 2,000-year-old ceramic figurines that were used to advertise Kahlúa Mexican liquor. Decolonial relocation demands are often flagged on the British Museum’s social pages under similar campaigns such as #UniteParthenon and #UnfilteredHistory.
To some extent, this heightened awareness of long-standing forms of racism can be attributed to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has pushed these discussions from corporate and government circles into the public forum. This movement, like this one, has been waged in part on social media, primarily by millennials and generation Z.
These increased calls have helped spur real-world influence. In 2018, for example, the French government commissioned a report that called for the wholesale restitution of colonial-era plunder.
newly Report by Open Restitution Africa reports that news articles, tweets and books about African restitution grew between 300 per cent and 600 per cent between 2016 and 2021 (based on analysis of data points from Google and Twitter), and that returns are increasing. However, the founder of the organization, Molimo Moelwa, pointed out that these discussions are still dominated by the Western world.
“Most of the refunds to date have occurred precisely because of political expediency or through long-term, opaque, museum-related processes,” Muylua said. “That is changing, which is important. But because the conversation is dominated by non-Africans, we see a focus on the domestic politics of the global North, when in reality Africa has much broader concerns including social education, healing, and reconstruction that rarely come up as issues in the global conversation.” “.
Now, she added, the conversation must move from social media to institutions, and museum leaders need to build more open and transparent forms of communication to allow for potential repatriation. “Information must be framed in a certain way for museum professionals to use and packaged, but it must be accessed in a different way in order for it to have a role to play among the broader audience. This work is complex but vital.”
Photo by Dan Kitwood / Getty Images
A changing museum landscape
For decades, museum industry groups and Western governments have advocated the idea of encyclopedic museums—institutions that provide comprehensive glimpses into the history of art over the years and around the world. They also warned that the response would be a slippery slope toward museum emptying.
Western museums have historically attempted to bolster their claims for theft of artifacts by pointing to legal requirements and claiming that the countries of origin of the objects could not care less. Now, however, the conversation has moved beyond legal ownership, and is instead focusing on moral validity.
In a recent interview with BBC Radio 4, Tristram Hunt, director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, called for a review of the 1983 National Heritage Act which bars UK museums from dismantling objects unless they are duplicated or irreparably damaged.
“It should be the responsibility of the trustees to prove what should and should not be in their collections and at the moment they don’t have that right because the 1983 law means they are legally unable to do so,” he explained, adding that there is “a game of ping-pong between governments and museums which I think everyone finds it a little unsatisfying at the moment.”
In April, the Smithsonian enacted an “Ethical Return Policy” that requires a look at how an item came into the institution’s possession. The US Department of the Interior is considering changes to a federal law guaranteeing the return of Native American remains and sacred objects. New York now has laws that require museums to display signs acknowledging artwork looted by the Nazis.
Museums across Europe are also increasingly involved in returns of controversial artifacts. Cambodia hosted an international conference on the protection of cultural property in September, which brought together law enforcement and civil society groups working for reparations in ASEAN countries to develop a unified approach to addressing heritage plunder.
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– vj @poetryinstone 🇮🇳 (@poetryinstone) November 15, 2022
concerted effort
A global movement of artistic and cultural restitution is under way that demands not only long-term loans and “positive partnerships” that avoid issues of ownership and colonial violence, but also permanent repatriation and recognition of the cultural and identity impact of colonialism.
Academic reports by experts such as Floin Saar and Benedict Savoy say that such transitional solutions should only be in place “until legal mechanisms are found to allow the final and unconditional return of heritage objects to the African continent”.
“We are collaborating with volunteers and organizations like us in Sri Lanka, Cambodia and more to locate lost cultural artifacts for each other,” said Kumar, an activist with the India Pride Project. “They show us the location of potential stolen artifacts which we check against a database we maintain. If they match, we report it to the authorities and help them gather evidence through the source. Once it is proven that something was stolen, the recovery process depends on each institution. We are also working on building Strong groups of immigrant volunteers to lobby for policy changes in their countries. Public awareness of movements for better response policies is the way forward.”
Kumar is the mastermind behind the #BringOurGodsHome campaign which has been instrumental in over 500 recent successful restorations in India including the return of Glasgow and the 15th century Vijayanagar era bronze idols of Lord Ram, Lakshman and Sita that were brought back by the UK Vijay Kumar and his team were Also key players in the arrest of Indian-American art dealer Subhash Kapoor, who was recently sentenced to prison for leading a smuggling ring. They are involved in research, documentation, cooperation with law enforcement agencies, and generally keep track of stolen artifacts.
Many of the artifacts recovered with the help of the team were returned to the original places of worship, and where the original structures were demolished or could no longer hold the proceeds, these were handed over to museums in different parts of the country.
The Nepali Heritage Recovery Campaign, the Lost Arts of Nepal, the ATHAR Project (Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research), the pan-African Muwazulu Dipanza movement, Yanka Nku, are just a few of the other organized movements happening around the world.
The success of most recovery campaigns currently depends on political pressure and the willingness of museum chiefs to cooperate. Although return has been on the agenda of most source countries for half a century now, every time a new application is submitted, the process starts over again, due to the lack of general return policies.
However, with calls for the return of stolen and colonial artefacts, such as the Rosetta Stone and Moai, now constantly in the news, the process has gained momentum. Citizen activists are now calling for legislation and laws that will make the process of dismantling the caliphate and returning home a smoother political process rather than an issue-by-case issue.
The UNESCO Declaration, issued after the World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development held in Mexico in October, saw ministers and cultural representatives from 150 countries commit to open an inclusive international dialogue on illegally acquired artifacts and concrete measures to combat the illicit traffic in antiquities.
Speaking on the sidelines of the event, Ernesto OttonA senior UNESCO official pointed to recent bilateral deals that have led to the artefacts’ return. He said, “In the last three years, there has been a change, a turning point, about how we compensate. Today, doors are opening for us.”
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