Author: Dr. Bhuvan Lall

Loot, a despicable word, was evidently among the first few Hindustani expressions to enter the British lexicon. It aptly illustrates the brand of British colonisation like no other word.

On a chilly evening in the first week of December in 1862, British Empire’s railway engineer E.B. Harris reached a small riverside market village called Sultanganj on the south bank of Ganges some twenty miles west of Bhagalpur. Here his 4,771 workers were excavating a vast mound of bricks on the hillside to build a railway yard. Harris, recognised among the railway engineers for the construction of the challenging Jamalpur tunnel, was alerted by the unexpected sound of field axes striking metal. The engineer rushed to the spot where at the depth of twelve feet he spotted the foot of a copper figure. Instantly a large number of people converged at the site. The workers shoved the crowds back and gently retrieved a statue entrenched in a brick-walled chamber. The copper figure was over seven feet and four inches tall and weighed five hundred kilogrammes. It was a stunning representation of Gautama Siddharth, the founder of Buddhism, who lived in India and Nepal around the 6th century BC. This was an amazing discovery.

The railway engineer with antiquarian leanings later noted, “I believe from what I can learn that nothing of the kind has ever been discovered before; certainly nothing in metal so large.” British archeologists confirmed that the copper statue was the only surviving one from the Gupta period of Indian history (4-7th century CE) and demonstrated the extraordinary skills of metal sculptors of ancient India. Some 700 years after it was made, the statue was deliberately buried in the Buddhist monastery for safekeeping from possible damage by foreign armies or rival kingdoms. The news about the chance unearthing of the statue spread swiftly and tens of thousands of Indians came out to pay their respect to the ancient sculpture known as Sultanganj Buddha. Harris, dressed in his vintage-safari hat and light-coloured suit was photographed standing next to the statue. But within two years it disappeared.

The news about the Sultanganj Buddha had reached the ears of Samuel Thornton, a railway ironmonger and the former Mayor of Birmingham. He acquired it for 200 pounds, and secretly shipped it to Britain. On its arrival at the London docks, curators of a local museum tried to pinch it but eventually it reached Birmingham safely. On 7 October 1864, Thornton, proudly presented the discovery of the British Empire to Birmingham Borough Council, writing, “…the colossal figure of Buddha, and the large marble one, to the town, to be placed in the Art Museum, now being erected, where they may be duly and properly located for the free inspection of the inhabitants of Birmingham.” Renamed ‘Birmingham Buddha’, it went on display first in the Corporation Art Gallery, then in a room in the Central Library in 1867. Eighteen years later in was placed as the most important artifact in the newly built Museum and Art Gallery inaugurated by King Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales. Since that day innumerable admirers of the British Empire romantically looking back at the Raj, have visited the Art Gallery to carefully scrutinise the Sultanganj Buddha’s arresting facial features that emphasise the rejection of the material world in favour of spiritual enlightenment. But the British Empire never set itself on the path of denying material wealth that was derived from its brutal campaign of global conquest. The Sultanganj Buddha displayed on British soil constantly reminds us of its illegitimate transfer from India. This was not a titanic achievement—it was loot.

Loot, a despicable word was evidently among the first few Hindustani expressions to enter the British lexicon. It aptly illustrates the brand of British colonisation like no other word. Late starters in the build your own global empire game, British seafarers followed the shipping fleets of Portugal, Spain, Holland, Denmark, and France towards the East. Just over a century after Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route from Europe to India, The East India Company was established in London in 1599 to reach out for India’s fabled treasures, gold, jewels, and spices. In the 17th and 18th centuries, India was prosperous while Britain was an inconsequential, feudal-ridden kingdom.

Essentially India had endured as an economically flourishing and culturally rich civilisation for millennia before Britain even existed. This multicultural spiritual centre of the planet knew that the Earth went around the Sun and many centuries before the first British ship docked on an Indian port, Indian entrepreneurs had shaped trade routes to Arabia, Africa, China, West Asia, and Southeast Asia. Then in 1602, the East India Company authorised by its charter to wage war, launched its maiden voyage to defeat the European powers in gaining control over India. Though the British outwardly came to India as a business venture and the adventure of finding new lands, the lines between exploration and exploitation blurred rapidly. The Company’s directors sitting in the boardroom of the multinational business in London employed the culture of corporate violence to make war across India. The gang of bankers, buccaneers, crusaders, gold-diggers, mandarins, pirates and planters, generated almost a quarter of Britain’s trade while systematically stripping India of its riches. And after defeating the Indians in the first war of Indian independence in 1857- 58, the British Crown directly took control of India and it became the jewel of the crown. Now the Queen of the small, rainy island in the North Atlantic ruled over the biggest empire in human history on which the sun never set. For the next ninety years, Indians were subjugated by Hukumat-i-Britannia’s repressive military rule, faced stringent race and class discrimination, and witnessed human greed at its basest.

By the time East India Railway’s Harris accidentally stumbled on the Buddha statue in Sultanganj in 1862, a ruthless campaign of appropriation of Indian art and the archaeological dismemberment of India had been underway for decades. In 1800 a strange-looking tiger automaton toy was delivered to an address on Leadenhall Street in Central London. This was the East India House, the office of the Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company. Carted off from Mysore it was a part of the booty lifted from Tipu Sultan’s palace. The toy was a six-foot-long mechanised wooden piece that was painted in the shape of a tiger devouring a red-coated European soldier lying on his back. An organ cleverly concealed inside the tiger’s body produced sounds imitating a man’s dying moans as well as the roar of a tiger.
From July 1808 onwards it was put on view as a piece of imperial propaganda in the Company’s reading room. It became a popular sight and its sounds caused many members of the British public to faint from fear. Even two hundred and twenty years later the wooden tiger remains the most prominent and intriguing displays at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 1849, the Koh-i-noor (the mountain of light), a beautiful 105.6-carat diamond that originated in the Golconda mines was removed to London under dubious circumstances. This mark of prestige and power in India for centuries was flaunted as an imperial possession in 1851 at the Great Exposition in London. In 1937 it was embedded in the royal crown of the Queen Mother and is now displayed at the Tower of London under the continual protection of the armed Yeoman Warders.

Inexplicably tourists are prohibited from photographing the famed diamond. Besides the over one-thousand-year-old sandstone sculpture of Harihara from Khajuraho now parked at the British Museum in London, one of the greatest robberies of all times from India was the famous Amaravati Railings originating from the Buddhist Stupa of Amaravati in the Guntur district. Here a magnificent architectural achievement of India, with a history that spanned seventeen centuries was ruthlessly dismantled piece by piece. In an indefensible act, the majority of the Stupa’s carved stones were hauled over to Britain. Today some of the Amaravati sculptures consisting of carved relief panels presenting narrative scenes from the life of Gautama Buddha as well as Buddhist emblems and symbols are displayed in Room 33 on the first level of the British Museum. Captain Henry Hardy Cole, the farsighted British Curator of Ancient Monuments in India during 1882-83, had unsuccessfully objected to the removal of the sculptures from the site and recorded, it is a “suicidal and indefensible policy to allow the country to be looted of original works of ancient art”.

Now it is well known that from the reign of Elizabeth I to almost the coronation of Elizabeth II there is an entire unrecorded parallel history of pillaging of Indian treasures. Far beyond the overhyped stories of the Hukumat-i-Britannia’s ceremonial durbars, maharajahs’ balls, Viceregal tiger shoots, cricket matches, Anglicized curries, parades, pageants, and shenanigans in Shimla, there exists the shameful colonial legacy of theft. Notwithstanding the British Empire’s assertion of its benevolence in introducing modern medicine, law, civil services, progressive education and railways in India all the expensive art pieces and artifacts stolen from India are now safely placed in the galleries and vaults of Britain’s museums and stately manors. They signify grave crimes that were committed in India in the name of racial superiority. The British program of plundering was essentially an indomitable endeavour to destroy India’s splendid history and obliterate our nation’s historical accomplishments as if they never existed.

Distinguished American historian Will Durant in his short pamphlet, The Case for India, remarked, “The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle… bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and legal plunder”. He added, that it was “the most sordid and criminal exploitation of one nation by another in all recorded history.” Recently Indian Economist Utsa Patnaik estimated that Britain decamped with a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938 but this excludes the environmental costs of aggressive deforestation and the institutionalized loot of Indian assets. To write a full-scale comprehensive history of the systematic ravaging of India by Hukumat-i-Britannia would be the work of many lifetimes for historians or the never-ending occupation of a government department. Consequently, there is no such record in the public domain as yet.

In the twenty-first century if British citizens look back impartially on the blotchy history of their occupation of India, they will conclude that the British Empire had a reprehensible past. On 22 September 2020, The National Trust of Britain, Europe’s largest conservation charity, with 5.6 million members; over 500 sites, and up to 14,000 employees made an astonishing disclosure. In an official report that spanned 115 pages, the National Trust admitted, that a third of the properties it manages had direct links to colonialism or slavery. The Trust that made $870 million in revenue in the past year claimed that at least 229 landed estates were purchased in Britain by those who had made their fortune either as employees of the East India Company or as independent merchants in India between 1700 and 1850.

The report highlighted the amalgamated collections of Robert Clive and his family that contained some 1,000 objects including ivories, textiles, statues of Hindu gods, ornamental silver and gold, weapons, and ceremonial armour from India that are now brandished at Powis Castle. It also confessed that the British robbed the spectacular Chinese porcelain dish originating from Shah Jahan’s treasury during the sacking of the Qaisar Bagh Palace in Lucknow in 1857. That rare Mughal heirloom is now held in the National Trust’s collection at Wallington.

In the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s Independence, the time has come for the repatriation of the Indian works of art and artifacts from Britain. An aggressive international campaign to retrieve the stolen treasures of India needs the resources of our political, diplomatic, legal, corporate, media, and entertainment communities and the professional expertise of art historians, artists, architects, archaeologists, curators and museum directors of India. The UNESCO’s heritage department must be persuaded to join forces with Bharat Sarkar for returning these antiquities. The planned repurposing of the North and South Block on the Raisina Hill as museums in New Delhi would only be complete with the hundreds and thousands of pilfered Indian treasures lying around the world in museums and the vaults of international auction houses being secured for future generations of Indians.

In the meanwhile, at the Birmingham Museum, the Sultanganj Buddha’s hand gestures (mudras) remain symbolic and can serve as an inspiration for Britain and His Majesty’s Government to accept a historic blunder. The raising of his right hand, Abhaya means ‘no fear’ and hence shows the Buddha giving reassurance and protection, and the left hand with its palm outward and held upwards represents granting a favour. Fittingly, the fearless repatriation of the loot by Britain is the only practicable resolution that is now long overdue.

Bhuvan Lall is an author, filmmaker, scriptwriter, speaker and entrepreneur. He is also the biographer of Subhas Bose, Har Dayal and Sardar Patel. He can be reached at writerlall@gmail.com