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Why India must return the British loot in its museums

After Indonesia’s ministerial request at Bhopal, it’s time for joint action to remedy regional histories shaped by colonial looting.

On 7 August, on the sidelines of the BRICS culture ministers’ meeting in Bhopal, Indonesia’s minister of culture Fadli Zon and his Indian counterpart Gajendra Singh Shekhawat confirmed a joint action plan to restore a hundred sub-shrines ringing the great medieval Shaiva complex at Prambanan, in central Java. The meeting closed with the Bhopal Declaration, which commits its signatories to returning cultural property taken by theft or illicit means.

At the same bilateral, the ministers discussed the return of the Pucangan inscription—a slab of inscribed stone that has sat in a storeroom of the Indian Museum, Kolkata, for over two centuries. It was issued by the 11th-century king Airlangga, seen as a key national figure in Indonesia. Zon earlier told reporters in Jakarta that he had raised it with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit, and that Modi had said he would take action.

Three months ago, Indian diplomats and academics successfully secured the return of the Leiden Plates, a crucial record of South India’s medieval connections, uprooted by networks of colonial European power. The Pucangan stone is, in a way, Indonesia’s Leiden Plates. Returning it is not only a moral duty, but a key step toward healing colonial scars in the Indian Ocean.

Medieval Java’s innovations

Prambanan, in Central Java, is a temple complex dating to the mid-ninth century CE—around the same time as the future imperial Chola dynasty was taking root in the Kaveri delta. Until the conqueror Rajaraja Chola raised the Brihadishvara temple at Thanjavur over a century and a half later, Prambanan was the largest Shiva temple anywhere in the Indian Ocean world. Its central sanctum held a three-metre standing image of Shiva mounted on a yoni, rather than a linga. Brahma and Vishnu stood on yonis of their own in the flanking shrines. This is just one among many features that distinguish the complex from developments on the mainland Indian subcontinent.

What the Prambanan complex was for remains contested. The Dutch scholar Roy Jordaan spent decades arguing—in his book In Praise of Prambanan (1996) and several papers after it—that the inner courtyard was designed to be deliberately flooded so that the temples appeared to rise from an artificial ocean, recreating the Puranic Ocean of Milk. Historian Jeffrey Sundberg, in his chapter in the edited volume The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia (2022), further argued that the thousand ribbed finials studding the complex are a sahasralinga array. He viewed the spires as a thousand lingas, whose top-to-bottom fluting alludes to the mythical descent of the river Ganga through Shiva’s locks of hair. Sundberg argued that the finials........

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