On Sunday 2nd January, it was reported that the Victoria & Albert museum is expected to lend all contentious treasures of the East India Company back to their native countries and homeland for the first time.
The V&A collection boasts of 19,000 objects amassed by officials from the East India Company including the famed Tipu’s Tiger organ. In a lecture last year Mr Tristram Hunt, the museum’s director said that “as a museum born of this imperial moment we are working hard to open up and discuss the V&A’s colonial past”.
Now, The Times has reported that the anniversary of India’s Independence Day in 2022 would be an “opportune” moment to “share” objects taken during the colonial era. The museum has already offered Ethiopia a loan of the Magdala treasures which were looted by the British Army during the 1868 Abyssinian Expedition. It also hopes to lend items of Asante gold to Ghana which were acquired after they were seized by a British expeditionary force in 1874. Mr Hunt added, however, that the museum was keen to share the antiquities “amassed” by the East India Company with Indian institutions and that removing the museum’s colonial inheritance would make “no sense” given how woven it was into the Victoria & Albert’s history.
The museum, however, it is understood was not allowed to remove items permanently and despite their limitations they were “trying to work really hard with nations seeking restitution” of objects.
He said, “Quite understandably communities to whom we are seeking to lend these items say: ‘Hold on, you are asking us to borrow items from you that you took from us’ and at the moment legally that’s all we can do.”
