(Curating Contemporary Art MA, Royal College of Art — originally written 2022–2023; revised 2025)
This essay was originally written in 2022–2023 as part of the Curating Contemporary Art MA at the Royal College of Art (RCA), responding to an assignment requiring a comparative reading of Tristram Hunt’s “Should museums return their cultural artefacts?” and the essay “Transhistoric Display and Colonial (Dis)Encounters.”
Abstract
For clarity, this text refers to Hunt’s article as Text 1 (T1) and Transhistoric Display as Text 2 (T2).
This 2025 revision strengthens the anti-colonial, anti-caste and Global South orientation of the original essay, drawing on Tamil oral epistemologies and Dalit feminist critique where appropriate. In-text citations are intentionally minimal to preserve readability, with additional scholarship placed in the bibliography.
Essay
As someone from a colonised country, whose hometown museum survives under deep economic strain and limited state support, I have long been invested in postcolonial debates around restitution and decolonisation. Although T1 ostensibly presents multiple dimensions of this debate, it reads as a defensive institutional response. Hunt—writing as Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum—explains why British museums cannot “automatically” respond to restitution claims from formerly colonised nations. His position as head of one of the largest repositories of colonial loot shapes the tone, framing and limits of the argument.
In contrast, T2 places restitution within broader theoretical frames: modernity, coloniality, and the museum’s epistemic authority over cultural heritage. It argues for interdisciplinary, politically grounded approaches to repatriation—approaches that exceed managerial thinking and seek structural transformation.
T1 begins with Emmanuel Macron’s call for restitution of African objects, but the framing is revealing. Hunt suggests that restitution should not follow “political timetables,” implying that political urgency delegitimises ethical claims. He also refers to “crimes” of empire in quotation marks, softening the force of the term. But it is the category of “empire”—its assumed neutrality, inevitability, and civilisational rhetoric—that requires interrogation.
Throughout the text, Hunt positions museums as stabilising, expert-driven institutions capable of safeguarding world culture. In recounting the Ethiopian request for restitution of the Maqdala objects, T1 describes internal Ethiopian conflict in a way that subtly distributes responsibility. When Ethiopia rejects the V&A’s offer of a “long-term loan,” Hunt describes the government as “adamant,” framing refusal as unreasonable. He ends by stressing Ethiopia’s “satisfaction” with the V&A’s conservation expertise. The implication is that care and conservation neutralise questions of ownership.
This overlooks the fact that care itself is culturally and epistemologically situated. In South India, for instance, a Shiva Nataraja is cared for through ritual anointing, procession and multisensory worship; this living, embodied conservation practice has preserved images for centuries. Such forms of care are not equivalent to museum conservation. T2’s critique of Western parameters being imposed onto non-Western objects is especially relevant here: different cosmologies of care cannot be collapsed into a single evaluative framework.
T1 cites criticism of the exhibition The Past is Now for presenting the British Empire as “uniquely evil.” To counter this, Hunt invokes other empires (Roman, Ottoman) to suggest comparability. But equivalence does not neutralise British colonial violence; rather, it risks flattening histories of extraction, famine, indenture, and forced labour specific to British imperial rule.
T1 next centres the “encyclopaedic museum,” arguing that removing objects risks “hardening” cultural purity and denying hybridity. This assumes that hybridity arises from benign cultural exchange rather than, as many scholars argue, from colonial dispossession, migration under duress, caste oppression and global inequality. T2 insists that such hybridity must be understood in relation to modernity and coloniality—not as museum-facilitated multiculturalism.
T1’s confidence in context and transparency—improved labels, historical notes—overlooks how displays themselves reproduce epistemic hierarchies. Simply adding provenance information does not decolonise a collection built from asymmetrical power relations. T2 highlights how genealogical display methods place Western objects in temporal progression while suspending non-Western objects in an ethnographic past. This temporal asymmetry shapes how objects are understood, valued and contextualised.
T1 also refers dismissively to terms such as “decoloniality” or “diversity” as fashionable. But such terms arise from long histories of grassroots critique, Indigenous scholarship, Dalit feminist thought and anti-racist organising. They are not decorative slogans; they name material struggles.
The National Heritage Act of 1983 is referenced as protecting the British public from the lament of “dispersal.” But T1 ignores the “later generations” of colonised nations—those deprived of cultural heritage, whose migration restrictions, economic challenges and diasporic displacements are tied to colonial aftermaths. Legislation preventing disposals protects Britain’s image rather than addressing historical violence.
More recent developments amplify these critiques. Digital meme cultures—circulated globally after the Queen’s death and during Rishi Sunak’s appointment—produced incisive commentary on the politics of empire. One widely shared meme stated: “The only immigrant Britain ever welcomed is the Kohinoor.” These memes operate as vernacular theory: immediate, affective and critical. They signal global public consciousness around restitution more effectively than formal institutional statements.
T2’s emphasis on de-hierarchising knowledge resonates here. Popular culture, oral histories, caste-conscious critique and digital publics are not peripheral—they are central spaces where decolonial analysis emerges.
Ultimately, T1 defends continuity: loans, transparency, conservation, cautious reform. It does not question the underlying structure through which the museum became the owner, expert and narrator of other people’s cultural heritage. T2, in contrast, demands epistemic transformation. Restitution becomes not a logistical question but an ethical, political and relational one.
The tension between these texts reveals the stakes of contemporary museology. Restitution is not merely the movement of objects; it is the reorganisation of power, history and care. For museums to remain relevant beyond their imperial inheritance, they must shift from possession to accountability, from display to relation, from accumulation to repair.
Bibliography
(Ordered following decolonial citational ethics — marginalised, Indigenous, Dalit, feminist, Global South and oral archives first; Western academic sources last.)
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso, 2019.
Basu, P. “Object Diaspora and Displacement.”
Benites, A., and Lafuente, P. Dja Guata Pora: Rio de Janeiro Indígena.
Chari, S. “Animism and Material Culture in India.” Economic and Political Weekly, 2002.
Clarke, Mary E., et al. “Critical Citations as an Anticolonial Practice.” SAA Archaeological Record 23 (2023).
Dalit feminist and Global South scholarship on extraction and caste labour (general reference).
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press, 1990.
Tamil oral histories and ritual conservation knowledge (2018–2024).
_____________________________________________________
Author’s family oral discussions on ritual conservation (2018–2024).
Author’s personal archive: Photograph of author’s mother taken inside the Tower of London (2022), captured under museum surveillance limitations.
_____________________________________________________
Free Press Journal. “Netizens Trend ‘Kohinoor’ on Twitter…” 9 September 2022.
NDTV. “Ashish Nehra, Kohinoor Memes Flood Twitter…” 24 October 2022.
Le Monde. “As Rishi Sunak Becomes Prime Minister, Kohinoor Memes Flood Twitter,” 26 October 2022.
_____________________________________________________
Acemoglu, D., and Robinson, J. “Economic Impact of Colonialism.” CEPR, 2017.
Ardia, P. “India’s Most Expensive Contemporary Artists.” The Culture Trip, 2016.
Artprice. Global Art Market Report, 2021.
Banteka, N. “Cultural Property and the Fallmerayer Theory.” UPenn Journal of International Law 37, no. 4 (2015).
Bienkowski, P. Repatriation and Museum Ethics, 2013.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Fields of Struggle, 1995.
Cartwright, M. “Koh-i-Noor Diamond.” World History Encyclopedia, 2021.
Clavo, M., and López, L. Decolonising the Ethnographic Museum, 2018.
Danziger, A. “Dividing Lines: India and Pakistan,” Stimson Center, 2020.
Daniel, H. “Why British Historians Must Be Decolonised.” Media Diversified, 2015.
Erdem, Z. “UK Immigration Crisis,” 2022.
Fung, A. “Deliberative Democracy in Practice,” 2006.
Griffiths, C. “Liz Truss Resigns After Shortest Tenure.” NPR, 2022.
Kinsey, A. “Duleep Singh and the Surrender of the Kohinoor.” Journal of Imperial History, 2009.
Kingsley, P. “UK Faces Recession.” The Independent, 2022.
Martin, S. “Avoiding Carbon Colonialism.” The Hill, 2021.
Merryman, J.H. “Cultural Property Internationalism.” California Law Review 1985.
Moore, S. “Impacts of War on Global Health.” News-Medical, 2021.
MyArtBroker. “David Hockney: Record Prices,” 2022.
National Geographic. “How the British Split India,” 2022.
Richter, H. “Mechanisms of Repression in Contemporary Art.” Art Journal, 2013.
Santos Silva, A. “Global Crisis and Interdisciplinary Approaches.” Review of Keynesian Economics 3 (2015).
Singh, A. “India’s Economic Decline under the British.” HuffPost, 2013.
Soirila, E. “Universal Museums and Legal Indeterminacy.” International Journal of Cultural Property, 2022.
Tharoor, S. An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, 2016.
Tombs, R. “Kohinoor and British History.” Daily Mail, 2022.
UN. UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007.
UN. “Statement on Climate,” 2022.
UNESCO. Convention Against Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property, 1970.
Worthy Staff. “Valuation of the Koh-i-Noor Diamond.” Worthy.com, 2021.
Yap, A. “Ethnographic Display and Chronology.” Uppsala University, 2014.
Zeldin-O’Neill, C. “Racism and UK Media.” The Guardian, 2022.