Darshan Denied: Mauritius, Memory, and the Gods in Imperial Custody

By Shyam Bhatia

In a softly lit hall of the British Museum, incense floats in the air, Sanskrit chants echo in the background, and visitors are invited to experience darshan–the sacred act of seeing and being seen by the divine. The new exhibition, Ancient India: Living Traditions, is designed to feel like a temple.

But for descendants of Indian indentured labourers in Mauritius, what’s truly on display is something far more troubling: the plundered soul of an ancient heritage, dressed up as celebration of state-funded imperial nostalgia.

Few visitors realise that the British Museum was founded in 1753 on the personal collection of Sir Hans Sloane, a physician whose fortune came partly from Jamaican sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans. Sloane married into a family that owned hundreds of slaves.

British Museum Exhibits Ancient India Living Traditions. Pic – A Bad Witch’s Blog

After slavery was formally abolished in 1834, many of those same plantations remained intact–their workforce replenished with indentured Indians, lured from villages in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, shipped across oceans aboard vessels like the Truro and Atlas to work Mauritian sugar fields for a pittance.

India is no stranger to foreign conquest. For over a millennium, its temples, palaces, and cultural treasures have drawn the attention of invaders–from Central Asian dynasties to European empires. The destruction of the Somnath temple in Gujarat, famed for its golden spire and immense wealth, by Mahmud of Ghazni in the 11th century is just one example. He looted its treasures, smashed its sanctum, and carried the spoils back to Ghazni as symbols of power and dominion.

Ruthless British colonialism followed in the same tradition. What the East India Company and later the British Crown did–shipping idols, jewels, manuscripts, and coins to Britain–echoed these earlier invasions. But unlike those who came and went, the British built institutions in their imperial capital to house the loot. In London the British Museum became a permanent repository for what was taken, placing sacred artefacts in glass cases far from the lands and communities they once belonged to.

This shared colonial legacy links the gods behind the glass in central London to the jahajis who crossed the kala pani–the dark waters–to build lives in Mauritius under duress. At Ganga Talao and across dozens of village temples, Mauritians continue to honour those gods–not as relics, but as living deities who are bathed, adorned, and loved.

The current exhibition in London cost £839,000 (approx. MUR 49 million) and includes 178 Indian artefacts from the Museum’s vast South Asia collection of over 38,000 objects, most taken during British rule.

Many are locked away in storage, far from the communities they were once part of–temples, shrines, homes. Among them: ancient gold coins from the Gupta and Mughal eras bearing images of Lakshmi on a lotus, emperors performing ashvamedha horse sacrifices, and deities from the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. These were once sacred. Now they are trophies.

Elsewhere the Museum proudly showcases a miniature painting of Prince Khurram–later Emperor Shah Jahan–being weighed in gold. It praises the aesthetic but ignores the history of how such items were acquired. That silence is deliberate.

The institution employs over 100 curators, each earning an average of £39,500 (approx. MUR 2.4 million per year). Its new Director, Nicholas Cullinan, receives up to £165,000 (approx. MUR 10 million annually)–more than a UK Cabinet Minister–to oversee what many now describe as a museum of imperial nostalgia.

British taxpayers fund this enterprise, with £70.1 million (approx. MUR 4.2 billion) in government grants for 2023-24. According to Freedom of Information (FOI) disclosures, the British Museum spent over £12 million (approx. MUR 720 million) on security and protection services alone–nearly 15 times the amount spent on the India exhibition. These figures speak volumes: the institution invests far more in guarding its collections than in researching or redressing their origins.

The advisory panel included members of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist communities, consulted primarily on matters of presentation and cultural context. There is no public indication that they were involved in discussions around provenance, ownership, or restitution. FOI disclosures confirm that panel members were paid for their participation, though the Museum has not published details of the terms or scope of that engagement.

The Museum also holds over 6,000 human remains, including skulls and bones from South Asia. These too are absent from the show. Living Traditions claims to celebrate continuity, but omits the ancestors still kept in its vaults.

Elsewhere in Britain, until as recently as 2021, 41 human skulls from Nagaland–taken during colonial rule–were openly displayed at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Only after years of pressure from Naga communities, researchers, and Indigenous rights advocates were the remains removed from view. Their continued presence in storage remains a source of pain and protest.

Earlier this year, tribal leaders from India’s northeast travelled to London to demand the return of Naga ancestral remains. Their call joins a growing global movement–from Nigeria to Sri Lanka–demanding the return of sacred artefacts and human remains looted during empire.

Germany, France, and the Netherlands have already begun restitution. The British Museum remains silent, hiding behind the British Museum Act of 1963, which prohibits the return of objects. Yet other UK institutions–such as the Horniman and Manchester museums–have found legal ways to act.

India’s national government has yet to mount a serious restitution campaign. Some progress has been made by Tamil Nadu’s Idol Wing and citizen-led initiatives like the India Pride Project. But major artefacts–the Kohinoor diamond, Ranjit Singh’s golden throne–remain unreclaimed, displayed as emblems of empire.

This is not merely about theft. It is about memory. For Mauritian families who still offer flowers and lamps to the very gods now confined in glass cabinets abroad, it is also about dignity. Knowing that our deities, our symbols, were not discarded–but taken. Silenced. And displayed for others to interpret.

Darshan here becomes performance. Reverence becomes parody. Faith becomes exhibit. The gods look out from behind the glass–displaced, dislocated, and mute.

The incense cannot mask it.
The institution cannot explain it.
And our ancestors, like our gods, know exactly what was done.

Shyam Bhatia is a London-based Indian-born British journalist, writer, and war reporter. He has covered conflicts in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Sudan, and is a former diplomatic editor for The Observer. His career also includes roles as US correspondent and Foreign Editor for the Deccan Herald (Bangalore) and Editor of Asian Affairs magazine (London).

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 18 July 2025