Pink Ball, Stolen Gods: The British Museum’s Gala of Contradiction

London Letter

A museum built on empire’s loot is poised to celebrate itself with chandeliers, champagne, and celebrity

By Shyam Bhatia

The British Museum, custodian of more than 30,000 Indian artefacts taken during the Raj, will this month host its first ever “Pink Ball”. According to The Times newspaper in London, tickets are priced at £2,000 (around Rs 120,000 Mauritian rupees) and 800 guests will dine in the Great Court only yards away from the Amaravati Sculptures — Buddhist treasures hacked out of Andhra Pradesh by the East India Company.

On stage will be Anoushka Shankar, the sitar virtuoso and daughter of the late Ravi Shankar, whose music brought Indian classical traditions to audiences worldwide. The event is co-chaired by Isha Ambani, daughter of Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani, alongside museum director Nicholas Cullinan.

The museum’s very origins underline the continuity of exploitation. Founded in 1753, it was built with funds from the estate of Sir Hans Sloane, a physician and collector whose wealth was tied to slavery and the transatlantic trade. From its first days, the museum’s grandeur was inseparable from empire. Pic – iStock

On the surface, it is a spectacle designed to rival New York’s Met Gala. The committee features Naomi Campbell, the British supermodel; Edward Enninful, the Ghanaian-born former editor-in-chief of British Vogue; Courtney Love, the American rock musician and actress best known as widow of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain; and Zadie Smith, the acclaimed British novelist. The evening will be themed around the “colours and light of India”. But beneath the pink glow lies a contradiction: a gala intended to raise millions for a museum that still refuses to return the treasures it took by conquest, coercion, or theft.

The Amaravati Sculptures illustrate the point. Carved between the 2nd century BCE and 3rd century CE, they once adorned a great Buddhist stupa on the banks of the Krishna River. Their panels told the life stories of the Buddha to pilgrims. When East India Company engineers dismantled the site, hundreds of blocks were crated for London. What remained in India was left exposed to decay. Today, those carvings, once alive with ritual and devotion, are reduced to dinner décor for wealthy donors.

The Indian presence in the British Museum is vast. More than 30,000 objects from the subcontinent form the largest collection outside South Asia. Chola bronzes once worshipped in Tamil Nadu, Hindu deities from Bengal and Odisha, and relics from Buddhist shrines now sit in storerooms or under glass. Many have never been catalogued; most will never be displayed. To priests and pilgrims, they were once living gods. In Bloomsbury, they are lifeless curiosities.

The museum also stores human remains. It admits to holding more than 6,000 sets of remains from across the world, including South Asia — bones looted from battlefields, burial grounds and temples. Scholars say the denial of dignity to the dead is even more shocking than the hoarding of bronzes or carvings.

Critics ask: what exactly is being celebrated? The institution is already scarred by scandal. In 2023, it admitted that more than 1,500 objects had gone missing from its storerooms. Only 634 have been traced. Hundreds remain unaccounted for, many never photographed or catalogued. The museum blamed a former curator, Peter Higgs, while police investigations continue. Reports suggest missing pieces passed through dealers in Britain, Switzerland and the Middle East before disappearing into private collections. Far from being a model custodian, the museum has shown itself unable to protect even what it keeps.

Financially, too, the contradictions are glaring. Freedom of Information requests answered by the museum show that in 2024/25 it received £44 million in operating subsidies and another £30 million in capital grants — more than £74 million (around Rs 4.4 billion Mauritian rupees) in total taxpayer funding. Its director Nicholas Cullinan earns between £215,000 and £220,000 a year (Rs 12–13 million Mauritian rupees), more than the British Prime Minister. A further £14 million (Rs 840 million) was spent on public relations, press handling and security — a sum larger than the annual budget of many regional museums.

Yet the Pink Ball seeks more money, this time from diaspora pockets. Its Indian theme and its celebrity endorsements are deliberately pitched to attract wealthy donors, especially among the Indian diasporas. Critics say this is a double imposition: first the artefacts were taken, and now the heirs of those dispossessed are asked to fund their keepers.

Nor is India the only country with claims. Greece continues to demand the return of the Parthenon Marbles. Nigeria campaigns for the Benin Bronzes. Ethiopia seeks regalia seized at the Battle of Maqdala in 1868. China points to treasures looted from the Summer Palace in 1860. As Professor Dan Hicks, British archaeologist and author of The British Museums, has said: “Restitution is not only about the past — it’s about the kind of future we want to build.”

For Mauritius, the resonance is direct. The unresolved fate of the Chagos Islands — detached by Britain in the 1960s and leased to the United States despite international rulings in favour of Mauritian sovereignty — is itself a form of dispossession. Just as India seeks the Amaravati Sculptures and Greece the Marbles, Mauritius continues to demand the return of what was taken. The struggles are linked by a common theme: restitution as dignity, restitution as justice.

The museum’s very origins underline the continuity of exploitation. Founded in 1753, it was built with funds from the estate of Sir Hans Sloane, a physician and collector whose wealth was tied to slavery and the transatlantic trade. From its first days, the museum’s grandeur was inseparable from empire. The Pink Ball does not mark a departure from that history but a continuation of it under softer lighting.

Britain’s fiscal pressures add another edge. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, the UK’s finance minister, must find tens of billions without raising taxes or slashing services. The British Museum squats on 5.5 acres of prime Bloomsbury real estate worth more than £2 billion. Its collections, valued conservatively at £30–50 billion, could transform public finances if restitution, sales or shared custody were seriously pursued. Advocates say that such measures would not only redress past wrongs but also fund hospitals, housing and schools, while decentralising cultural infrastructure to cities like Manchester or Birmingham.

Instead, chandeliers will sparkle, and sitar strings will sound. Anoushka Shankar, Isha Ambani and a roster of international celebrities will lend their prestige to an institution scarred by thefts and scandals. Yet for all the glamour, the contradictions are impossible to conceal. A museum built on empire’s loot is asking the heirs of the looted to pay again.

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). He is presently the London correspondent of The Tribune (India).

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 3 October 2025