Every few days I was to find myself on both sides of what was once the brutal cycle of colonization. Looters and the looted.
One day I saw the Indian one the storm mogulGrand Mogul is an imperial title used in the historical Mughal Empire of South Asia, which was a Muslim dynasty that ruled much of India. Shah Jahan’s (he who built the Taj Mahal) ring and wine glass on display in a display in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Along with Buddha statues from Taxila.
The other day I was in Taxila, Pakistan, looking at the void in the walls where the Buddha statues were robbed from.
It forced me to think some new thoughts.
One thing is indisputable. The British Empire, the most powerful of its time, impoverished the “crown in the jewel” – India for nearly two hundred years. First through the East India Company and then through direct colonizationColonization is the process where one country takes control of another area and often settles there to exploit the resources..
But should the taxes be claimed back? And, should the British pay reparations as more and more people are advocating? Instinctively, my answer is an unequivocal yes.
Because it stung unexpectedly deep and deeply as I stood with my nose glued to the display cases in the London museum and looked at these intimate, priceless objects once worn by people who look like me. Glasses and equipment, festive clothes similar to the ones I wear on Eid and 2000-year-old earrings similar to the ones my mother got for her wedding.
But I’m still not quite sure whether all the stolen treasures are going home.
Although this hits closer than I thought. In fact, less than half an hour’s drive from my mother’s childhood home.
Taxila, or Takshasila as it was originally called, is as far from my mother’s Rawalpindi as Asker is from Oslo. It is part of the world heritage, protected by UNESCO. I was soon to understand why.
We were on our way to what was once an advanced civilization. Taxila was the hub of three trade routes in ancient times. Called “The Royal Highway” by the Greeks. World religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism and civilizations older than this met here. Before the city was razed to the ground by the Huns in the year 5 AD.
We were going to the museum, but I insisted on a detour. Dharma-Rajika burial ground, I couldn’t pronounce the name. It was even more difficult to imagine the place. Apparently a relatively modest structure ravaged by weather, wind and looters for over 2,000 years.
But it did something to me in all its simplicity. I understood that I had been influenced in an unconscious and imperceptible way by the constant drip that the “remote cultured” are so uncivilized. Especially the Pakistanis, in contrast to Europeans and Norwegians.
And here I stood, in what was once an advanced civilization.
The burial ground in front of me had once held something most sacred to Buddhists: Buddha’s tooth and ashes. It was decorated with priceless statues of the Buddha. There was a water reservoir and an advanced kitchen and communal laundry. Of course it was. I just hadn’t fully understood, until now.
Now the burial ground stands back. The treasures are located, among other things, in museums in England. Some of the treasures.
But, mostly not. I saw that now.
Buddha’s tooth is painstakingly preserved in the tiny museum in Taxila built in 1928, under British Raj. Presumably not because the British were so thoughtful, rather because a tooth doesn’t quite make it into the crown of the British monarch. Unlike the fabled diamond Koh-I-Noor.
Buddhists from all over the world make pilgrimages to the place.
And this is what makes it harder to be unequivocally morally outraged.
The treasures were lost for thousands of years. It is the British Sir John Marshall who is responsible for carefully excavating this part of the world heritage.
He is the first person you meet, before entering the museum itself. Acknowledging his contribution, the Pakistanis have put up his office furniture, a portrait and a sign that reads:
“In memory of Sir John Marshall”. It is generous of those who have been plundered.
Had Indians and Pakistanis managed to discover and preserve their own archaeological heritage? Presumably yes, albeit much later.
But, I have my doubts. The priceless heritage has crumbled away in several places in Pakistan. In India, there are constant examples of vandalism and neglect, especially of historical sites built by the Muslim Mughal emperors.
There are Hindu nationalists who demand the destruction of the Taj Mahal because it is allegedly built on the site of a former temple.
And we know what happened to the several thousand-year-old Buddha statues and other cultural monuments in Afghanistan and Syria. They were destroyed by fanatical Islamist terrorists.
All this taken into account, it is tempting to place the Taj Mahal in a display case in a museum in London. It doesn’t work, but maybe it’s just as well that Shah Jahan’s white ring is where it is?
The British and the West filled their own pockets, but they also made a decisive effort for the preservation of world heritage.
But before it is world heritage, it is the heritage of Indians and Pakistanis.
By removing many of the most important objects, the people have also been deprived of parts of their proudest history.
Keep the diamonds, I think, but give us back the most valuable: the history expressed through works of art such as magnificent paintings and drawings, carpets and wooden furniture and clothes and equipment.
The things that showed our ancestors’ real formation and potential.
That’s what I thought as I stood looking at a several-thousand-year-old folding chair at the museum in Taxila. It was therefore made half an hour’s drive from where mother grew up.
It wasn’t studded with diamonds, but it still made me proud of my cultural heritage. My back was straighter. It is here, in one of the cradles of civilization, that I have my roots.
