In October, Mick Jagger and London Mayor Sadiq Khan were among guests attending a fundraising ball marking the British Museum’s Ancient India: Living traditions exhibition.
The event arranged by a committee including Dhaka Art Summit founders Rajeeb and Nadia Samdani and led by Isha Ambani, daughter of Mukesh Ambani, the Chair of India’s Reliance Industries conglomerate and Asia’s richest man, brought its own controversies.
Climate campaigners have been increasingly lobbying UK cultural institutions to stop helping fossil fuel majors art-wash their image, so the involvement of Reliance was a potential issue but mostly seemed overlooked due to British Petroleum already being a major longstanding sponsor of the British Museum. More reservations were expressed about whether the august Bloomsbury institution should chase the celebrity glitz of New York’s Met Gala.
With tickets starting at £2,000 a head, I was mostly oblivious to the October ball even happening. Out of the blue, less than a fortnight later I found myself looking it up after an Egyptian colleague asked if any journalists might be interested in attending an event at the British Museum that Saturday evening.
The Egyptian embassy was holding a party inside the British Museum to coincide with the official opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo. This was a relatively relaxed celebratory event, with the two iconic museums themselves providing all the glamour.
On video, the brand-new GEM at Giza looked every bit its 1.2-billion-dollar price tag as the biggest museum in the world dedicated to one single civilization, not least because the world’s most famous pyramids can be glimpsed in the distance.
For its part, the BM’s glass roofed courtyard enclosing the historic former British Library circular reading room once used by the likes of Gandhi, Orwell, Mark Twain, and Karl Marx, provided a spectacular backdrop (free from the bustle of its six and a half million annual visitors,) for some short speeches and a lively performance by an Egyptian singer.
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the authoritarian leader of Egypt, was seen briefly speaking in a clip from the GEM opening ceremony, but far more time was given over to curators talking about Ancient Egypt. A food and drink reception followed inside the British Museum’s Egyptian gallery, whose centrepiece is the priceless 2200-year-old Rosetta stone, famously found by a French army officer during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, that provided the key to translating forgotten old Egyptian scripts.
Although the evening highlighted inter-museum co-operation, the event’s location made an obvious -- if unspoken -- statement. Most of the British Museum’s most famous exhibits are not British. A major proportion of its collections, not least those from Egypt, was acquired when the British empire (and others) colonized and dominated much of the globe.
Debates over the Parthenon ("Elgin") Marbles show that institutions wanting to resist calls to repatriate contested artifacts, can easily complicate questions of legality and chains of acquisition/ownership. Outright looting, seizure, and unfair treaties during British rule all played a part ensuring key pieces of South Asia’s heritage, from the 1st century BCE Amaravati Marbles to Tipu Sultan's Tiger, ended up on display in London to this day.
The same can be said for the Benin Bronzes looted when British troops attacked the palace of Benin City in 1897 as part of an imperial quest to expand colonial rule over Nigeria. Likewise for many Chinese artifacts plundered during the Opium wars. Much more notorious in China than the Lord Elgin, famous in Britain and Greece, is his son, James Bruce who ordered the destruction of the famed summer palace of Beijing in 1860 and two years later was appointed Viceroy of India.
Like the Louvre and other globally renowned institutions, the British Museum takes pride in its record of scholarship and labels itself as a “universal museum” with a commitment to serving as a custodian of humanity’s heritage.
With Egypt and other nations increasingly building their own world class institutions, one of the stronger grounds for universal museums not acceding to requests from formerly subjugated nations to repatriate contested objects, is starting to disappear.
The splendid surroundings of the soiree made it too mellow an occasion for long debates about decolonization. I could not help but notice however the many Egyptians there of all ages taking a quiet satisfaction and pride in the interest shown in Egypt’s new museum and asking myself how and when Bangladeshi Londoners might experience something similar?
Of course, there was the opening this summer in London’s Hyde Park of the 24th Serpentine Pavillion designed by award winning Bangladeshi architect Marina Tassabaum. But as one of her earlier projects is the museum at the Swadhinata Stambha Independence monument at Suhrawardy Udyan, which (along with other places) was vandalized last year, I wonder how many people in Bangladesh would truly care.
It’s bad enough the nation has been harmed for decades by simple facts from as recently as 1971 being repeatedly distorted and fought over by its political classes. And that education and research have been chronically underfunded in Bangladesh compared to other nations. Heritage buildings are widely neglected, and museum bookshops are often empty of customers. Or that older governmental documents relating to the land must be looked for in the archives of Delhi, Islamabad, and London.
But on top of it all, there is also vandalism, sometimes organized or targeted, but always mindless, to be contended with by historians. Such thoughts soon dissipated, it was too pleasant an occasion.
As I exited the museum that night, a curious passer-by asked what had been going on inside, so I answered and showed off the heavyweight (in all senses of the word) tome on hieroglyphics we had received in our gift bags.
When I got home, I was as content as the proverbial ancient Egyptian cat.
Niaz Alam is Dhaka Tribune’s London Bureau Chief.