Dr Nicholas Cullinan, the museum’s director, has described the initiative as a fresh template for cultural diplomacy. The items are now on display at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya. “You don’t have to embarrass your own country to do something positive with another country,” Dr Cullinan said.
“It can actually be very beneficial – cultural diplomacy, that’s what museums should do,” he told The Telegraph. The scheme represents the first arrangement of its kind with a non-Western museum.
Courtesy British Museum
Comment by Dan Hicks: ‘Decolonisation from above’
What exactly is this “new model”, for museum loans that we increasingly read about in the press releases of national museums? Loans have always taken place from the UK’s national museums of course. Ramping them up to distract from restitution demands borrows a methodology from the old Edwardian V&A model — the Circulation Department that loaned objects to regional UK locations from 1909 until former director Sir Roy Strong shut it down in 1977. When now applied to formerly colonised nations as “cultural diplomacy” this circulationism becomes patriarchal interference, the exercise of soft power based on the antidemocratic circumvention of elected governments demanding returns to broker deals with independent museums, from Ghana to India. Never mind cultural usury — it’s time to return stolen art and culture and build new equitable relationships from our museums. That, however, would require political leadership and understanding from the Culture Secretary which isn’t currently there.
