There Was Nothing Indian About The British Museum's India

Let’s get the obvious irony out of the way. I like to think of myself as something of a museum buff, and London really panders to this curiosity with a spectrum of exhibitions that span from obvious to obscure.

Yet the one–plenty famous–cultural space that many immigrants, including me, struggle to walk up to is the British Museum. Or as some historians would call it, the grand British repository of stolen artefacts that were forcibly taken from people of colour during the colonial rule.

Now that you have the context in place, imagine the absolute shock that swept over when the British Museum announced that the theme for its first ever fundraising ball, an across-the-Atlantic parallel to the revered Met Gala, is inspired by ancient India. Call it internalised colonialism, but the idea of