• An unfinished story from Asia

Last year, I attended a major conference on museums in Europe. Decolonisation was the big topic, and every session had debates about repatriation, provenance research, and institutional blame. The Benin Bronzes were discussed. Egyptian antiquities were discussed. African collections were discussed. 

As the conference went on, however, I realised something odd. Asia was unmentioned. And then when a colleague from Indonesia brought up the topic of Southeast Asian collections, the moderator nodded graciously and then moved on to another topic. Decolonisation, it appears, is an African story. And that is all.

Marginalising Asia

This silence is noteworthy, given the extent of Asian holdings in Western museums. The British Museum alone has over 30,000 pieces of South Asian artefacts. The Rijksmuseum, together with the Wereldmuseum and other Dutch institutions, are replete with treasures from Indonesia and Sri Lanka, legacies of the Dutch East India Company’s 200-year reign. 

Indochina is also amply represented in France’s museum treasures. Germany has numerous ethnological museums bursting with treasures from its erstwhile colonial empire throughout Asia. Other US-based museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum, grew their collections during the period of Western ascendancy on the Asian continent.

These are not small, marginal collections stored out of the way. These are central collections, defining the global significance of the institutions which hold them. Yet the debate over what decolonisation means for Asian heritage is stuck decades behind what it means for African and Pacific heritage.

Take any major museum of art in Europe and you will always see a revealing paradox. Rembrandts and Vermeers will be found in galleries called ‘art.’ A short distance away, Asian pieces of equal, or even superior, technical skill will be found under labels such as ‘ethnography’ or ’decorative arts.’ 

Such classification is not neutral. It places colonial value systems onto museum architecture, with Europe rated universal aesthetic achievement and Asian culture relegated to the role of anthropological study.

The global movement for the decolonisation of museums gathered pace after the Sarr-Savoy report of 2018, which had been commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron. The report seriously questioned the traditional concepts and notions of ownership and interpretive authority. 

In Germany, repatriations of Benin Bronzes had started. The Netherlands pledged to repatriate Indonesian and Sri Lankan artefacts acquired from colonies. Research programmes to investigate provenance had been initiated by France.

These are indeed major steps forward. Yet beneath this progress, there is a discomfiting truth: the decolonisation process has largely been driven by African and European opinion. Asian opinions are marginalised in the global discourse on the very institutions where our cultural heritage resides.

Remedying an imbalance

Recent work by various Asian museum professionals and scholars is slowly attempting to redress this balance. 

Previous research from India aims to rethink how temples were systematically plundered of bronzes during colonial times, with pieces taken from contexts of worship and transformed into ‘art objects’ within Western museums. 

Research from Southeast Asia emphasises the nature of various expeditions aimed at gathering objects within the colonial period, with unequal exchange or appropriations. Research from China reflects upon the imperial plunder during the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion, leading to an endless dispersion of treasures across Western and American shores.

The 2019 International Council of Museums (ICOM) conference in Kyoto was a potential turning point as a collective of Asian museum professionals gave coordinated presentations on the subject of decolonisation, looking at it from the point of view of the Asian region. 

The speakers from Japan, India, Indonesia, and Thailand focused on the idea of challenging the dominant discourse of decolonisation from a Western point of view, because the nature of colonisation differed from the typical narrative of theft and return. The colonisation of the Asian region was of a longer period and had more complex trading and more sophisticated power structures.

This point has been particularly eloquently spelled out by Dr. Kavita Singh of Jawaharlal Nehru University. In her latest writings, Dr. Singh contends that the Indian bronzes in Western museums experience a “double alienation”: first from their ritual context and then from their epistemic framework. In displaying them as aesthetic artefacts, these bronzes are erased of their epistemological framework. In the context of return to the colonisers, there is also an epistemological restoration needed.

A dissection of expertise

This relates to a broader discussion of issues of expertise and authority. Who is entitled to interpret Asian cultural heritage? 

Western museums have, until recently, championed the knowledge of European experts to interpret Asian artefacts. The documents created during the colonial period – by colonial officials and merchants who fundamentally misunderstood what they were studying – are considered acceptable. 

However, traditional knowledge systems – artistic traditions that have carried on technical knowledge through generations, traditional texts that explain symbols, oral traditions that explain the histories of artefacts – were considered folklore or interesting background material.

A number of structural elements serve to exacerbate this issue. First, there is a continued reluctance to engage with Asian researchers as truly equal partners in research. Indeed, even when such collaboration does happen, it often does so on asymmetrical terms, with European institutions dictating terms of research while ignoring the very notion of independent potential offered by researchers from these source communities. 

Next, there is a continued reliance on institutional affiliations with those deemed to have relevant expertise, with qualifications from European institutions being accorded more weight than equivalent, or even superior, qualifications from Asian institutions.

The Netherlands has initiated some trial approaches to provenance studies, but these have not been part of a standardised ethical process. More fundamentally, European museums have failed to use Asian provenance researchers as staff members; this is not because of resource constraints but because of a reluctance to share decision-making authority, or a kind of possessiveness, that re-creates the old knowledge colonialism of a century ago, notwithstanding all the rhetoric of decolonisation.

Such is the pecking order. European knowledge, however flawed, is fact; Asian knowledge, however deep, is opinion.

These dynamics can also be seen in the Indonesian case. A good example here is that of the Lombok treasure. After the military intervention in Lombok by the Dutch in 1894, thousands of treasures from the royal palace were shipped to the Netherlands. These treasures included gold jewellery, ritual items, manuscripts, and weapons. 

While these would be legitimate spoils of war to the Dutch, they would also represent colonial looting from an Indonesian perspective. These two views can never coexist – a reality that appreciates the fact that legitimate acquisition can also mean illegitimacy.

The same questions also emerge from other collections in Asia. Were the British Museum’s Amaravati Marbles, comprising Buddhist sculptures from South India, being removed from temple sites by colonial officers in the early 19th century? Were these ruined sites being saved and rescued as recorded by the British? Or were these pilgrimage sites being plundered as recalled by the Indians? 

There is only room for the coloniser’s voice in the records. There is no space for the voice of the indigenous peoples, for it wasn’t considered worthy.

Repatriation and beyond

This naturally leads us to the contentious topic of repatriation. 

Museums have rationalised the acquisition and retention of disputed objects by using sophisticated arguments. Provenance, it is suggested, is ‘unclear’ – an advantage since provenance research traditionally lacked adequate funding and has disproportionately focused on the acquisition of European art. 

The acquisition of disputed objects, we are told, was legal – these legal systems having been yet another mode of subjugation. Objects are now our ‘shared heritage’; everyone can agree that these will always move from Asia to Europe, never from Europe to Asia. Europe will offer better care – yet another paternalistic argument conveniently neglecting the relative wealth disparities created by colonialism.

Yet recent developments in international museum practice are beginning to challenge these assumptions. The 2025 ICOM Dubai General Assembly voted through Resolution No. 6 to create a Standing Committee on Decolonisation.

The greatest of these is that implementation has been glacially slow. Dutch museums have returned artefacts to Indonesia and Sri Lanka, but these are minuscule in comparison to pre-colonial holdings. British museums are generally still resistant, based on the British Museum Act that makes deaccessioning impossible. France has many laws intended to govern its patrimony, while America has no guidelines on colonial-era acquisitions.

Meanwhile, Asian nations have adopted a more advanced form of cultural diplomacy related to heritage. 

The Chinese State is increasingly assertive over the restitution of artefacts that were stolen through the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion. India has successfully repatriated many of its temple bronzes, both legally and diplomatically. 

Similarly, Indonesia has developed processes for requesting repatriations of objects, enhancing its museums to accommodate these repatriations. This defies the idea of having the cultural heritage of Asian countries housed in museums in the West.

However, the underlying question here extends far beyond repatriation and into the very basis on which museums function. To truly achieve this concept of decolonisation, several rather uncomfortable changes are required.

First, there is the need to diversify the staff working in museums, especially in curatorial and management positions. Museums in Europe dealing with Asian collections are predominantly white in colour. This affects everything, including acquisition strategies and interpretative schemes. When those making decisions on Asian heritage have little or no connection with Asian communities and knowledge systems, the concept of decolonisation becomes an intellectual exercise. 

Second, the museums also need to acknowledge indigenous knowledge systems as being equal to Western approaches to academic knowledge. This involves working in consultation with hereditary craftspeople in developing knowledge around crafts and materials, using traditional texts as part of research, and recognising oral history as being as significant as written records.

Third, museums have to facilitate true co-curation, putting source communities in charge of the presentation and interpretation of their heritage. This is not the case currently, as museums invite, but do not always implement, advice on how to do this better. Co-curation entails collaboration in decision-making, even if this leads to challenges to established wisdom.

Fourth, museums ought to invest substantially in research and transparency on provenance. Most of the acquisitions made during the colonial era lack clear documentation regarding the circumstances of acquisition. Museums ought to assume a problematic provenance for all acquisitions made during the colonial era until proven otherwise, reversing the burden of proof that lies on communities to prove that the artefacts were stolen.

Fifth, museums must support capacity building in the former colonies rather than holding onto the resources. The wide gap between the riches of museums in Western countries and those of museums in the Global South stems from colonial legacies. The museums based in the West, which complain about the state of conservation in their source countries, must support capacity building in these countries.

Decolonisation’s next chapter

Some people argue that decolonising will undermine the universal mission of museums or even destroy history. This is a deeply mistaken assumption of what decolonising seeks to achieve. 

Decolonising does not mean abandoning international collections; it means trying to create more comprehensive and genuine histories of their formation. It does not mean pretending colonial histories did not exist; it means engaging with colonial legacies in many contemporary museum practices. And it does not mean relativising one history over another; on the contrary, ‘universal’ museums were never universal, they are European museums that always imagined they spoke on behalf of all of humanity, when in fact they were simply espousing European knowledge and values.

The Asian dimension of museum decolonisation remains an unfinished story because we have yet to gain meaningful voice in writing it. Recent initiatives offer cautious optimism: collaborative research projects, some repatriations, the growing acknowledgement of problematic colonial acquisitions. But these remain exceptions. The fundamental power structures persist.

Decolonisation cannot be controlled by museum professionals interested in managing controversy. It needs to be propelled by long-standing pressure on the part of Asian communities and scholars who demand epistemic justice. The question must move from if museums should decolonise to how this transformation can best happen.

Western museums have to begin with an understanding that they are custodians, not owners, of a large part of Asian cultural heritage. There is a responsibility, as custodians, to share power, and sometimes that includes repatriating objects to communities of origin. 

Until such time as Asian voices are heard within these institutions, until knowledge systems, values, and conceptions of understanding are centred, not marginalised, it cannot be said that these institutions have fully come to terms with colonialism.

The next chapter of museum decolonisation will be written by Asian communities reclaiming our right to speak for ourselves, to interpret our heritage, and to demand that institutions holding our patrimony finally listen. That is the unfinished story that must now be told.

(The writer is an ethnographer and art historian specialising in material culture, critical museum studies, and participatory research methodologies. As a member of Provenance Research on Objects of the Colonial Era [PPROCE], the Netherlands and Dutch Research Council [NWO] committees, she engages with repatriation and decolonisation debates. She currently holds a NIAS-NIOD-KITLV Research Fellowship in the Netherlands)

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)