• Communication and the long shadow of dependency

She is a little under five feet high, cast in bronze, nude except for the lower part of her body, her right hand facing outward in the posture of gift-giving. She has occupied this space for over a thousand years. 

From the 10th century until 1830, when a British official named Robert Brownrigg moved her to London as personal property, she was at some point at a sanctuary along the eastern coast of this island, though the exact location is no longer known. These days she resides behind glass in Room 33 of the British Museum, bathed in overhead light, catalogued in perhaps 30 words. People refer to her as the Tara.

I have visited her twice. In 2018, I stood before her for over an hour. A French family arrived and left; a school party was hurried through. Not one of them, I observed, paused long enough to read the label beside her case. The label was not for their benefit. It was for her. It told her in English, using the past tense, who she was now that an institution, in her stead, had decided upon her identity.

What I want to explore in this article today is how heritage, power, and narrative relate to each other, and how the subtle, insidious dependencies shape who tells the story of a culture in 2026 and who becomes little more than a footnote at the back of a museum.

The story is the asset

Today, heritage is less about the collection of physical objects and more about the collection of stories. Sigiriya is a rock formation in the dry zone; it becomes heritage when it comes to the story we create. 

The Lewke cannon, which was repatriated back to Sri Lanka from the Netherlands in 2023 after almost two-and-a-half centuries in the Rijksmuseum, is heritage because of the story that has been built around it: the gift of a Sinhala minister to his king which was looted by the British at the fall of Kandy and was later, through years of provenance studies, discovered to be a Sri Lankan artefact.

The moment one accepts the first idea – that the story is the heritage – one must realise the implications of it: whoever owns the story owns the economic, political, and emotional power of the heritage. 

And here the truth of Sri Lanka, like most of the Global South, is that we own the objects, we own the soil, but the dominant narrative framework and the academic language for interpretation, museum taxonomy, and global media reach all continue to belong to other powers.

Dependency in its quietest form

This notion of dependency was defined by Latin American intellectuals in the late 1960s, namely that the lack of development in the global periphery was a direct result of becoming integrated into an international economy that was dominated by the Global North. 

The notion was first posited by André Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney, and Samir Amin. Then, Herbert Schiller, along with the cultural imperialism school, applied the same logic to communications – in particular, how Global North-based transnational corporations not only provided the equipment of the global media apparatus but also its programming and news values.

The third edge, heritage dependency, has perhaps received less attention than any of the three dependencies we have mentioned thus far. Rather than extraction or forced broadcasting, heritage dependency works slowly, through the incorporation of an outside perspective into the institutional structures through which a postcolonial society sees itself. 

In this respect, consider the Department of Archaeology of Sri Lanka, established in 1890, whose establishment was decided upon by colonial scholars who determined what was significant and how it should be understood. 

It was only sites and narratives which made sense within the ‘rise-and-fall-of-civilisations’ framework of the European scholar that found their way into the canon; while Vedda cultures, coastal Muslim traders, Tamil ritual practices, and Catholic-Sinhalese syncretism could be studied ethnographically, none qualified as heritage. 

The Colombo National Museum, founded in 1877, had its displays organised in accordance with a London Victorian model: glass cases, Linnaean classification, ethnographies in eternal past tense. Hardly anything has been changed in the last century and a half.

This is dependency at its most insidious. No gunboats. No tied lending programmes. Not even Schiller’s cultural imperialism in its most blatant sense. Merely the legacy of an inherited way of looking at things.

The 2.36 m visitors and the stories we sell them

In 2025, tourist arrivals in Sri Lanka reached a record level – 2.36 million tourists – and earned an estimated $ 3.2 billion for the country, according to the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. Leading the source markets were India (531,511 visitors), the UK (212,277), Russia (186,580), Germany (147,966), and China (132,035). 

Tourism is now second only to textiles and apparel as a source of foreign exchange. The Minister talked about a target of three million in 2026. Each one of these visitors will spend some days exploring the heritage of the island nation.

The important question that arises is what they will explore. Research on the travel imagery of Sri Lanka has revealed how resilient colonial stereotypes are. 

The country continues to be advertised in glossy magazines and on social media platforms as a tropical garden, paradise island, and jungle – the three main archetypes of the British imperialist imagination. In terms of heritage tourism, the most easily recognisable sites are highlighted: ancient Buddhist kingdoms, Dutch forts, tea plantation verandas, and the pageantry of Kandy. The Aluthgama riots, the Maradana mosques, Malaiyaha Tamil line rooms, and the rich Muslim heritage of Galle have been ignored.

It’s not due to deliberate censorship, mind you. Rather, it’s due to the fact that international tourism incentivises legibility, and legibility is, ultimately, a product of the gaze of the highest bidder. 

An industry that brings in 2.36 million visitors annually is an impressive editor. It tells our hoteliers what to emphasise, our heritage boards what to restore, and our cultural ministries what to subsidise. An actor from Maharagama and a marketer in Colombo are both, albeit in their own unique ways, writing for the same imagined Global North audience.

Three quiet arguments

These, then, would be, broadly speaking, the three standpoints one could adopt with respect to all this, and indeed Sri Lankan discourse on such matters has been confused over them since at least a decade ago.

The first is that of the celebrative standpoint. Observe the outcomes of all this activity: the Lewke cannon, returned in 2023, the six artefacts recovered from the Rijksmuseum in the same batch, the continuing discussion between the Sri Lankan Advisory Committee for the Return of Artefacts and the Dutch Advisory Committee for the Return of Cultural Objects from Colonial Contexts. 

In July 2025 the Dutch Ambassador met with the Secretary to the President in an effort to continue talks about manuscripts and artefacts. UNESCO is consistently adding to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of Sri Lanka: Rūkada Nātya (2018), Dumbara Ratā Kalāla (2021), and Kithul Madeema (2025).

The second stance is the rejectionist stance. Returns are breadcrumbs. The great majority of objects stolen from Sri Lanka in the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Ethnologisches Museum, and the Royal Museums are not even close to being on the discussion agenda. 

Joint provenance research, according to this view, is a highly complex delaying tactic, enabling Global North museums to retain control over the narrative, the vocabulary, and ultimately the academic accolades. The label is yet to be penned in the metropole.

I believe both positions ignore the true stakes of the matter. 

The third stance, the one that I would take, is that the object was merely the surface all along. The deeper issue is whether we can develop the cultural and scholarly capacity to craft our own narratives, using our own archival resources and our own global reach, as European museums have done for over two centuries. 

It will be a glorious day when we return the Tara to Colombo, but if she is displayed in a vitrine with a label in the same Victorian tone, only in Sinhala translation, then we will have returned the object, but not the narrative.

What it would take

Repossessing the narrative will take effort far more difficult than repossessing the bronze. There are four things it needs, none of which can happen in a press release.

First of all, we need to commit to building our own scholarship. We need the PhDs who know provenance studies, conservation science, manuscript palaeography, and digital humanities in English, Sinhala, and Tamil. Our own experts must carry the same currency of legitimacy as those from Bonn and Leiden; otherwise, we shall continue exporting the privilege of authority.

Secondly, we need to redesign our museums and heritage institutions in such a way that they foreground community knowledge, rather than undermine it. An indigenous script on the royal insignia has more to offer us about the rings kept in the Rijksmuseum and the Berlin Ethnological Museum than any late-19th century European catalogue. Folk stories belonging to craft communities – the lacquer-makers of Matale, the brass-smiths of Pilimathalawa, the puppeteers of Ambalangoda – are historical records; they ought to appear in the museum labels.

This means learning how to speak to the audience of the Global South first. The Indonesians, Malaysians, and Vietnamese dealing with their Dutch, French, and Portuguese archives; the Nigerians, Beninese, and Ethiopians negotiating with the same few European bodies; the museum exchange between the Global South countries; the manuscript digitisation project; the restitution case study – all of these are not idealistic. These are just less picturesque than the handshake ceremony in Europe.

This means speaking honestly about the dependencies within our own institutions. In this country, heritage has long been wielded like a stick. This means that decolonising arguments become hollow the minute they are used only against external parties and never against the inequities within our own walls. To write our own descriptions, we need to be ready to write our descriptions inclusively.

Returning to the case

I returned to Room 33 last October. The Tara was still in the same position; the lighting was the same; the label was slightly altered. 

A young woman wearing a Sri Lankan cricket shirt was standing in front of the display case, talking on the phone. She was talking through a video chat. She was explaining to someone, in Sinhala, how each aspect of the statue – the mudras, the jewellery, even the position of her hip – worked. Whoever she was talking to was asking her questions about the figure, and she answered them without any hesitation.

As I watched her do this, I realised something that took me a while to understand in my academic career. Repatriation on its own isn’t the answer. 

Bringing the object back is the easy part – the glamorous part, the media-hyped part, the quick part that only takes a couple of hours of diplomacy. The difficult part is the time-consuming effort of discussion, collaboration, mutual discovery, and discourse that must take place around the act. 

Repatriation as an act of commerce resolves a dispute about property rights. Repatriation as a process initiates a dialogue among source communities and repositories, scholars and artisans, expatriate populations and home islands, South and South.

The kind of advocacy that we must be involved with, therefore, involves much more than restoration. It involves an epistemological transformation: the question of who counts as an acceptable knower of our history, what language he or she knows it in, and who holds the power to make sense of all of it. 

An epistemological transformation like this cannot be dictated through a ministry’s statement, nor can it be enacted through a signing ceremony on an international podium. Rather, it has to be constructed, painstakingly and carefully, through our classrooms; through our devalayas, kovils, temples, and mosques; through craft workshops; through walks around our neighborhoods; through meals in our own homes; and perhaps even in front of the glass enclosures of our museums. This construction of meaning, this process of epistemological change, can come about only through storytelling.

This is why I have come to believe that the future of heritage in Sri Lanka does not lie chiefly in the formal corridors of UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property, important as those corridors are, nor only in bilateral negotiations between Colombo and The Hague. It lies in the power of the people in what Antonio Gramsci would have recognised as the slow, civic work of building a counter-common sense from below. 

When ordinary Sri Lankans, in Pettah and in Jaffna, in Galle and in Nuwara Eliya, in Melbourne and in Toronto, begin to claim the right to narrate their own material culture, when teachers, journalists, weavers, drummers, monks, priests, mothers, and grandchildren begin to share custody of the story, then conservation ceases to be a state monopoly, and heritage ceases to be a possession. It becomes, instead, a commons – something a society holds together, defends together, and passes on together. That is the real return.

Storytelling is, in the end, the deepest form of sovereignty. A country whose heritage is narrated by others, however graciously, however lavishly funded, is not yet fully its own. A country whose ordinary citizens are confident enough to stand in front of an imperial vitrine and tell the object, in their grandmother’s language, who it actually is – that is a country beginning, very quietly, to come home.

(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)