Reading Circle: Stolen Heritage and Identities

Reading Circle: Stolen Heritage and Identities Friday, September 18, 2026 4 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. Taragaon Next, Bouddha Registration required Limited to 15 participants What Empire Took, What Empire Left: Museums, Borders and the Politics of Return in South Asia emerges from a central provocation: what happens when the sacred is violently dislocated—not only from place, but from time, ritual, and meaning? Curated by Dr. Arshiya Lokhandwala, the exhibition talks about how across South Asia, deities, manuscripts, and ritual objects have been removed from living contexts and reclassified within Western museums, where they are aestheticized, contained, and severed from the cosmologies that once animated them. This exhibition confronts that rupture. During this reading, we will be understanding and learning about the stolen artifacts in western museums and repatriation efforts made by the countries to bring them back home. We will be analyzing 10 written pieces from various sources explaining the heritage hunting industry, how smuggling religious items in South Asia has affected communities and the ethics of museums in the West. We will also be discussing the effects of colonization and how repatriation efforts in South Asia look like. -------- Taragaon Next 'Reading Circle: Stolen Heritage and Identities' for the exhibition - What Empire Took, What Empire Left . . . . [heritage, repatriation, stolen, reading circle, analysis, educational programming, exhibition based programming] #TaragaonNext