What Empire Took, What Empire Left: Museums, Borders and the Politics of Return in South Asia

Exhibition Opening: What Empire Took, What Empire Left: Museums, Borders and the Politics of Return in South Asia Curated by Dr. Arshiya Mansoor Lokhandwala for the Saraf Foundation, hosted at Taragaon Next The exhibition starts on August 23, 2026 with a Symposium at 3 p.m. and the official opening at 4 p.m. Exhibiting Artists: Temsüyanger Longkumer, Reetu Sattar, Shaurya Kumar, Raqs Media Collective, Mithu Sen, Divya Mehra, Marium Ghani, L.N. Tallur, Roshan Mishra, Bishal Manandhar, Jagath Weerasinghe What Empire Took, What Empire Left emerges from a central provocation: what happens when the sacred is violently dislocated—not only from place, but from time, ritual, and meaning? 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. Rather than simply narrating histories of loss, it interrogates the conditions that enabled such displacement—colonial epistemologies, illicit markets, institutional complicity, and the enduring frameworks of museology that privilege possession over presence. From Nepal’s emptied temples to the dispersal of India’s bronzes, from Gandharan sculptures in Pakistan to the systematic erosion of Bangladesh’s terracotta heritage, the exhibition traces a region-wide history of cultural dismemberment. Yet this is not a lament. Through contemporary artistic practices, What Empire Took, What Empire Left activates a counter-archive—foregrounding acts of return not only as restitution, but as epistemic resistance. It calls for a rethinking of South Asian art history itself: not as a neutral canon of objects, but as a field marked by violence and in urgent need of decolonial reparation, where memory, belief, and sovereignty are reclaimed. . . . [new exhibition, artwork, heritage, repatriation, stolen heritage, south asian culture] #TaragaonNext