Piprahwa Gems: Sotheby’s halts sale of Buddha’s jewels; can India get them back?

The ministry’s notice added, “The proposed auction involves sacred Buddhist relics excavated from Piprahwa Stupa in Uttar Pradesh, India, in 1898. These relics — referred to as “duplicate jewels” — constitute inalienable religious and cultural heritage of India and the global Buddhist community. Their sale violates Indian and international laws, as well as United Nations conventions.” In the run-up to the auction, pressure had begun to be built by Buddhist leaders from around the world.

A call to the Sotheby’s Hong Kong office by this writer, on the said auction, went unanswered, while the tab on this particular sale on the auction house’s website repeatedly led to Error 404 with the message, ‘Oops, the page you are looking for doesn’t seem to exist.’

However, late on May 6 night, the Ministry of Culture posted on X: “We are pleased to inform that, following the intervention of the @MinOfCultureGoI, @Sothebys Hong Kong has postponed the auction of the Piprahwa Buddhist relics, which was scheduled for May 7, 2025. Further details will be shared in due course.”

According to a statement released by Sotheby’s on Wednesday morning (as published on France24.com), the auction had been postponed “in light of the matters raised by the Government of India and in agreement with the consignors.”

The importance of Piprahwa Gems

The Piprahwa Gems denote the cache of jewels linked to the mortal remains of the Buddha, unearthed in 1898 in an excavation in Piprahwa in present-day Uttar Pradesh, alongside bone fragments identified by an inscribed urn as belonging to the Buddha himself.

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The Piprahwa Gems had come to the auction table, courtesy Chris Peppé, a Los Angeles-based television director and film editor, who is the great grandson of William Claxton Peppé, an English estate manager who excavated the stupa at Piprahwa, a village in Siddharthnagar district in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Piprahwa lies just nine miles from the World Heritage Site of Lumbini in Nepal, where the Buddha was born in 624 BCE.

According to publicly available information, the gems that were going to the auction included amethysts, coral, garnets, pearls, beads, gold, crystals, and even ornaments, which were buried along with the cremated remains of the Buddha, who died circa 480 BCE. The gems and the mortal remains of the Buddha were buried in the Piprahwa Stupa circa 240 BCE-200 BCE.

When discovered, the cache of gems and bones were claimed by the British government under the Indian Treasure Trove Act of 1878. In a lengthy piece on Sotheby's website dated February 9, 2025, explaining the history of his treasure, Chris Peppé writes: “The Piprahwa gem relics were passed down from my great uncle to his son, then in 2013 they came to myself and two cousins. It was at this point that I began in-depth research into the discovery of the gems by William Claxton Peppé, my great-grandfather… The inscription on the reliquary urn that my great-grandfather discovered inside the Piprahwa stupa created a wave of excitement among the leading ancient language translators of the time who interpreted it to mean that the bone relics were the remains of the Buddha given to his own Shakya clan after his cremation…”

“And I learned that the excavation of the stupa was an attempt by Willie Peppé to provide work for his tenant farmers who had fallen victim to the famine of 1897. His technical diagrams of ramps and pulleys suggest that he was also a trained engineer who couldn’t resist a project. He gave the gems, the relics and the reliquaries to the Indian government [the British colonial government that ran India]. The bone relics were gifted to the King of Siam (Rama V) and all the major pieces of gold and jewellery were donated to the museum in Kolkata. It is the small portion of duplicates that he was allowed to keep that have been kept in our family,” writes Chris Peppé.

He further writes that he, along with his cousins, set up a website “that allows people to access all the research materials that we have gathered. We posted Willie Peppé’s letters that authenticate the discovery on the site and donated them to the Royal Asiatic Society.”

Private sale of an epochal treasure

In an age and time when colonial loot is an openly discussed topic in all former colonies of Britain, including India, where prominent scholars and writers such as William Dalrymple, Shashi Tharoor and Utsa Patnaik, among several others, have not only calculated the extent of the British plunder of India but have increasingly become vocal about it on international platforms, Chris Peppé’s carefully worded story on the Sotheby’s website seems condescending and even outright insulting to the people of the former colonies. It is absolutely unethical to say the least. Just as he donated his great grandfather’s letters to the Royal Asiatic Society, should he not have donated these gems to those that they rightfully belong to, instead of putting them up for sale in a high-profile auction?

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Poet Ashok Vajpeyi, a retired IAS officer, who served as Culture Secretary with the Government of India, and was the force behind the creation of the well-known arts institution of Bharat Bhawan in Bhopal, says, “There has been a greater awareness in the last few decades about colonial plunder and loot, which is housed in some of the best museums in Europe, including the British Museum and Louvre, to name only a few. Under the UNESCO Convention, protocol expects member countries to return art objects which have been taken by way of loot or pilferage, theft, etc.”

“Some objects by museums have also been returned; museums being public institutions are sometimes more responsive to such conventions than individual or private collectors. The auction houses have been auctioning many objects which have perhaps been taken away by force, lure, etc. Ideally, they should be behaving ethically, not agreeing to auction such objects. Individual collectors, too, should behave more ethically, it is not right for them to auction items of such historical value for the sake of money. But these are not the best of times for civic morality,” Vajpeyi adds.

Only one part of the story

Now that The Piprahwa Gems have been saved from being traded in marketplace like cheap glittery stuff, at least for now, the bigger question that remains to be answered is, will this invaluable piece of India’s heritage ever be returned to the land where it belongs?

The looting of India, now being documented with hard facts, which put the figure of $45 trillion that the British effected in their two centuries of colonial rule of the subcontinent, remains one of the biggest tragedies of human civilisation ever. Even within the subset of treasures plundered from India during different centuries, such as The Piprahwa Gems, there are too many objects that need to be repatriated back to the land they belong to. Unfortunately, in this tragic story, often the Koh-i-Noor diamond walks away with all the limelight. Equal spotlight and action are required for the repatriation of the following, to name just a few:

The Sultanganj Buddha: The largest substantially complete copper Buddha from Gupta-Pala period (500 CE-700 CE), weighing 500 kg and measuring 2.3 m (approx. 7.5 ft), which was discovered while digging for the East Indian Railway in 1861 at Sultanganj in present-day Jharkhand, and was promptly shipped to England. It is housed in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England.

The Sandstone Statue of Harihar: Harihar is the fused representation of Vishnu (Hari) and Shiva (Har). This statue is from Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, dating back to approximately 1,000 years, and was looted by the British when it became part of Major General Charles Stuart’s collection. It is now housed in the British Museum.

Bronze Natarajas from Tamil Nadu: The British Museum houses significant bronze Natarajas from the Pallava (circa 800 CE) and Chola (circa 1100 CE) periods.

Amaravati Marbles: A collection of over 120 sculptures and inscriptions from the Mahachaitya at Amaravati in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh, which were excavated in the 1840s and transferred to the British Museum in London in 1880s.

These are just a few of the thousands of examples of vital links of India’s cultural history that now lie in the permanent collections of the top museums in the western world. Besides India, several other former colonies have continuously demanded the return of their looted treasures, the most famous examples of which are the Elgin Marbles of Greece in the custody of the British Museum, and the Benin Bronzes from Nigeria in the custody of the British Museum and the Ethnological Museum of Berlin.

In November last year, looted antiquities worth $10 million were returned to India by the US as part of its initiative to repatriate stolen art from countries across South and Southeast Asia, some of which had been illegally sold to prominent museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This particular cache of antiquities hailed from the racket operated by art traffickers Nancy Wiener and Subhash Kapoor.

However, repatriation of cultural heritage of India looted by the British colonisers remains a topic of deliberation with no hope in sight from the Indian perspective. As Vajpeyi says, it would require a strong, concerted campaign by all previous colonies. “There has to be a massive campaign, supported by diplomatic dialogue, in which UNESCO will have to play a major role. But UNESCO, which used to be once dynamic and active, too seems to be fading as the UN gets caught in the middle of two international wars.”