Anoushka Shankar, Isha Ambani to headline fundraiser for British Museum

Ravi Shankar’s daughter, the sitarist Anoushka Shankar, and Indian businesswoman Isha Ambani are set to headline a glittering fundraiser for the British Museum — even as the institution reels from thefts, scandals, and growing calls for restitution of its colonial loot.

According to the Times newspaper in London, the museum will stage its first ever “Pink Ball” on October 18, billing it as a London counterpart to New York’s Met Gala. Tickets cost £2,000 (Rs 2.38 lakh) each, with 800 guests expected to dine only yards away from the legendary Amaravati Sculptures — Buddhist treasures looted from Andhra Pradesh by East India Company forces — while being entertained by Shankar and the Jules Buckley Orchestra in the Great Court.

Ambani, daughter of Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, has co-led planning for the event with museum director Nicholas Cullinan. A “star-studded committee” includes Naomi Campbell, the British supermodel; Edward Enninful, the former editor-in-chief of British Vogue; Courtney Love, the American rock musician and actress; and Zadie Smith, the acclaimed British novelist. The evening will be themed around the “colours and light of India”, with guests given exclusive access to the museum’s Ancient India: Living Traditions exhibition.

The spectacle promises chandeliers, champagne flutes, and contested treasures, but it also exposes a bitter irony. While India’s culture is being used as a backdrop for glamour, the museum still clings to more than 30,000 Indian artefacts seized during the Raj, many of them never formally catalogued, and together worth billions of pounds.

The British Museum also admits to holding more than 6,000 human remains from across the world, including South Asia. Campaigners and scholars argue that retaining human remains — often looted from battlefields, burial grounds, or temples — is even more disturbing than holding looted artefacts, because it denies dignity to the dead and their descendants.

Among these are treasures originally consecrated in temples and shrines: Chola bronzes once worshipped in Tamil Nadu, Hindu deities from Odisha and Bengal, and Buddhist relics removed from stupas and monasteries across the subcontinent. Objects once bathed in ritual offerings and garlanded with flowers now sit under glass in British Museum galleries, transformed from living deities into lifeless curiosities.

Behind the pink glow lies hard arithmetic. Cullinan is paid between £215,000 and £220,000 a year (Rs 2.56–2.62 crore), according to the museum’s accounts, more than the British Prime Minister and 40 per cent above a Cabinet minister’s salary. Senior curators enjoy gold-plated civil service pensions, underwritten by the taxpayer.

Freedom of Information requests revealed to The Tribune confirm that in 2024/25, the museum drew £44 million (Rs 5,236 crore) in annual operating subsidies and another £30 million (Rs 3,570 crore) in capital grants, more than £74 million (Rs 8,806 crore) in total. A further £14 million (Rs 1,666 crore) went on PR, press handling, and security alone — a sum larger than the entire annual budget of many regional museums. British taxpayers are paying not just for salaries and pensions, but also for press and communications staff in an institution that markets itself as “free to enter” while costing the public dearly to sustain its aura.

The museum’s governance failures are as notorious as its riches. Under Cullinan’s predecessor Hartwig Fischer, it admitted that more than 1,500 items had gone missing from its storerooms, many of them gems and antiquities. The scandal forced Fischer’s resignation and shattered the museum’s claim to be a better custodian than the nations from which its treasures were seized.

An internal recovery team was assembled; by last year only 634 items had been traced. The head of the Greek and Roman department, Thomas Harrison, conceded that more than 850 remained unaccounted for and another 100 might resurface “in the next year or so”. The task is complicated by the fact that many of the missing pieces were never photographed or properly catalogued.

The museum has accused Peter Higgs, a former curator, of responsibility, and won a civil case demanding he return stolen items. Higgs has not responded publicly. Police inquiries continue. In the meantime, many of the missing artefacts are believed to have passed through dealers in Britain, Switzerland and the Middle East before vanishing into private hands.

The gala’s Indian theme is deliberately designed to encourage wealthy Indian diaspora donors to support the museum’s redevelopment and “international partnerships”. Yet it asks the descendants of Indian victims of colonial plunder to bankroll the very institution that refuses to return their heritage.

The irony is sharper still because the Ancient India: Living Traditions exhibition, which Pink Ball guests will be invited to stroll through, is itself deeply contested. Much of the material was seized during the East India Company and Raj conquests, and critics say the display reframes looted objects as cultural curiosities while glossing over the violence of their acquisition. Far from being neutral, it risks becoming a marketing tool to attract diaspora donors even as the museum resists restitution. As Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal has argued more broadly, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.”

The dissonance is hard to ignore. Alongside Indian objects, the museum holds the Rosetta Stone, the Benin Bronzes, Chinese imperial treasures from the Qing dynasty — many believed to have been taken during the looting of the Old Summer Palace in 1860 — and artefacts seized at the Battle of Maqdala in Ethiopia, including regalia of Emperor Tewodros II. All are subjects of ongoing restitution claims. As Professor Dan Hicks, author of ‘The Brutish Museums’, has said: “Restitution is not only about the past — it’s about the kind of future we want to build.”

Gala glamour may work for New York’s fundraising circuit, but no amount of pink will conceal that the British Museum’s authority still rests on empire and contested ownership.

It is worth recalling how the institution began. The British Museum was founded in 1753 with funds from the estate of Hans Sloane, a physician and collector whose wealth was built in part on investments in slavery and the transatlantic trade. From its origins, the museum’s grandeur was tied to empire and exploitation. The Pink Ball therefore represents not a clean break, but a continuation of that legacy under new colours.

Britain’s fiscal reality gives the controversy sharper edges. The country’s Chancellor of the Exchequer — its finance minister — Rachel Reeves, needs to find tens of billions without raising taxes or slashing services. The British Museum alone squats on 5.5 acres of prime Bloomsbury real estate worth at least £2 billion (Rs 2.38 lakh crore). Its collections, by conservative estimates, could raise £30-50 billion (Rs 35.7-59.5 lakh crore) through restitution, sale, or structured repatriation. Handled correctly, such a programme would not just resolve historical injustices but fund hospitals, housing, and schools. It would also decentralise Britain’s cultural infrastructure.

A reimagined museum could be relocated to Manchester or Birmingham, freeing central London for redevelopment and jobs.

For now, the chandeliers will sparkle and the sitar will play. Shankar, Ambani, and an A-list of artists and celebrities will lend their prestige to an institution in need of cash and credibility. But, for many, the ball highlights rather than erases the contradictions: a scandal-riven, taxpayer-funded museum asking the heirs of the looted to pay again.

Rachel Reeves could continue the subsidies, or she could take the radical step of privatisation by converting Britain’s imperial inheritance into public wealth of the future. Until then, the Pink Ball remains a symbol: a night of champagne and song, only yards from India’s looted Amaravati Sculptures and, elsewhere in the galleries, beneath the gaze of the Parthenon Marbles, as the ghosts of empire look on.

— The writer is the London correspondent of The Tribune