[ Birad Rajaram Yajnik ] In Hinduism we always believe that life is a full circle, there are always ups and downs.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] India before the British was the
richest nation with the highest GDP in the world.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] And why did the hundred years of British rule
bring it to a decimal low of some 50th ranking or late 30th ranking?
[ Achala Moulik ] They came to take our trade, our textile, our raw material,
even for making cannonball, they needed saltpeter which came from India.
[ Tarun Vijay ] India was not their property.
They had no right to take my property, my idols, my gods.
[ Mandira Row ] They went to our public spaces, our sacred
spaces of temples and really violently pulled out these pieces.
[ Vikram Sampath ] In fact, the word "lute" also is a Hindi word, which is now got into the English dictionary.
[ Vikram ] So, quite tellingly, even the Hindi word "lute" has been looted into the English lexicon.
[ C.S. Rangarajan ] Suppose you are a neighbor, takes important valuables and displays to you
and says: 'I took it from your home.' What will you do?
[ Achala Moulik ] Like if you take an example of a piece of jewelry,
sometimes you may think that it needs repair or it's totally broken.
[ Achala Moulik ] You may decide to break it up, remove the gel,
gel stones and actually melt the gold and recast it.
[ Achala Moulik ] And it might be even brighter and better than what it was before.
[ Actor ] Sir, we are hearing some voice from there.
[ Actor ] Sir, welcome to our humble hamlet, Kusampur.
[ Actor ] We are helping unit community working hand in hand
and shoulder to shoulder.
[ Actor ] I see.
[ Actor ] Here comes the following.
[ Actor ] The arrangement of our village.
[ Actor ] He makes the finest pots and pans
and sharpest our weapons.
[ Actor ] Like sports and sports.
[ Actor ] Ah, that's quite primitive manual work.
[ Actor ] You see your modern manufacturing units in glass go
and the cotton mil in Manchester.
[ Actor ] What does that work as?
[ Achala Moulik ] It was our wealth which was also our misfortune.
[ Achala Moulik ] Because had we been a poor country, I don't think they would have come here.
[ Actor ] Can you tell me what that guy is doing over there?
[ Actor ] I have a profound worship in our village temple,
praying for well-being of all the people
and the villagers are seeking blessing from him.
[ Actor ] I can't the blacksmith do the blessings. He's inferior, right?
[ Actor ] No sir, it is not like that.
[ Actor ] This is oppression, not harmony.
[ Actor ] You people have been cheated for centuries.
[ Actor ] But don't worry though, the East India Company is here
to save you from this oppressive social events
and get a better future.
[ Tarun Vijay ] They propagate it falsely
that India is a land of snake charmers,
elephants, crocodiles, and we have to
civilize these hedons and pagans.
[ Tarun Vijay ] So we have to convert them to Christianity.
[ Actor ] Is that true, sir?
[ Actor ] Police, stop this nonsense going on in the name of knowledge.
[ Actor ] Take this children to a mission school.
[ Actor ] We'll take care of this children from now on, not us.
[ Vikram Sampath ] One of the main reasons for the success of the East India Company
was the disunity among Indians.
[ Vikram Sampath ] There were lots of provinces and Rajas and Maharajas
who were constantly fighting with each other.
[ Achala Moulik ] We began with Warren Hastings,
who was an aggressive imperialist,
who was able to break up the Confederacy of the various states
who realized the danger of British rule,
which was beginning in 1776.
[ Vikram Sampath ] So they thought the British were just yet another player.
[ Vikram Sampath ] They probably did not foresee the pernicious effect
that these people were bringing in,
that it was not just economic or trade relations
that they were looking at, they were looking at political subjugation,
which was undermined or not thought through well enough
by the local Indian players.
[ Achala Moulik ] Well, they said the economic structure of India
was certainly destroyed.
[ Achala Moulik ] Because India at the time of Emperor Shah Jahan was the sixth richest country in the world.
[ Achala Moulik ] It had the volume of trade was one sixth of the world.
[ Tarun Vijay ] We were well-deer than Britain when the British came here.
[ Tarun Vijay ] The story begins in 1768 to 1938.
[ Tarun Vijay ] These years, for the years when the Indian
artifacts were stolen from Indian temples, houses,
palaces, art centers. They were taken to the British Museum.
The entire British Museum
is filled with stolen items.
[ Anhad Mishra ] And here we are.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Right outside British Museum
just meets gorgeous from the outside
where from the inside it's quite controversial
as some people might want to call it.
[ Anhad Mishra ] So let's head inside and see what are some of
the artifacts taken from India that reside here.
[ Anhad Mishra ] I'm Anhad, I live in New Delhi and I've just recently
graduated from National Experiment Television School in London.
[ Anhad Mishra ] So I was about to move out from London, come back to India.
[ Anhad Mishra ] And when I got this opportunity, I thought
that was the best way for me to spend my last days in London
by going and looking at these museums that had artifacts
and cultural pieces of belonging to my own country.
[ Anhad Mishra ] You see, this entire section is filled
with South Asian-looted artifacts.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Hello, the things I saw their kind of reignited my
love for history and I was literally experiencing
history in front of me and it was a weird mix of emotions that I felt.
[ Anhad Mishra ] There was a sense of sadness, there was a sense of pride.
[ Anhad Mishra ] The artifacts, just like any piece of
furniture that belongs to somebody's house belongs
to that house and should not be looted by
some third party and be put on display in some
other house or in some other country and specially made a tourist take attraction out of it
and monetized.
[ Achala Moulik ] So there are two ways of thinking that when they took these artifacts monuments which were
lying in ruins, perhaps if they had remained they would have gone, become ruins broken pillars
as you see in Roman Forum.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Perhaps by going to the British Museum,
they were preserved for prosperity.
[ Anhad Mishra ] We are right in the
hustle and bustle of old Delhi right now.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Chor Bazar originally means selling stolen items and stolen goods.
[ Anhad Mishra ] We are right in front of, in the heart of Chor Bazar,
right now in Delhi and it is a miniature version of what I saw in London in the British
[ Anhad Mishra ] Museum where all these stolen treasures and artifacts have been kept here similarly.
[ Anhad Mishra ] So many such stuff is sold here to us Indians.
[ Anhad Mishra ] So yeah.
[ Anhad Mishra ] You really look like them belong to Saudi.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Some time.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Look at this, this looks like obviously a CCTV camera which
is like it was ripped off the wall or something.
[ Anhad Mishra ] It is an absolutely perfect analogy about what British museums truly are.
[ C.S. Rangarajan ] This is a 500 year old temple.
[ C.S. Rangarajan ] The presiding deity is Balaji.
[ C.S. Rangarajan ] We call him Tirupati Balaji's reincarnation.
[ C.S. Rangarajan ] I exactly do not remember the exact date, 23 years old.
[ C.S. Rangarajan ] Somewhere in July, early morning we got a call from the family member here.
[ C.S. Rangarajan ] He called us and said our temple has been looted.
[ C.S. Rangarajan ] Burgled small murthies or the deities we call
five murthies were stolen. We were all in tears because for us it is not the idol.
[ C.S. Rangarajan ] It is the Swami Himself, the deity Himself,
God Himself standing there. For us it is like your child is
God kidnapped. How you feel when your small child gets kidnapped?
[ C.S. Rangarajan ] Nurak Sakshana is running a group called India Pride Project.
[ C.S. Rangarajan ] India Pride Project is a project wherein
they are trying to locate all these smuggled heritage icons
that the Daities or the carved images or statues or lot of these heritage
images are being smuggled out of different parts of this country.
[ C.S. Rangarajan ] And when I went there, I was surprised to see
that not only are there are thousands of such images
which are being smuggled from this country.
[ Anurag Saxena ] I am Anurag Saksena, co-founder of the India Pride Project,
which is an organization to make the case
that history belongs to its geography.
[ Anurag Saxena ] So what we do is make the case for artifacts and heritage looted from India to be brought back to India.
[ Anurag Saxena ] British, when the colonizers say they saved items.
[ Anurag Saxena ] The items were safe for centuries before they came.
[ Anurag Saxena ] The items are not safe because they broke them down and stole them away.
[ Anurag Saxena ] Right, so for somebody to say that the item, I mean,
why does a museum today or a private collector value these items?
[ Anurag Saxena ] Because they stayed safe for centuries and they are centuries old.
[ Anurag Saxena ] When a destroyer believes that he is the savior,
when the villain believes he is the hero.
[ Jared Chopra ] So the Pugia that was done yesterday is called the Shastra Pugia.
[ Jared Chopra ] This is a very ancient ceremony, and this is not an idealization of a physical weapon.
[ Jared Chopra ] It is rather an appeal for light to defeat
darkness, for goodness, to defeat evil, for right to defeat wrong.
[ Anurag Saxena ] You know, Jared's case is very interesting.
[ Anurag Saxena ] Their family was from modern day, what we call Punjab now.
[ Anurag Saxena ] You know, the sword amongst many other objects were taken.
[ Anurag Saxena ] That sword is meaningful because
it is a part of conquests, fights, resistance, wars
that the family engaged in.
[ Anurag Saxena ] And rightfully, you know, the heirs of that family should have a right to it.
[ Jared Chopra ] My name is Jared Chopra. I'm an international lawyer by training.
being half Indian and half British.
[ Jared Chopra ] Of course, these are powerful forces that when I was growing up,
I had to learn how to reconcile.
[ Jared Chopra ] But in reconciling them, I understand very well both sides of this equation.
[ Jared Chopra ] My family's been on both sides of this equation.
[ Jared Chopra ] We have to go back 175, 176 years, actually,
in which the East India Company had reached the Punjab.
[ Jared Chopra ] What was in the Punjab at the time was a sick empire,
but the founder of that empire, Maharaj Ranjit Singh,
had died in 1839.
[ Jared Chopra ] And as a result of that,
that empire was breaking up into different kingdoms.
[ Jared Chopra ] The East India Company had managed to create
a compromising set of relations
with the northern half of the Punjab,
and that left one kingdom in the southern half of the Punjab,
which is where my ancestors were ruling at that time.
[ Jared Chopra ] It was inevitable that there would be a conflict
between the East India Company and the British forces
and this last remaining kingdom,
the last part of India to be conquered.
[ Jared Chopra ] And this was the fuse that lit the Second Anglo-Sick War.
[ Jared Chopra ] But it was an extremely powerful fortress in Maltan.
[ Jared Chopra ] It took an enormous amount of material and troops
and artillery to be brought to Maltan for this siege.
[ Jared Chopra ] And so as the British advanced, they came up to...
[ Jared Chopra ] They came through the city, came up to the fortress,
and then communicated with Maharaj to say it's time to surrender.
[ Jared Chopra ] Ultimately, it came to the day of surrender,
and this was the 22nd of January, 1849.
[ Jared Chopra ] Maharaj was brought to the commander's tent,
who was General William Wish,
[ Jared Chopra ] And the translator in the tent took his sword
and gave it to William Wish as an act of surrender.
[ Jared Chopra ] So Maharaj would be my three greats, great-great-great grandfather.
[ Jared Chopra ] Then the generations passed.
[ Jared Chopra ] And as the generations passed, there was the search for this particular sword.
[ Jared Chopra ] There was no evidence of it anywhere.
[ Actor ] Students,
today we will learn, if we will
be for both repeat after me,
2 into 2 is equal to 4.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] Do it, do it, we'll be closer.
[ Actor ] Repeat after me. The sun rises in the east.
[ Boys ] Sun rises in the east.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] What are you doing?
[ Actor ] Father, I don't want to learn this irrelevant and meaningless lesson at school.
[ Actor ] I really miss the life lessons which is thought by our Pandit Ji.
[ Actor ] Here, help us, my son. The English and Sarvaksar card wants you to learn only this.
[ Actor ] You have also lost the opportunity to learn the thread of our forefathers.
[ Teacher ] Okay, go ahead.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] The British education system in India.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] Before that, the education system was very localized.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] They were great educational institutions, right from 5,500 years.
[ Tarun Vijay ] We had more schools and the largest number of literate people in the world.
[ Tarun Vijay ] Our literacy rate was more than 90% before the British.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] When the British came and introduced this public school system of education or the
missionary schools kind of an education where everybody were put under one roof and they
had to learn science and they had to learn math and they felt that they had to be developing
the rational mind and the scientific mind and the Indians we are thinking in a very backward,
superstitious manner.
[ Achala Moulik ] Education, they concentrated on higher education.
[ Achala Moulik ] They established three Presidency Colleges,
universities in Bengal Presidency, in Calcutta,
in Calcutta, in Madras, and in Bombay.
[ Achala Moulik ] He was a three-president, he knew.
[ Achala Moulik ] And they brought modern education here.
[ Achala Moulik ] If you give them credit, it will say they wanted to put Indians,
young Indians, in the mainstream of education.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] So they wanted to somehow impose that scientific education.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] But what happened in the process
was that many of the children could not relate to that.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] Before that education was very relatable.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] It was something concerned with their own surroundings, which they could feel, which they could sense,
which they could smell.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] They could relate to it.
[ Chinna Jeeyar Swamy ] Of course, British role.
short the easy-going life.
[ Chinna Jeeyar Swamy ] By way of providing jobs and also
by giving them the easy way of
address practices, under lifestyles.
[ Mandira Row ] So our schools, our colleges, all the education programs were all colonial trained, including
the art schools.
[ Mandira Row ] Indians were painting on the floors, on their homes, the decorated roofs, the decorated walls.
[ Mandira Row ] They made beautiful textile which were exported.
[ Mandira Row ] Beautiful craft material which is today called craft.
[ Mandira Row ] And all of that changed during the colonial rules.
[ Mandira Row ] A lot of craft has stopped.
[ Mandira Row ] Craft that people didn't know existed before.
[ Mandira Row ] You know, techniques have stopped because industrialization, machinery and things that have
replaced the traditional form.
[ Chinna Jeeyar Swamy ] So all these things made people
to slowly come away from the traditional practices that
they have.
[ Chinna Jeeyar Swamy ] So that's how the values have been slowly decreased.
[ Chinna Jeeyar Swamy ] This is the Jiwa premises in Hyderabad.
[ Chinna Jeeyar Swamy ] Jiwa is a Jiir integrated Vedic
academy where the research in our Vedic scriptures is done.
[ Chinna Jeeyar Swamy ] We are not depriving the students here in getting the regular academia.
the students focus on the time-tested Vedic scriptures.
[ Chinna Jeeyar Swamy ] They study them for sake of two things.
[ Chinna Jeeyar Swamy ] One is to know the ancient techniques
of the lifestyle, the mysterious world as a how it is formed.
[ Chinna Jeeyar Swamy ] My beloved Pramacharis, we are performing the Sanjya-un-denum three times a day.
[ Chinna Jeeyar Swamy ] Morning, while sun is raising,
evening, one sun is setting,
an astronaut when sun is in the mid-air.
[ Vikram Sampath ] We have this famous, infamous, rather minutes of Lord Makale who said the main objective
of English education in India is to create a vast set of interpreters, not someone who
rulers which is interpreters between them, the rulers and the millions that they govern,
who were Indian in their blood and in their skin colour, but they were English in their
opinions, in their morals, in their intellect.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] As I said earlier, the education
system that they introduced in India somehow has built
a very low self esteem among Indians.
starts with the school, it starts with childhood.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] So people are always thinking, I'm repeating the
sentence, but people are all, Indians are always thinking the grass is green
on the other side.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] So that's how even cricket was introduced into India,
along with the other education curriculum.
[ Tarun Vijay ] Clicket it is popular nowhere on this earth.
[ Tarun Vijay ] Only the slaves play this game.
games would have been more energizing like football,
soccer, hockey, kabaddi or koku.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Wow, what a six.
[ Tarun Vijay ] We were heroes in these games,
but like English, language, cricket is also a
mark a signature of ours.
[ Tarun Vijay ] A colonial mindset and slavery.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Hi everybody. So I am currently in Dover Kent.
[ Anhad Mishra ] And I've come here in search of Lord Clydebout,
where the sepoy’s skull was found, the skull of Alambeck.
[ Anhad Mishra ] So, in the mid-XX century, in a small pub in the
English county of Kent, the owners discovered a human skull. As it
turned out, it belonged to one of the sepoys, which banded against
the British in the XIX century. They even managed to find out his
fate: the sepoy’s name was Alum Bheg, and he was executed after
the suppression of the rebellion, and his head was brought back to
Britain by a British officer. This was a common practice among the
English at the time towards Indians who openly opposed London’s rule.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Alright guys, I think we might have found it. I think we might have just found it.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Here it is. The blue building you see that used to be the lot live power
where the sepoy’s Skull was powered. When I brought the topic of the Alambeek Skull that was found in
in the pub. She was aware of it.
[ Anhad Mishra ] I have Eber with me here, who is now the owner of the place.
[ Anhad Mishra ] And yeah, so do you know about the history of this job?
[ Eber ] Yes, my husband's mind bought the building approximately nine years ago.
[ Eber ] Once we lived in, we were told at some point that somebody mentioned to us
that Ijana had a history then apart from the mute make.
[ Eber ] And that because of the name,
somebody had, back in the way, way back in history
in the early days of the pub,
had brought, presented the land law that was the skull of Alan Begg,
who was involved in the Indian mutiny
and was caught and punished by being fired from a cannon.
[ Anhad Mishra ] At first, she was very hesitant to give an interview.
[ Anhad Mishra ] And the reason that she told me was that history is history.
[ Anhad Mishra ] It's gone, it's the past, it's dead.
[ Anhad Mishra ] But it happened and it's, it's, it's, it happened.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Nobody can change it. So why discuss about that?
[ Anhad Mishra ] Why talk about that? I think there's a lot of amnesia in,
in the Britain culture about the colonial past they have.
[ Vikram Sampath ] There was a continuous stream of an armed struggle,
a violent and a very bloody armed struggle as well,
right from what was known as the first uprising in 1857
till 1946 when we had a naval and an army mutiny.
[ Vikram Sampath ] So throughout this entire stream,
there were lots of people who were the revolutionaries
and the revolutionary movement in India.
[ Actor ] Run! They're attacking us, run [ Actor ] It's not possible to locate them
[ Actor ] Hit their gunners! [ Actor ] What the hell is this?
[ Actor ] You shameless creatures!
[ Actor ] How long you serve...
[ Teacher ] Full dialogue, full dialogue...
[ Actor ] You shameless creatures!
[ Actor ] How long will you serve the foreigners and kill your own brothers?
[ Actor ] How long?
[ Actor ] This small but significant fight
[ Actor ] No foreigner, however mighty he might be...
[ Actor ] Let’s fight with them, and take our lands back from them
[ Actors ] Water, forest and land! [ Actors ] Water, forest and land!
[ Anhad Mishra ] As you can see, it's quite touristy.
[ Anhad Mishra ] A lot of people come here.
[ Anhad Mishra ] When I went to the British museums and the museums,
I didn't see people who were really there to learn anything.
[ Anhad Mishra ] They were just there, in my opinion, to as tourists,
to just see in the different sections of the countries
what kind of artifacts are made because they have different styles.
[ Anhad Mishra ] I don't see a point of the artifacts that belong to us be
kept there in London or Britain as an excuse for people to learn history.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Oh, I think we are in front of the most controversial artifact in my opinion in the British Museum,
which is the sword and the rings above it of Tipu Sultan,
is a reminder of the colonialism that occurred in India.
[ Anhad Mishra ] Here, if you read these descriptions,
you will find that they have very explicitly written
that this sword and the ring was actually taken
from his dead body after he was killed.
[ Anurag Saxena ] Ancestors protected these objects with their blood.
[ Anurag Saxena ] They lost their lives for it. You know, they've been praying to,
and giving respect to these objects for centuries.
[ Anurag Saxena ] The least we can do is convince other nations
to give these objects back to us.
[ Jared Chopra ] At the time of my grandparents' death,
they had said, "Well, now the search for this sword is your duty.
[ Jared Chopra ] I've been looking for the sword for quite some time.
[ Jared Chopra ] And it was in October of 2018.
[ Jared Chopra ] It was a time when the Hindus believed the ancestors
come back to visit for a two-week period.
[ Jared Chopra ] I saw that there was an announcement for an auction,
and it was the auction of General Wish's medals.
[ Jared Chopra ] But in the story,
was a piece of information saying that in fact,
he had kept this particular sword.
[ Jared Chopra ] It had passed down in the family,
and one of his descendants in 1965 had donated it to the Royal Artillery Institution.
[ Jared Chopra ] I contacted the Royal Artillery and said, "Do you have this sword?"
[ Jared Chopra ] And they took about three months and they
finally confirmed that they have it and they were able to
locate it. And it was in a case that hadn't been opened. It seems for a very long time.
[ Jared Chopra ] And anyway, they confirmed that they had it.
[ Jared Chopra ] They sent me some photographs.
[ Woman ] You have a bucket?
[ Jared Chopra ] So what is important for my family and this sort?
[ Jared Chopra ] There is a concept in Hinduism called Pithrodoche.
[ Jared Chopra ] This is the idea that your ancestors may have done something bad,
or something bad may have been done to them,
but you as descendants carry the karma of those events and those acts.
[ Jared Chopra ] And so there is a disturbance that enters into the family.
[ Jared Chopra ] In other words, it's like a collective traumatic consequence of events.
[ Jared Chopra ] And in order to put those things to rest,
you need to either perform certain ceremonies,
or in this case, the return of the sword
is really about putting to rest the effects of history.
[ Jared Chopra ] So there'll be individuals in my family
who will have risen to a certain success,
and then it just dissipates.
[ Jared Chopra ] One can see this repeating pattern of individuals who rise,
and then fall, rise, and then fall, rise,
and then fall extremely quickly.
[ Jared Chopra ] And so this is a very typical,
karmic consequence called Pithridosh,
in which basically the ancestors are trying to get your attention
to fix the situation so you can move on peacefully.
[ Jared Chopra ] What do you do in social and emotional learning?
[ Girl ] Well, the question were like,
each station has questions,
and the question for social-loyal learning
is who had been your friends in safe grade?
[ Girl ] Who are your allies?
[ Girl ] Well, we didn't share social-emotional play.
[ Girl ] Because some kids thought unsafe,
but they didn't have friends
until they couldn't share about friends, because they didn't have friends.
[ A Man ] Action.
[ Actor ] Did I do it?
[ Actor ] Swamiji, my great fortune I could meet you Swamiji.
[ Actor ] Sir, the case has been imprisoned.
[ Actor ] How can a unite, the society divided into multiple caste, freez and communities?
[ Actor ] Tindyaj.
[ Actor ] Be steady in your chosen path.
[ Actor ] The obstacles will vanish, current Indians lack a sense of belonging.
[ Actor ] You will need a strong platform to unite them.
a symbol which creates a feeling of oneness,
can you provide you with that?
[ Vikram Sampath ] There are actually many streams of the Indian freedom struggle.
[ Vikram Sampath ] One common narrative that's been held
is that it was largely a nonviolent movement.
[ Vikram Sampath ] Of course, the pressure that Mahatma Gandhi,
the Congress put on the British Raj,
through moral persuasion,
through ensuring that, you know,
through the non-violent movement actually
wrinkle the conscience of the colonial oppressor.
[ Achala Moulik ] And then Tolstoy gave them a formula.
[ Achala Moulik ] This is 1908, before Gandhi came on the scene.
[ Achala Moulik ] He said, don't join their bureaucracy.
[ Achala Moulik ] Don't join their army.
[ Achala Moulik ] He said, that has been enslaving you.
[ Achala Moulik ] Don't join their courts.
[ Achala Moulik ] If you can do non-cooperation on these three sectors,
[ Achala Moulik ] You will paralyze the rulers.
[ Tarun Vijay ] It did not happen before Gandhi, because we needed a Gandhi to actually put us all together.
[ Tarun Vijay ] We needed a Gandhi who could give us a simple message,
which even an aristocrat could understand,
and even the poorest or poor could understand.
[ Tarun Vijay ] So if you'll see how Gandhi communicated,
I mean one of the greatest examples
of this communication was the salt march.
[ Vikram Sampath ] So, Mahatma Gandhi, they say, took a pinch of salt and broke the
Empire’s back. And how did he do that? He took 78 of his followers from Ahmedabad
and walked 241 miles to the seacoast, to a village called Dandi. And in these
241 miles, when he reached the coast of Dandi, he had a 100,000 Indians with him.
[ Birad Rajaram Yajnik ] And go on hitting somebody, but if the person is not hitting back,
your conscience at some point of time will kick in. And so: 'What am I doing?
Am I doing the right thing?' And I think that's what he did to the British.
[ Kishwar Desai ] India became independent on the 15th of August 1947.
[ Kishwar Desai ] Whilst we were moving towards independence of India,
we were also moving towards the partition of India.
[ Kishwar Desai ] That was a terrible legacy of the British.
when they were here in India as rulers,
because one of the things they did was divide and rule.
[ Kishwar Desai ] So they did create a kind of schism
between the Hindus and the Muslims
whilst they were ruling this country.
[ Kishwar Desai ] And that meant that the British felt
that they could no longer control the situation.
[ Kishwar Desai ] They brought in a mount-battern
and he was the last of our history of India.
[ Kishwar Desai ] And he needed to do something
and he thought that partition was the only way out.
[ Kishwar Desai ] So then he brought in a judge from the UK called Cyril Radcliffe,
who came in who had never been to India before.
[ Kishwar Desai ] He had no idea of the country at all,
and he was given five weeks to divide the country.
[ Kishwar Desai ] And within five weeks, he takes a decision and he just draws up the lines.
[ Kishwar Desai ] Mountbatten could not tell anybody what the boundaries were.
[ Kishwar Desai ] You know, because it was only between him and Radcliffe.
[ Kishwar Desai ] And of course, the British government back home in London.
[ Kishwar Desai ] So Pakistan was born on the 14th of August
and India became independent on the 15th of August.
[ Kishwar Desai ] But the terms of the partition of the country
were only announced on the 17th of August.
[ Kishwar Desai ] So it was a free India and Pakistan
that learnt about what were the terms of the partition
but the people were completely unprepared.
and people have to leave. They have to leave their homes. They're being forced out of their homes
because there are rights all around them. People are
looting homes, they're driving people out. What happens in a situation like this when
the nation is unprepared for it and that is what had happened. The British left a very unprepared
[ Kishwar Desai ] They lost so much, they lost lives, they lost homes,
they lost their status, they became refugees overnight
in the new country that they were forced to go to.
[ Kishwar Desai ] It was also a division of everything,
right from the armies to the cricket team,
to music, to art, to culture.
[ Kishwar Desai ] Everything was divided, you know, on the basis of religion.
[ Kishwar Desai ] So this is a very beautiful sculpture given to us on loan by Kashmiri artist Veer Wanshi.
[ Kishwar Desai ] And it represents, as you can see, the whole story of migration, how difficult it is, because
this is a horse painted in the traditional style of Kashmir in Papier mache style.
[ Kishwar Desai ] But on his back, he's carrying bones, different bones of different parts of a human's body.
[ Kishwar Desai ] And I think that is very symbolic and something which we must remember that when people migrate,
they carry many things with them.
[ Malam Chopra ] What can you raise the jumps?
[ Malam Chopra ] I wish I could.
[ Malam Chopra ] My name is Marlon Chopra.
[ Malam Chopra ] I'm 11 years old and I have a lot of family history.
[ Man ] So she is a descendant of Punjabi kings?
[ Tanja Chopra ] Yes, correct. She's the last in line, or the latest.
[ Tanja Chopra ] So there's a straight male line from the Maharaj Chopra,
from the Raja of Moldan.
[ Tanja Chopra ] That was the honor of the SWAT.
[ Tanja Chopra ] And in that male line that goes down to Maharaj,
she's then the last, there's no boy.
[ Malan Chopra ] There is a part of India called Punjab and we had,
there was Maharaj who had his sword there and he was
flashing with his sword and he had to give the sword up and he
went to prison and we want the sword back because we don't
want any more bad things, we don't want the past trauma, we just
want to have the sword in a safe place.
[ Jared Chopra ] I went about seeking the return of it,
and I basically requested it.
[ Jared Chopra ] And that was very clearly and rather abruptly rejected.
[ Tanja Chopra ] Well, certainly, it was very, very disappointed.
[ Tanja Chopra ] And I think especially at a time when
we've gone through quite some transformation generally
in the world, where we've become much more accepting
of different cultures and different people
and the world has become a more diverse place.
[ Tanja Chopra ] And I think also the discussion of actually returning objects
that were taken in the colonial context has become,
you know, a very relevant discussion.
[ Jared Chopra ] So this is the initial letter from me requesting
the return of the sword.
[ Jared Chopra ] And this was the response, which after its explanation,
ends with the words in conclusion,
and I must advise you that the regiment will not agree to the return,
or sail of the Talwar sword and considers this matter closed,
which of course for me it is not.
[ Jared Chopra ] They basically explained that this was a war trophy,
and as a war trophy as a material object,
it was important to them to celebrate their victories of the past,
which of course was adding insult to injury for the family
that had suffered in that very brutal siege.
[ Jared Chopra ] And in addition to that, they said, well, if we give this back,
why shouldn't we give everything else back?
[ Jared Chopra ] And if we don't give everything else back,
why should we give this back?
[ Jared Chopra ] And to me, that's a very false logic.
[ Jared Chopra ] If I go into someone's house and I take something,
and I leave the house, and I say, look,
[ Jared Chopra ] More people will benefit from this, from your possessions,
because I can put them on display.
[ Jared Chopra ] Is that going to be a very satisfactory answer for you? You just want it back.
[ Jared Chopra ] It came from your house.
[ Jared Chopra ] So I don't think that Britain, as its museums have done,
can self-appoint themselves as the keepers of human civilization
in terms of these objects.
[ Jared Chopra ] It is not about changing history. It is not about changing the facts of history.
[ Jared Chopra ] There was a siege, there was a defeat, that's a fact.
[ Jared Chopra ] But we can change our experience of that history.
[ Jared Chopra ] And I have made it very clear to the Royal Artillery
that the family continues to suffer a consequence from that.
[ Jared Chopra ] My daughter will say she doesn't want any family curse
to be passed onto her.
[ Jared Chopra ] And this sword has gone through an enormously
traumatic experience.
[ Jared Chopra ] I think the answer is for this sword to be taken to the kind of place that Maharaj himself
would have wanted, which is basically a Hindu temple
for the sword to have a degree of respect,
to be treated with respect, and for that peace to come.
[ Anhad Mishra ] So I've just met these two fellow Indians
who I spoke to about this cause.
they're just happy to be there.
[ Anhad Mishra ] The artifacts that they're seeing
should are best appreciated by being at the British Museum.
[ Anhad Mishra ] That being proud to see a lot of us stuff here,
especially coming back.
[ Anhad Mishra ] We're all from South India,
so I'm from Shaman, East from Kumbhakoda.
[ Anhad Mishra ]I learned more here
about the temples and about Lord Shiva,
then more ever.
[ Anhad Mishra ]Lord, yeah, that's one.
[ Indian ] That's an advantage of
of maybe just coming over.
[ Anhad Mishra ] But I think it's just a lack of awareness. It is not just about a touristic viewing of the artifacts.
[ Anhad Mishra ] It's actually about history. It's actually about the rightful ownership of each artifact.
[ Anhad Mishra ] And they should rightfully be in India.
[ Anurag Saxena ] What I would recommend is let UK send their heritage
to India and I can guarantee there'll be more eyeballs
than the British museum.
[ Anurag Saxena ] The world needs to understand that history belongs to its geography.
[ Tarun Vijay ] When people talk of remnants of British colonialism,
only in positive light, right?
[ Tarun Vijay ] I think we have to be fair and balanced
and talk about British colonialism, you know,
what had left back.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] Still you go, how you ask any English-speaking person,
call when the school educated
and they would give you 10 reasons
why the British rule was good for India.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] It takes time to show them the truth.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] Let's say if I call my neighbor's mother,
my neighbor's mother is more beautiful than my mother.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] So I start calling her mom because she's more beautiful
than my mother though the British have left us.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] Still a cultural blind worship
is actually putting your power in somebody else's hands
and allowing them to control you.
[ Vinayak Kalletla ] So this misuse should stop.
[ Vikram Sampath ] I'm speaking to you in English
and I've been, I've learned that as my first language
in school in my growing up years and later on,
itself is an acknowledgement of the fact
that we've been colonized.
[ Vikram Sampath ] The fact that many Indians cannot even, you
know, probably speak prolifically in their original languages,
in their regional languages, their own mother tongues,
is an acknowledgement of the pernicious effect of colonialism.
[ Vikram Sampath ] British gene is quite inextricably come into the Indian,
you know, DNA today.
[ Tarun Vijay ] See to be honest with you, as I said,
[ Tarun Vijay ] We are 5,000 years old.
[ Tarun Vijay ] If you look at our history, Britain probably is the last 200 years.
[ Tarun Vijay ] But if you take 5,000 years of account, almost every part of the world has visited India.
[ Tarun Vijay ] So I think not only there would be a gene of the English people over here,
but I think the whole world comes here.
[ Achala Moulik ] I would ask this nation to remember their history
and to tell your own narrative yourself.
[ Achala Moulik ] Don't be dependent on foreign historians
to tell you who you are and what you did.
[ Mandira Row ] India today is reborn.
[ Mandira Row ] There's a new energy, there's a new buzz
and I see it around me and I don't think 10 years ago,
I actually felt this change and it's a huge shift.
[ Mandira Row ] We are a young nation of young people
who have a lot of energy so yes,
we're going to make a difference.
[ Achala Moulik ] The empire brought many emissaries.
[ Achala Moulik ] They were the traders who came to plunder and enrich themselves with the gold of India.
[ Achala Moulik ] Others came to offer the challenge of a new civilization and opened India to the wonders of the West.
[ Achala Moulik ] In time, the conquerors were touched by the grandeur of India and were conquered in return.