CYIL vol. 15 (2024)

CYIL 15 ȍ2024Ȏ BRINGING “TARA” HOME: SRI LANKA’S DISCONTENT WITH CULTURAL RESTITUTION… TWAIL is driven by three main goals. The first one is akin to a mission of decolonizing, re-narrating the international law as an equal platform, which would subordinate both the Europeans and Non-Europeans. Secondly, TWAIL is devoted to propose some alternative normative legal rules for the global governance and at last TWAIL determines to unveil and uproot the intellectual underdevelopment of the Third World through its large community of engaging scholars. However, it’s ghastly silence over some of the preeminent issues in the Global South and its own peculiar nature in engaging in the scholarship in international law creates a legitimate question that whether TWAIL is just an ivory tower or practical discourse. The poverty of corpus of literature produced by TWAIL scholars becomes evident with their conspicuous silence on the debate related to return of the cultural properties taken during the colonial period. In his seminal article published in year 2006, Bhupinder Chimni entitled “Third World Manifesto”, Chimni lampoons the apathy of early TWAILIER’s in acknowledging the right of the Global South to reclaim their right for reparation from the colonial atrocities. 1 Many years later the stentorian roar of Indian statesmen Shahi Tharroor at the Oxford Union exposed the tip of iceberg on British colonial lootings across the Indian subcontinent as a part of their despicable history in South Asia and Tharoor’s paroxysm at Oxford created a public debate within the UK itself on the possibilities of the colonial reparation. Same as India and many other Commonwealth states, Sri Lanka has its own chips on the shoulders with the inglorious colonial past, which remains a perpetual scar in the island’s history. Sri Lanka, an island in the Indian Ocean can boast of its ancient history imbued with Buddhist civilizational values dating back to the 6 th century BC. Given its decisive location in the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka became susceptible for continuous foreign invasions throughout its history that reached the culmination by the advent of Europeans conquerors in the 16 th century. British remained extremely unique from their counterparts Portuguese and the Dutch with regard to their attitude to the cultural properties they looted from Sri Lanka as their attitude to the local culture and its related properties reflected the sense of awe of the British to the Orient. 2 Instead of choosing the complete obliteration of the cultural properties championed by the Portuguese, British carefully preserved the ancient monuments in Sri Lanka with zest and they furthermore empowered the archeological excavations carried out by the British archeologists in the island. Yet the none of the acts were altruistic or based on noble objectives to unfold island’s grandeur before the West. Here comes the cardinal point of this article to the fore as the subjected statue named Tara was taken to Great Britain during the colonial British administration. This article takes a holistic approach in examining two main issues stemming from Tara’s longer stay in British Museum in London. First it explores the dichotomy between the British rule and modern Britain based on changing trajectories of British perception towards the colonialism, but this article fervently shows how modern British laws have overlooked in identifying a path to restore justice on the looted colonial cultural properties while lingering in a self justification of the imperial acts. The story of Tara Devi’s statue is a stark revelation for the anomalous situation, in which Britain rigidly adheres to its stances by ignoring the emerging 1 CHIMNI, B. S., The International Law of Jurisdiction: A TWAIL Perspective, Leiden Journal of International Law , Vol. 19, 2022. 2 GOONATILAKE, S., Towards a Global Science: Mining Civilizational Knowledge ,1 st edition, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 178.

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