By Tarannum Ahmed

Five Caryatids collecting dust while awaiting their sister since 1802 is not news. While most visitors of the British Museum today might think of this as an unbridgeable rift between the two nations, a representation of the cruel treatment of ‘lesser’ countries if you will; it serves as a deeper insight into the selfless nature of the elite, Her Majesty’s Factory of Refugees. Why else would the British empire be giving asylum to the sixth daughter of Erechtheion so far away from her home? To protect her from the narcissistic origin of their birth being punishment for all the sins committed by Caryatid women, of course.  

The five sisters being away from their kin since the beginning of the 19th century is not surprising. It is merely symbolic to the centuries of patience shown by the daemons often misnamed as “colonizers”. What most people fail to comprehend is that their decision to bring the sixth sister more than 3000 kilometres away, has kept at least one of them safe from the eyes of onlookers practically stripping her with their eyes which is certainly not the case in the British Museum, a place known to be the safest to keep stolen world treasures.  

And when the subject of stolen treasures arises, of course the echoes of bellyaching Indians can be heard from miles away, however the brilliant minds certainly are aware that the Kohinoor was obtained legally through the Last Treaty of Lahore in 1849. If more than 80,000 trillion rupees worth of resources were not extracted from them by the British as a valuable lesson, would India ever have the courage and resilience to have the cultural superiority they have over the world today to begin with? Could the glorious idea of Hindutva have ever been established? 

And to those ungrateful, untaught and self-serving souls with such antediluvian mindsets who do not bother to think before accusing the British empire saying they only “snatched” and never gave, let it be reminded that to begin the life-changing phenomenon that is the denim industry in the 1800s, it was the Her Majesty’s blessings with which South Asian farmers received their daily bread through the harvest of indigo to fulfill the demands in the West. It was undoubtedly a minor miscalculation on their part to forget about food crops entirely. It was rather a coincidence that it resulted in a major famine which in the bigger picture became the reason South Asians are statistically more prone to diabetes, due to farmers storing as much carbohydrates as humanly possible, unsure about their next meal. But to those individuals, the question remains- could all of those have been planned by an empire simply because they had a cumbersome task to meet the denim demands in that century? Of course an educated, well-thought out business owner would never throw the towel at a time like that; they are not as tightly wound like the barbarian farmers- they have always been logical and practical to say the least. 

Photograph: An emaciated family who arrived in Kolkata in search of food in November 1943; Keystone/Getty Images