Britain cannot hold the Kohinoor forever

On April 29, 2026, as King Charles III visited New York City to mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani revealed his intention to lobby the King to return the legendary Kohinoor diamond to India. It was a small gesture — a quiet word sought in the margins of a memorial event — but its symbolic weight was enormous. Mamdani, himself of Indian descent, gave voice to a demand that has echoed across the subcontinent for generations and one that is now gathering momentum as part of a sweeping, worldwide reassessment of the colonial plunder that filled the museums and palaces of the West.

He is right. The Kohinoor should go home.

The diamond weighs 105.6 carats and has been in the possession of the British government since the mid-1800s, originating from alluvial mines in India thousands of years ago. Its journey to London was not one of commerce or gifting; it was the journey of conquest. India has long argued the gem was surrendered under duress, framing its continued presence in London as a lingering emblem of colonial-era plunder. The UK has shown no sign of budging, maintaining that its legal claim remains airtight under the terms of a 19th-century treaty. But a treaty signed under military occupation is no treaty at all. It is the paperwork of theft. The legal argument the British government deploys is precisely the kind of colonial reasoning that the modern world has grown increasingly unwilling to accept.

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The Kohinoor case does not stand alone. It is one chapter in a vast and shameful library. From the Elgin Marbles to the Benin Bronzes, the repatriation movement challenges us to reconsider the role of museums, the legacy of colonialism, and the very definition of cultural heritage. The demand for artefact repatriation is rooted in historical injustices where cultural objects were seized through force, coercion, or unequal power dynamics. These were not curiosities stumbled upon by benevolent explorers. They were trophies of empire, stripped from communities to adorn the drawing rooms and gallery halls of their conquerors.

Consider the Benin Bronzes. Around 5,000 artefacts — bronze regalia, plaques, sculptures, ceremonial swords, ritualistic statues, and musical instruments, mostly created between the 13th and 16th centuries — were looted by British colonial troops in 1897 when they invaded and destroyed Benin City. For over a century, Nigeria pleaded for their return while the British Museum cited preservation concerns and the philosophy of the ‘universal museum’ — an idea that has always conveniently served the interests of the institutions that hold the loot. The moral bankruptcy of that position is now widely acknowledged. The Metropolitan Museum, the Smithsonian, and institutions in Germany and the Netherlands have all returned artefacts in recent years. In February 2025, the Dutch State Collection announced the return of 119 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, following the lead of museums in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, marking a continuation of the broader repatriation movement.

Greece, too, has waged a decades-long struggle to reclaim the Parthenon Marbles. These classical sculptures, originally part of the Parthenon in Athens, were removed by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century and sold to the British government, where they have remained ever since. Greece's argument is unimpeachable: the sculptures were removed during a period of foreign occupation, and the Ottoman authority that permitted their removal had no legitimate right to sanction the dismemberment of Greek civilisation. The British Museum's legal constraints under the British Museum Act of 1963, the same institution that is simultaneously struggling with a scandal over thousands of missing items from its own collection, have so far blocked their return. But the pressure mounts relentlessly, and the world is watching.

The pattern is global and accelerating. In 2024, the Metropolitan Museum of Art facilitated the return of ancient sculptures to Cambodia and Thailand. The United States continues to enforce the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which mandates the return of cultural items to Native American tribes. In Brazil, a 400-year-old ceremonial Tupinambá cape held by a Danish museum was finally returned in 2024, following a major community mobilisation and intense negotiations headed by the Brazilian ambassador to Denmark. The moral logic propelling all these decisions is the same: objects taken by force belong to those from whom they were taken.

Opponents of repatriation sometimes argue that returning colonial treasures would "empty the museums". This concern, thinly veiled as a public-interest argument, is really an admission that the museums of the Global North are warehouses of stolen goods. As one historian put it, "To lose your culture on such a wide scale is one of the best ways for a nation to defeat a people, to defeat a community." Cultural objects are not decorative. They are memory-made material. Denying a people access to them on their own soil is a form of ongoing subjugation.

The British government's position on the Kohinoor reflects a broader failure of moral imagination. The same country that has begun, however haltingly, returning Benin Bronzes and engaging in dialogue over the Elgin Marbles continues to mount the Kohinoor in the Crown Jewels as if its origins require no explanation. They do. As UNESCO's director Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow argued as far back as 1978, being robbed of cultural objects equals the removal of collective memory and a sense of self. Nearly fifty years later, that argument has never been more persuasive or more politically urgent.

Zohran Mamdani used a presidential visit and a moment of international goodwill to raise a question that should shame every British institution still clinging to plundered heritage. The Kohinoor belongs to India. The world is returning what was stolen. It is past time Britain caught up.

Some people, wrongly, believe that this can never be achieved. Entirely incorrect. It only needs relentless governmental effort, repeated public outcry and pressure as India rises in the world. Sooner or later, the Kohinoor will come home.

(Hindol Sengupta is professor of international relations, and executive dean, of the school of international affairs, and director of the India institute, at the OP Jindal Global University. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)