Indian Museum, Kolkata

The Indian Museum was founded in 1814 under the Asiatic Society of Bengal, making it the oldest museum in India and among the oldest in Asia, and it moved into its present Chowringhee Road building, a grand colonial-era structure in central Kolkata, in 1875. Its founding purpose combined scientific and colonial administrative interests typical of the period, cataloguing the natural history, archaeology and ethnography of British India in one institution, and its collections grew heavily through nineteenth and early twentieth century excavation and survey work carried out under colonial administration across the subcontinent.

After Indian independence the museum was retained rather than dismantled or repurposed, transferring to the administration of independent India's Ministry of Culture as one of a small number of museums under direct national rather than state control. Its archaeology holdings, built during the colonial period, became part of the new nation's own heritage infrastructure without a change of building or much change of collection, a continuity that distinguishes it from newer institutions such as the National Museum in New Delhi, founded after independence specifically as a national showcase.

When William Claxton Peppe excavated the Piprahwa stupa on his estate in 1898, the relics and roughly 1,800 gems he uncovered were divided under the colonial government's treasure trove arrangements: the reliquaries and the bulk of the material went to the Indian Museum in Kolkata, a portion of the relics was given by the British to King Chulalongkorn of Siam as a gift to a fellow Buddhist monarch, who further distributed some to Buddhist communities elsewhere in Asia, and Peppe himself was permitted to keep a smaller share of the gems as the excavator's reward, a common practice under the era's antiquities law.

That third share, retained by Peppe's descendants for over a century, became the center of an international controversy in 2025, when family members planned to auction roughly 1,800 of the gems through Sotheby's in Hong Kong. Indian government officials and Buddhist organisations objected strongly, arguing the gems were sacred relics rather than ordinary heritage property and that a colonial-era division of a religious find did not entitle a private family to sell it internationally; the sale was withdrawn amid the controversy, and the gems were reported on display in India in 2026 after more than a century abroad. The dispute illustrates how a single excavation's legal division under colonial rule can generate a live restitution argument well over a hundred years later, one the atlas records as unresolved rather than settled by the 2026 exhibition.