Photo courtesy of The Guardian
London: The India has issued a legal notice to stop the auction of ancient Piprahwa gems taking place in Hong Kong this week.
The ministry of culture seeks to treat the relics as the sacred body of the Buddhha, adding that their auction would violate ‘Indian and international laws, as well as United Nations conventions’, according to The Guardian.
Serving the notice to Sotheby’s Hong Kong and Chris Peppé to stop selling the gems, the government demanded that relics should be repatriated to India ‘for preservation and religious veneration’.
Chris Peppé, a Los Angeles-based TV director and film editor, is one of the three heirs of British colonial landowner, William Claxton Peppé, who dug up the gems in 1898 on his estate in northern India.
Meanwhile, scholars and monastic leaders have protested against the auction which will take place on 7 May to sell gems for an expected price of HK$100m (£9.7m).
The ministry of culture in its Instagram account posted that Peppé has no authority to sell the gems while accusing Sotheby’s of ‘participating in continued colonial exploitation’ by holding the auction.
Asking those involved in the auction to immediately stop the sale of gems, the ministry said that gems relics form part of India’s ‘inalienable religious and cultural heritage and that of ‘the global Buddhist community’.
Alongside demanding public apology of Sotheby’s and Chris Peppé, the ministry sought disclosure of provenance document and details of any other relics that William Peppé’s heirs possess or they transferred to any other individual or entity.
The ministry threatened to take legal action in both Indian and Hong Kong court and through international bodies in the event of not complying with its demand.
The gems including amethysts, coral, garnets, pearls, rock crystals, shells and gold were found buried in a funeral monument called stupa in Piprahwa in today’s Uttar Pradesh.
Buried so in about 240-200BC, they got mixed with the cremated remains of the Buddha died about 480BC.
The colonial British authorities handed the bones and ash to the Buddhist monarch King Chulalongkorn of Siam, while claiming the find under its 1878 Indian Treasure Trove Act.
While most of 1,800 gems are now at the Indian Museum in Kolkata, Peppé was given nearly a fifth of the find calling them as ‘duplicates’ of some of the others.