Darshan denied: SA, memory and the gods in imperial custody

IN A SOFTLY lit hall of the British Museum, incense floats in the air, Sanskrit chants echo in the background, and visitors are invited to experience darshan — the sacred act of seeing and being seen by the divine.

- SHYAM BHATIA

The new exhibition, Ancient India: Living Traditions, is designed to feel like a temple.

But for descendants of Indian indentured labourers in South Africa, what's truly on display is something far more troubling: the plundered soul of an ancient heritage, dressed up as celebration of state-funded imperial nostalgia.

Few visitors realise that the British Museum was founded in 1753 on the personal collection of Sir Hans Sloane, a physician whose fortune came partly from Jamaican sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans.

Sloane married into a family that owned hundreds of slaves. After slavery was formally abolished in 1834, many of those same plantations remained intact — their workforce replenished with indentured Indians, lured from villages in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and shipped across oceans aboard vessels like the Truro and Umlazi to work colonial sugar fields - including in Natal - for a pittance.

This shared colonial legacy links the gods behind the glass in central London to the jahajis who crossed the kala pani — the dark waters - to build lives in South Africa under duress.

In Durban and across dozens of temples from Pietermaritzburg to Phoenix, families continue to honour those gods — not as relics, but as living deities who are bathed, adorned, and loved.