Leiden University has announced that it will return the Chola Plates, inventory numbers Or.1687 and Or.1688, to India, following the advice of the Dutch national Colonial Collections Committee. The 354 page advice can be read online.  

The objects were shown on 16 May 2026 during a formal moment in The Hague in the presence of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten. Their physical transfer to India will follow at a later date, with the Archaeological Survey of India in New Delhi expected to receive them. 

The political symbolism of the moment should not obscure the evidentiary work that brought the matter to this point. This was not simply a diplomatic courtesy timed to coincide with a prime ministerial visit. It was the outcome of a formal restitution process, a provenance investigation, an additional independent inquiry, and a legal-policy assessment under the Netherlands’ framework for cultural objects removed in colonial contexts.

The restitution request concerns two Chola-era charters. The first, Or.1687, consists of 21 copper plates held together by a bronze ring bearing the seal of Rājendra Chola I, who ruled from 1012 to 1042. Five plates contain Sanskrit text in Grantha script and sixteen contain Tamil text. The second, Or.1688, consists of three copper plates, also held together by a bronze ring, this time bearing the seal of Kulōttunga Chola I, who ruled from 1070 to 1120. 

Their inscriptions relate to the collection of revenues from villages for the maintenance of a Buddhist vihara ( a monastic residences or complexes serving as a center for spiritual practice and learning) at Nagapattinam. In plain terms, these were not decorative artefacts. They were documentary instruments of enduring legal, religious, and economic significance. The committee described them as important examples of South Indian royal decrees and as significant historical sources for the relationship between the Chola kingdom in South India and the Srivijaya world of Southeast Asia. 

That matters, because the legal and moral question in this case turned not only on where the plates were found, but on what they were understood to be.

India submitted its request to Leiden University on 6 July 2023. On 24 October 2023, Leiden asked the Dutch State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science to place the matter before the Colonial Collections Committee. This was important because Leiden University, not the Dutch State, owned the objects. Under the Dutch restitution framework, however, public owners other than the State may use the national procedure if they agree to be bound by its outcome. Leiden did so. 

The committee’s first task was not to decide immediately whether India should receive the objects. Its first task was procedural and evidentiary: was the provenance research sufficient?

Before the committee’s involvement, Leiden University Libraries had already commissioned research by historian Roelof van Gelder and by Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, former curator of South and Southeast Asian art at the Rijksmuseum. Their findings were later summarised by Marieke van Meer and Doris Jedamski of Leiden University Libraries. India’s Ministry of Culture, through the Indian Embassy in the Netherlands, also submitted background documentation. 

The committee then identified gaps. It wanted further research into the precise route by which the objects left Nagapattinam, into local practices surrounding Chola Plates and related sacred objects, and into the possibility — ultimately rejected — that the plates may have travelled from India to the Srivijaya realm in pre-colonial times and only later reached Dutch hands. Independent historians Tristan Mostert and Lennart Bes were asked to carry out additional provenance research. Their report was delivered in June 2025, shared with Leiden University Libraries and the Archaeological Survey of India, and both institutions were invited to respond. 

Only after this research-and-response phase did the committee deliberate. On 21 November 2025, it adopted its advice.

The committee found the request admissible because Nagapattinam had been conquered by the VOC from the Portuguese in 1658 and was then used as a Dutch trading post within the VOC’s colonial-commercial network. The VOC exercised territorial authority in and around Nagapattinam. 

The key historical question was how the plates left that setting. The provenance chain is clearest only from the early eighteenth century onward. A label once attached to Or.1687 indicated that Florentius Camper, a minister in Batavia, brought the objects to the Netherlands. Camper returned from Batavia in 1712 with his wife, Sara Geertrui Camper-Kettingh. In 1862, their descendants donated the plates to Leiden University. 

What remains uncertain is precisely how Camper or his household acquired them. The committee did not claim certainty where the evidence did not permit it. Instead, it worked with a standard of plausibility grounded in converging evidence.

Lunsingh Scheurleer had argued that the plates were likely unearthed during VOC construction works at Fort De Vijf Sinnen and the redevelopment of the area around the so-called China Pagoda in Nagapattinam between 1687 and 1700. Mostert and Bes found the circumstantial evidence for this scenario to be “more than substantial.” The inscriptions, archaeology, and European documentary sources all pointed to the likelihood that the Leiden Chola Plates belonged to a group of Buddhist finds made in Nagapattinam during that period. 

One of the most consequential elements of the committee’s reasoning concerns the meaning of burial.

Objects like the Chola Plates, Buddhist bronzes, and other religious materials were often carefully buried in the region. The question was whether burial could be interpreted as abandonment — whether the objects had become ownerless, or res nullius, and therefore available for taking.

The committee answered no.

The research indicated that careful burial was most commonly understood as a means of protection in times of unrest, not as an act of relinquishment. Sir Walter Elliot, writing in the nineteenth century about finds at the China Pagoda, observed that objects had been placed carefully in a chamber under brick covering, apparently with a view to future religious use. The committee treated this as consistent with a protective practice rather than disposal. 

This point is crucial. The Chola Plates were not scrap metal, curios, or abandoned ruins. They had been legal-religious charters intended to remain permanently with the Buddhist institutions to which they related. The committee noted that their grants were considered to have perpetual validity and that comparable Chola plates were still used as evidence in legal proceedings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Even if the Buddhist institutions at Nagapattinam were no longer active at the time the plates were removed, the committee concluded that this did not mean there were no rightsholders. Nor did it mean that those rightsholders had consented to the removal.

Under the Dutch policy framework, once involuntary loss of possession in a colonial context is established with a reasonable degree of certainty, the appropriate recommendation is unconditional return. If involuntary loss cannot be established, the committee may instead undertake a broader balancing of interests. 

In this case, the committee did not need to rely merely on a balancing exercise. It concluded that the plates had likely been removed from Nagapattinam without the consent of rightsholders and that they were not ownerless objects. The removal therefore amounted to involuntary loss of possession. 

The committee advised Leiden University to return both sets of Chola Plates unconditionally to the Republic of India. It also advised that associated metadata, including archival material, correspondence, and contextual documentation, should be made available to India as part of the work of repairing historical injustice. 

Leiden has accepted the advice.

For provenance researchers, the Chola Plates case is instructive precisely because it is not built on a single dramatic document saying “taken by force.” Many colonial-era object histories do not provide that kind of archival clarity. Instead, they require the careful reading of inscriptions, ownership functions, local religious practice, colonial construction history, European collecting networks, shipping movements, family transmission, and institutional acquisition.

Here, the evidentiary pattern was enough.

The plates were made for named religious institutions in Nagapattinam. They were meant to remain there as proof of land and revenue rights. Their likely discovery occurred during VOC works in a city under Dutch colonial control. Their burial was understood not as abandonment but as safeguarding. No evidence of consent by rightsholders was found. Their later movement into a European family collection and then into Leiden University did not cure the original loss.

That is the deeper lesson behind the diplomatic photographs.

The return of the Chola Plates is a reminder that colonial restitution is not only about the removal of objects from Western institutions. It is about the reconstruction of historical relationships: between archive and archaeology, between sacred and legal function, between possession and entitlement, and between what an institution can hold and what it should now return.

By: Edgar Tijhuis