Leiden Plates returned by Netherlands aren’t for ASI storerooms. They belong at Nagapattinam

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]The Dutch government on 16th May, formally returned to India a set of 24 copper plates that spent the past 300 years in Leiden, a city in the western Netherlands. The handover ceremony took place in The Hague. I was among the historians consulted by the Netherlands colonial collections committee as it assembled its provenance report. I was just one name among many and far from the most important, but the coverage of these objects has described them as Chola plates, symbols of a vanished imperial glory and of cultural restitution. But the Leiden plates are much more. Over their 1,000 year history, they were conduits for the many entanglements of the Indian Ocean world.

[00:00:36]Their story is of Buddhism and Shaivism, imperialism and colonialism, warfare, famine, and cosmopolitanism.

[00:00:42]Throughout India's early medieval period, which is circa 400 to 1100 CE, copper plate inscriptions were issued by courts across the subcontinent recording the granting of land to a religious institution or to a Brahmin agraharam.

[00:00:54]Chola copper plates were issued for similar purposes but were exceptional in scale. Typically, they extended across several hundred acres. They were gifted across the rich Kaveri Delta with eulogistic Sanskrit prefaces and detailed Tamil sections outlining the terms of the gift. Now, typical recipients of Chola copper plate grants were Agamic Shaiva temples and Vedic Brahmins. Within this tradition, the Leiden plates are exceptional for many reasons. For one, they sketch out the relationship of three separate institutions, the Chola court, a Buddhist complex at Nagapattinam port, and the court of the kings of Kedah. The larger Leiden plates are dated to the 21st regnal year, which is to say 1006 CE, of Rajaraja the First, whose imperial campaigns had carried his armies from the Krishna-Godavari Delta to Polonnaruwa in present-day Sri Lanka.

[00:01:40]The Sanskrit preface, which was added in 1019 during the reign of Rajendra Chola the First, confirmed and recorded this gift made by his then-late father. The revenues of Anaimangalam village were granted to a Buddhist monastery called the Chudamani Vihara of such high loftiness as had belittled the golden mountain. The Chudamani Vihara was named for Chudamani Varman, the late king of the Malay port of Kedah. It had been paid for by his son, Mara Vijayottungavarman, the then king.

[00:02:06]Tamil section then relates an order not to a Chola official, but to the Nadu assembly, the chief landholders of the region, organized as a collective, ordering them to enforce the grant as tax-free. Annually, 8,943 measures of paddy were transferred to the Chudamani Vihara, which was a gift of several tons of rice. Rajendra Chola's renewal of the gift in 1019 may be significant, especially when read with other Nagapattinam inscriptions.

[00:02:31]According to Professors Noboru Karashima and Y. Subbarayalu, who provided a reassessment of the gift with other scholars in Nagapattinam to Suvarnadvipa, Mara Vijayottungavarman of Kedah had made a series of reciprocal gifts at the temple to Shiva Kayilasanathaswamy in Nagapattinam.

[00:02:46]Acting through Tamil agents from various ports, he donated a temple gateway, ornaments affixed with Mara Vijayottunga's Makara emblem, and Chinese gold for the feeding of Ardhanarishvara, the lord who is half woman, and of course for Brahmins. Which is all to say, the donors were agents of the same ruler who was funding the Buddhist monastery across town.

[00:03:05]Simultaneously, the god who received all this Chinese gold was Shiva. And significantly, the last gift to the Shiva temple happened in 1019, the very same year Rajendra Chola confirmed his father's grants to the Chudamani Vihara.

[00:03:17]This, then, was temple diplomacy, as several historians have called it, gifts made to religious institutions as part of larger diplomatic exchanges and positionings in the Indian Ocean.

[00:03:27]Nagapattinam was a rich and diverse port through which merchants of many lands passed. Gifts of this sort presented both the Chola and the Kedah king as a devout and benevolent rulers. Now, after that, there's a gap of several decades in the Chudamani Vihara inscriptions until the smaller Leiden plates were issued in 1090. Quite a lot happened in those decades. Despite the amicable picture of the larger Leiden plates, Chola-Kedah relations soon deteriorated.

[00:03:52]In 1025-1026, Rajendra Chola ordered an unprecedented overseas attack on Kedah and possibly other nearby settlements. Various Chola inscriptions claim Maravijayottungavarman was captured with his elephants and Kedah's bejeweled gates. Rajendra Chola's son, Virarajendra, claimed to have undertaken a regime change at Kedah in 1070. Now, in the wake of all these attacks, an inscription from 1088 confirms that Tamil merchants set up autonomous colonies in Sumatra to extract valuable forest resins. Now, while all this was happening, there was a sea change in Chola policy. With Rajendra Chola's grandson, Kulothunga the First, effectively abandoning the court's distant provinces to focus on economic reform at home. In 1090, apparently seeking to normalize relations, two senior aristocrats, or Srisamantan, arrived from Kedah. They petitioned Kulothunga to dissolve the rights of all cultivators in several villages, not just Anaimangalam, which had apparently been gifted to the Buddhist temple, as scholar Gokul Seshadri argues in Nagapattinam to Suvarnadvipa. The Chola court seems to have allowed the grant to lapse during these tense decades. Then, issuing the smaller lion plates, this time in Tamil, Kulothunga Chola returned the revenue rights to the monastery. By then, two sub-shrines of the Buddhist complex, which had both been built by an unknown king of Kedah, bore the names of Rajaraja and Rajendra Chola, the Rajaraja Chola Parampalli and the Rajendra Chola Parampalli. They shared the sacred compound with a vihara of the late Chudamani Varman, whose son they had attacked in 1025-1026.

[00:05:21]So, this quality of entanglement, the mixing up of things and people, was characteristic of Nagapattinam and other pre-modern Indian Ocean cities. It was not just courts, but also merchants, goldsmiths, monks, and grammarians, and everyone and everything in between that jumbled together in ports like this.

[00:05:37]Consider, for example, the great medieval merchant corporation known as the Ainurruvar, the 500 lords of the 18 countries and the thousand directions.

[00:05:45]Historian Risha Lee, in her 2013 PhD thesis constructing community Tamil merchant temples India and China 850 to 1281 shows that the 500 lords donated prolifically to Shiva temples. They gave bronzes, they commissioned structural additions, they imposed levies in their own trade, and they also gifted precious goods. Professor E. Edwards McKinnon in medieval Tamil involvement in northern Sumatra traces the same guild network sourcing out camphor and gold from northern Sumatra. The resin wealth that funded their gifts on both sides of the Bay of Bengal. Their settlements have yielded archaeological remains of Buddhist, Shaivite, and Vaishnavite temples. And in Nagapattinam, historian A. Minakshi Sundararajan in Nagapattinam to Suvarnadvipa makes note of a 12th-century bronze processional Buddha from the collection of the American Rockefeller dynasty. It was originally gifted by a group of metalworkers to a shrine named after them in the Rajendra Chola Perumpalli monastery complex. The inscription mentions that the Buddha was sacred to those of the 18 countries, likely the Ayyavolu who are also funding, remember, Shiva temples. So, was there some connection between the gold obtained by the Ayyavolu and Sumatra? There are Buddhist temples there and this Buddhist gift in Nagapattinam? It's impossible to say.

[00:06:55]But as archaeologist Himanshu Prabha Ray writes in her paper, Nagapattinam bronzes in context, "Hundreds of Buddhas were gifted to this monastic temple complex over the centuries, mostly by craftsmen, traders, and mobile communities rather than by royals." So, Indian Ocean entanglements were not just limited to patrons and patronage, though. They also extended to ideas and faiths. Tamil Buddhists and Shaivites both paraded their sacred images through the streets in ceremonial procession and offered bronzes, fine jewels, food, and aromatics. Indeed, in the 12th century, Tamil Buddhism seems to have been booming. As historian Anne-Monius writes in Imagining a Place for Buddhism, the Viracholiyam, which is a Buddhist grammar presented to a Chola king, cites a now-lost Tamil Buddhist text such as the Bimbisara Kathai, Tiruppatikam, and the Kundalakesi, evidently produced by a thriving literary scene.

[00:07:46]Meanwhile, Buddhist monks writing in Pali at the time were calling themselves Choliya or Damila or Tamil, which is to say they were claiming the Chola homeland and Tamil identity as their own. But at the same time, Shaiva literature, such as the Periyapuranam, describes Buddhist monks being humiliated by earlier Shaiva saints and humbly converting to Shaivism. So, the Buddhist world the Leiden plates was thriving and contested at once.

[00:08:09]Contemporary notions, such as royal tolerance or Sanatana Dharma or secularism, all fall short of describing this richness.

[00:08:18]The Tamil Buddhist tradition was far older than the plates, but the plates ultimately record a moment of brilliance before the downfall. As Leiden University professors Leonard Besseling and Tristan Mustard note in the Netherlands Colonial Collections Committee Dossier, the Leiden plates, along with the hundreds of bronzes in the Nagapattinam monastery, were buried at some point before the 1600s. But when before the 1600s? Was it in the 1200s when the Pandyas and Hoysalas launched attacks that destabilized Chola power and exacerbated famines in the region?

[00:08:48]Was it linked to shrinking global trade at the time, which must have hit merchant patrons hard? Or was it in the 1300s when the Delhi Sultanate's raiders sacked major complexes like Srirangam and the Madurai Meenakshi? Or was it in the 1500s when Vijayanagara inscriptions mentioned troubled grants to Buddhist and Jain institutions in South India?

[00:09:06]Either way, it seems that without reliable royal patronage, without extensive landholdings, and without the political value attached to Hindu temple complexes, no returning Buddhist reestablished the Nagapattinam complex after the burial of the plates and bronzes. Aside from the ancient Manimekalai and the medieval Viracholiyam grammar, little of Tamil Buddhism would survive the upheavals of centuries. The Dutch East India Company, or the VOC, captured Nagapattinam from the Portuguese in 1658 and shifted their Coromandel headquarters there in 1690.

[00:09:37]Contracted weavers in the Kaveri Delta and the Andhra coast produced the painted Kalamkari cottons that became Coromandel chintzes in fashionable European costumes and drawing rooms. The Dutch also traded in Gujarati ikat textiles exchanging them for spices in factories that they operated in Island Southeast Asia. Now it's because of this exchange that so many heritage Indian textiles survive in Indonesia as heirlooms passed down family to family.

[00:10:00]In fact, at least as many textiles from this period survive in Southeast Asia as in India today. But in addition to trading in textiles and spices, the VOC also trafficked people. That's a history that has found absolutely no space in Indian media coverage. In his paper The World's Oldest Trade, historian Markus documented the famine slave cycle.

[00:10:20]Military devastation or drought collapses the food supply, families cannot feed their children, and finally intermediaries arrive with cash. Now to be clear, the VOC did not run this system alone. In fact, Vink's reading of the evidence suggests the Dutch were comparatively minor minor players in the slave trade compared to Asian traders.

[00:10:38]And the political instability that fed all of this, which is to say raids by the Bijapur Sultanate which was often led by Maratha generals, the wars of various Telugu Nayakas, the newly established Maratha state in Thanjavur, expanding Mughal power, all of these were masterminded by Indian powers and Indian warriors who disrupted cultivation, looted indiscriminately, and damaged irrigation works. So in 1688 as the VOC constructed Fort Vijayan at Nagapatnam, the Leiden plates and other precious artifacts in a now lost monastery were picked up by European antiquities enthusiasts. As European power advanced, it also did the value of ancient artifacts from conquered territories. Florencius Camper, a Dutch pastor situated in Batavia, the VOC's colonial capital in Java, brought the plates to the Netherlands in 1712, likely having acquired them in Nagapatnam. Around the same time, Dr. citing VOC accounts on the old Chola capital of Thanjavur mentions that thousands of people, predominantly children, were exported from Nagapatnam to Aceh, Johor and other markets. The same port in the same decade shipped cloth, people, spices and artifacts.

[00:11:46]Enslaved people were as much a feature of pre-modern Indian Ocean ports as cosmopolitanism.

[00:11:51]Now, Kemper's descendants donated the plates to Leiden University in 1862. By then, the Coromandel Coast had already changed hands several times, ending up in British hands after the Carnatic Wars. Five years later, French Jesuits, with the approval of a British Governor-General, demolished a Chinese pagoda that was the last structural remnant of the great medieval Buddhist complex of Nagapatnam. In 2026, the Leiden plates are being unconditionally returned to the Archaeological Survey of India, which will determine whether and where they will be exhibited. It is worth pausing on that sentence. The Chudamani Vihara and the Rajendra Chola Perumpalli, which were endowed by the plates, no longer exist. The Tamil Buddhist community, whose history the plates record, has no heir in Nagapatnam, and the ASI holds them by default, not by any logic of continuity.

[00:12:37]As the Prince's ground report from December 2024 documents, many repatriated objects end up in the ASI's Central Antiquity Collection at Purana Qila, secured from public view. When Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, recently said he would ask King Charles to return the Koh-i-Noor, the question that followed was immediate. Return it to whom? The Leiden plates raise the same question. A seated Buddha image repatriated from Australia in 2017 sits outside the Director-General's office at the National Museum in Delhi. The Pathur Nataraja returned from Britain in 1991 has not been seen since. Another Chola bronzes are featured at prestigious G20 exhibitions, while regional museums, which originally homed the artifacts, are in a woeful state. When I visited Nagapatnam a field worker in 2025, the museum had been demolished, and nobody could tell me when or if it would be rebuilt or if it just moved. The picture is similarly woeful at Madurai and Visakhapatnam, both crucial nodes in Indian history. Meanwhile, the Nagapattinam Buddha bronzes are mostly in the Government Museum in Chennai, but like most of the museum's treasures, they have little more than a small information card to communicate with curious visitors. Basically, the repatriation of Indian artifacts seems to involve two tracks. First, there's a media circus giving the credit to muscular foreign policy and the Prime Minister, but we would know little about medieval Nagapattinam not for Karashima and Subbarayalu's work on its inscriptions, Realon its bronzes, McKim as guild networks, Munis on its literary culture, and many, many others. Public historians and history communicators have a part to play in this process, too, though a smaller one. We responsibly contextualize what the evidence shows and what it does not. The Netherlands Colonial Restitutions Committee extended its thanks to both academics and public historians.

[00:14:15]Prime Minister Modi did not. In fact, the last decade of his government's tenure has seen a dangerous erosion of evidence-based histories in India, owing both to an ongoing neglect of public universities and museums, and direct support of propagandistic polemical narratives.

[00:14:29]In an ideal world, the Leiden plates would return to the centerpiece of a world-class maritime museum at Nagapattinam with programming in all Indian languages. The plates should be reunited with the Shiva bronzes from the same port, with Tamil Buddhist bronzes now scattered across Chennai, London, Kolkata, New York, and the temple wall inscriptions recording the Kedah agents' donations to Shiva and Buddha alike, as well as loans of Tamil origin artifacts from Southeast Asia. The Dutch history of the Coromandel Coast should also be explored with archival records, loan textiles, and VOC prints scattered across Indian museum collections. The return of such priceless artifacts like the Leiden plates should provoke new investigative projects, international scholarly grants, and centers of excellence to communicate scholarly knowledge to citizens. I can only hope that the Leiden plates will not suffer political misappropriation and institutional lethargy as so many other repatriated treasures have.

[00:15:21]If you have questions or comments, we'd love to hear them. Follow us everywhere on social media. You can find me on Instagram at @anuruddha and on Twitter @IKanikeSaty. We'll see you next week.

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