After 200 Years, How The Chola Copper Plates Finally Returned To India

S Vijay Kumar

For more than a decade, I have campaigned for the return of the two sets of Chola copper plates held by Leiden University Library in the Netherlands. Their handover is a moment of immense satisfaction, for Tamil Nadu, for India, for Chola enthusiasts across the world, and especially for people of Gangaikonda Cholapuram and Jayankondam, who have kept the memory of Emperor Rajendra Chola alive in the landscape.

This journey began long before the formal request. We raised the matter publicly, wrote about it, researched the provenance, engaged with local communities, and pursued it with successive govts and institutions. The effort involved patient work with the Archaeological Survey of India, Union Ministry of Culture, Ministry of External Affairs, and successive Tamil Nadu govts. Several former ministers as well as local heritage enthusiasts from Gangaikonda Cholapuram and Jayankondam kept faith with this cause.

This was citizen-led work. We were not litigants seeking headlines. We were a non-profit initiative working pro bono, hoping to assist a diplomatic solution.

The larger Leiden grant, the Anaimangalam plates, catalogued as Or.1687, belongs to the world of Rajaraja Chola I and Rajendra Chola I. It consists of 21 copper plates, five with Sanskrit inscriptions and 16 with Tamil inscriptions, held together by a bronze ring bearing the seal of Rajendra Chola I. The other set, Or.1688, consists of three copper plates bearing the seal of Kulottunga Chola I. Together, they record royal charters concerning revenues for a Buddhist shrine and monasteries in Nagapattinam.

In June 2018, I visited Leiden University Library and saw the plates. Nothing had prepared me for that moment. For years, I had read about them, written about them, and argued for their return. But standing before them was different. They were no longer catalogue entries or distant archival references. They were real: copper, script, seal, memory.

And then I saw the emperor’s name etched there.

To read Rajendra Chola’s name, not in a modern book or on a museum label, but on the very copper charter issued in the world of the Cholas, was overwhelming. It felt as though 1,000 years had collapsed into that one instant. Here was the voice of an empire, still legible.

Rajendra Chola built Gangaikonda Cholapuram, brought the waters of the Ganga to the Tamil country, projected Chola power across the seas, and launched the celebrated naval expedition into Southeast Asia. Even today, villages around his capital carry his honorific titles: Jayankondan, Gangaikondan, Mudikondan. People there still name their children Rajendra. That is why seeing his name far away in Leiden sharpened the ache behind the restitution demand.

The provenance available to us was thin. It stated that the plates had been donated to Leiden in 1862 through the estate of Professor H A Hamaker, and that they had earlier been “brought from India” by Florentius Camper, a minister of faith in Batavia in the early 18th century. But “brought” is not provenance. It does not explain how he obtained them, from whom, under what authority, or whether there was any legitimate transfer.

This became central to our exchanges with Leiden in May 2023. When it was suggested that the plates were not stolen but “given away by the Raja himself”, we asked for evidence. The Chola king’s grant was to a beneficiary institution in India. It was not a grant to Florentius Camper, to a Dutch collector, or to a European university. A royal charter created to secure a perpetual religious endowment cannot be presumed to have passed legitimately into private European inheritance merely because it later entered a library.

One part of that correspondence stayed with me. After I wrote publicly about the plates, I was told that had my intentions been known earlier, “other arrangements” might have been insisted upon, possibly meaning I would not have seen them at all.

At the same time, Leiden had cared for the plates, and that must be acknowledged. The question was not whether Leiden had preserved them. It had. The question was whether good custody could become a substitute for rightful context. It cannot.

After India’s formal request in 2023, Leiden commissioned an independent provenance investigation and sought advice from the Dutch Colonial Collections Committee. Its finding must be read carefully. It did not produce a neat smoking gun or a complete acquisition file. Its operative word was “likely”: the plates were most likely excavated during VOC works at Nagapattinam between 1687 and 1700 and likely brought to the Netherlands by the Camper-Kettinghs. The exact circumstances remain uncertain.

This was not a courtroom-style victory based on direct proof of theft. It was something more important: a success for India’s sustained diplomatic efforts, careful provenance research, and Dutch institutional fairness.

This handover must not mean disappearance into another vault. The plates must be conserved, digitised, translated, displayed, and explained. Their Tamil and Sanskrit texts must be accessible to students, researchers, temple visitors, pilgrims, and ordinary citizens. Their connection to Nagapattinam, Srivijaya, Anaimangalam, and Gangaikonda Cholapuram must be explained with scholarly care.

Above all, the plates that speak most directly of Rajendra Chola’s lineage, achievements, and overseas exploits must be displayed at or near Gangaikonda Cholapuram, Rajendra’s capital, the architectural statement of his reign, and the sacred landscape where his memory still breathes. A world-class site museum there would be the natural home for the public interpretation of these plates. If the originals require conservation-grade display, climate control, and high security, India has the expertise to provide it. If necessary, the originals can be shown periodically while high-quality replicas, digital facsimiles, and translations remain permanently accessible.

The handover closes one chapter. The larger task now begins: conserve them, translate them, display them, and let the plates of Rajendra Chola speak again in the land of Gangaikonda Cholapuram.

(The writer is co-founder of the India Pride Project, a citizen-led initiative to combat heritage crimes)