LONDON: Three British museums have embarked on an exercise to confront the colonial legacy of their artefacts by being more transparent about the items’ provenance. British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum and Pitt Rivers Museum are reviewing the labels on thousands of their objects, particularly those plundered during colonial times.“We are looking into and researching collection histories. This is an ongoing process, so I am unable to give the number of Indian objects that might be relabelled,” a British Museum spokeswoman said, adding that objects in historic collections have been acquired “in many circumstances as a result of punitive expeditions, forced acquisitions and colonial collecting but also as diplomatic gifts, donations and objects that have been given or sold with conscious intent”.In 2017, Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) appointed its first provenance curator to coordinate V&A’s provenance and spoliation research.“V&A is not embarking on a relabelling project in isolation, but exploring a variety of programmes through which we hope to recontextualize the histories of some objects in our collection,” its spokeswoman said.Pitt Rivers Museum, part of the University of Oxford , recently hired a research associate for its ‘Labelling Matters’ project to help identify how the museum can best deal with the historical labels in its galleries.The museum, which has an Indian collection comprising 25,000 items, keeps historic labels on display, in addition to contemporary ones. “Some of the historic labels are problematic,” said its director Dr Laura Van Broekhoven.“Some have very derogatory words on them which are racist or sexist. In the case of others, we feel we are not being upfront about the problematic history. Some objects came to the museum as the result of plunder and looting. The project is to find ways forward. In some cases, we might take the label off, in others we might keep it on. It is all part of a process of decolonising museums,” she said.Last year, a report commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron concluded that objects taken from African countries without consent during France ’s colonial period should be permanently returned.All three museums told TOI they had not received any official requests for the repatriation of collections or objects to India.V&A director Tristram Hunt said the museum has had debates “denouncing its colonial collections” on its spaces. “We are very clear and open about our colonial past, but we are not going to remove things,” Hunt added.V&A and British Museum both said their approach was to lend objects extensively across the world and they already collaborated with museum colleagues across India.“Restitution is an important issue for our sorts of museums currently. We are in the process of drafting a policy on the return of objects,” Van Broekhoven said.“To the victor, the spoils may once have been the approach of imperialists and military adventurers, but it can’t be the basis on which major international institutions justify their holdings and collections,” said British historian and former BBC Delhi correspondent Andrew Whitehead. “This is a very promising sign and means there can be a much better-informed discussion about restitution,” he added.But London-based PIO historian and author Dr Zareer Masani disagreed. “I don’t see how relabelling can clarify the issue of looting as a lot of art has travelled in different ways and been plundered, sold and forsaken. I don’t see how a label can get into the complexities of that,” he said.“The Nizams of Hyderabad jewels were displayed at the National Museum in Delhi for a couple of months after the government of India acquired them in 1995 (for Rs218 crore). Now they have disappeared and no one has seen them since. That will be the fate of anything that returns to India. Where the looted treasures are now, they are seen by a far wider group of people than would ever be possible if returned to India. There is no space to even display what they have,” Masani added.A spokeswoman for the Royal Collection Trust, responsible for the Koh-i-Nur diamond, which is kept at the Tower of London , said: “There are no plans at present to amend the label. Questions on the restitution of the Koh-i-Nur are a matter for the government.”