As Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima at the Hague and held talks with Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten, the Dutch government handed over the Anaimangalam Chola Copper Plates, a culmination of a 14-year effort to get them back.
Known in the Netherlands as the Leiden Plates, they are among the most significant surviving records of the Chola dynasty and among the most important artefacts of Tamil heritage held anywhere outside India.
Dating back to Emperor Rajaraja Chola I (985-1014 CE), these 21 copper plates, weighing approximately 30 kg, are bound together by a bronze ring bearing the royal seal of the Chola dynasty.
Officials said India has been pursuing the return of the plates since 2012 but the effort gained momentum on on 30 October 2023, when the Ambassador and Permanent Delegate of India to UNESCO formally requested the inclusion of the Chola Dynasty Copper Plates in the agenda of the 24th session of the Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation (ICPRCP).
During the session, India’s claim as the nation of origin was found to be valid.
As of November 2023, the UNESCO committee encouraged the Netherlands to engage in constructive bilateral dialogue with India regarding its return, which has now resulted in the agreement to hand over the plates during the PM’s visit, bringing to fruition more than a decade of diplomatic efforts spanning multiple governments, academic representations and multilateral negotiations.
The Leiden plates are divided into two sections in Sanskrit and in Tamil. The Sanskrit section covers the genealogy of the Chola dynasty, beginning with praises of Lord Vishnu and proceeding through a list of divine ancestors that establishes the dynasty’s claim to long-standing legitimacy.
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The Tamil section records that in the 21st year of Rajaraja Chola I’s reign, the king pledged the entire revenue of villages bordering Anaimangalam to support a Buddhist vihara in the port city of Nagapattinam, a vihara that had been built by the Malay king of Srivijaya.
Rajaraja Chola I was one of the greatest rulers in Indian history, the builder of the Brihadeeswara Temple at Thanjavur, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the architect of an empire that stretched across South India and into Sri Lanka.
His grant to the Nagapattinam vihara is remarkable for what it reveals about the Chola Empire’s religious pluralism: a Shaivite Hindu emperor providing revenue endowments for a Buddhist monastery built by a foreign king. The plates are thus not merely administrative records, they are windows into the cosmopolitan, commercially connected world of medieval South India, where Hinduism, Buddhism and international trade coexisted and cross-pollinated.
While Rajaraja Chola I gave the original verbal order (recorded on palm leaves), it was his son, Emperor Rajendra Chola I (1012-1042 CE), who had the grant etched on durable copper plates to preserve it for posterity. The bronze ring that binds the plates bears Rajendra Chola’s seal. The plates are thus the work of both father and son, the grant of one, the permanence ensured by the other.
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The plates were brought to the Netherlands in around 1700 by Florentius Camper, who was in India as part of a Christian missionary in the period when Nagapattinam was under Dutch control.
The Dutch East India Company (VOC) had made Nagapattinam its Coromandel Coast headquarters in 1690, shifting its chief stronghold from Pulicat to Nagapattinam and thus the plates fell into European hands. The precise legal and personal circumstances under which Camper obtained the plates from India are not fully documented, a lacuna that has complicated, though not derailed, India’s repatriation effort.
Once in the Netherlands, the plates were eventually donated to Leiden University, where they came to be housed in the Asian section of the Leiden University Library and remained in its vault for over 300 years, exhibited on special occasions and out of bounds for the general public.
They have been studied by scholars of Indian history and Tamil epigraphy, and they appear in the Tamil literary canon: the Anaimangalam Plates are referenced in Kalki Krishnamurthy’s celebrated historical novel Ponniyin Selvan, deepening their hold on Tamil cultural imagination.
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On Sunday, Modi, along with Jetten, will visit the Afsluitdijk Dam as part of India-Netherlands collaboration in clean energy, water management and sustainable fisheries. This is an effort towards diversification from fossil fuel and ensuring energy security.
Modi, who is on a four-nation Europe tour from May 15-20, will leave for Gothenburg, Sweden, on Sunday.
