Overview
- The Wellcome Collection signed a memorandum of understanding to transfer more than 2,000 Jain manuscripts to the Institute of Jainology for deposit at the University of Birmingham.
- The museum says its governors and the UK Charity Commission must approve deaccession, with a phased handover set to begin this year and expected to take several years, and it is discussing further returns.
- The trove spans the 15th to 19th centuries and includes an early illustrated Kalpasutra and a 1592 Hindi medical treatise that may be the earliest of its kind, making it the largest group of Jain manuscripts outside South Asia.
- Acquisition records show Henry Wellcome’s agent bought many of the texts in 1919 from a Punjab temple for a few rupees each, a purchase the museum now says was against the sellers’ best interests.
- Organizers selected a UK repository because the source temple no longer exists and Partition dispersed local Jains, which they say will protect the texts and open them to worshippers and researchers.