Wellcome Collection to Restitute 2,000 Jain Manuscripts to Birmingham
The Wellcome Collection in London is preparing to transfer 2,000 Jain manuscripts acquired in 1919 from a temple in what is now Pakistan, in a restitution that reflects both the fragility of the material and the upheaval of South Asian history. The manuscripts, described as the largest group of Jain manuscripts outside South Asia, will be deposited with the UK Institute of Jainology at the University of Birmingham rather than returned to Pakistan or India.
The arrangement is unusual, but the circumstances are equally specific. After the partition of India in 1947, Jain communities were scattered across the region. Today, there are virtually no Jains left in Pakistan, and the community in India is too dispersed to point to a single obvious institution that could care for the collection. In that context, the University of Birmingham has emerged as the chosen repository, through the Birmingham Centre of Jain Studies, established in 2023.
The manuscripts entered the Wellcome Collection through Henry Wellcome, the pharmaceutical magnate who assembled a vast archive of objects and documents related to health and medicine. Most of his holdings were later dispersed to the Science Museum, but the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road retained the archival material and artworks. Of the Jain manuscripts, around 1,200 came from an unidentified temple in the Punjab area, in a place recorded in the acquisition papers as Patli or Pattli, while the remaining 800 came from unidentified sources in present-day Pakistan. Some are still wrapped in the 1919 newspapers used to protect them during transport.
Adrian Plau, the Wellcome Collection’s head of collections, has acknowledged that the manuscripts were bought at “a low price and against the best interests of their original owners.” Contemporary correspondence suggests they were purchased for 5 rupees each. Mehool Sanghrajka, a trustee of the UK Institute of Jainology, said some of the manuscripts might not have survived the turmoil of partition and expressed gratitude for the care the Wellcome has shown them.
About half of the collection has a health connection. The manuscripts include an illustrated early 16th-century text of the Kalpasutra, an important Jain scripture, as well as what may be the earliest surviving copy of the first medical treatise in early Hindi, dated 1592. The documents are mainly in Prakrit, with others in different South Asian languages, and are currently stored in more than 100 archive boxes.
Permission to deaccession is being sought from the Wellcome Collection’s governors and the Charity Commission. The physical transfer is expected to begin this year and may take several years, marking a careful and closely watched shift in the stewardship of a collection shaped by colonial-era acquisition and post-partition displacement.
