London's Wellcome Collection returns 2,000 manuscripts to the Jain community

London’s Wellcome Collection will restitute 2,000 Jain manuscripts acquired in 1919 from a Jain temple in what is now Pakistan, in what it describes as the largest group of Jain manuscripts outside South Asia. A Memorandum of Understanding formalizing the transfer is being signed at the UK House of Commons, with the manuscripts returning not to a state but to the UK-based Institute of Jainology for deposit at the University of Birmingham. Wellcome Collection head of collections Adrian Plau said the manuscripts were bought “at a low price and against the best interests of their original owners,” with correspondence suggesting a price of 5 rupees each (at the time, 15 rupees equaled £1). About 1,200 manuscripts came from an unidentified Punjab location recorded as Patli or Pattli, and around 800 came from other unidentified sources in present-day Pakistan, where there are now virtually no Jains and no clear local repository following the 1947 partition.

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