Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate “The Light and The Lotus: Relics of the Awakened One”, an exhibition in New Delhi on Saturday (January 3) to present the Piprahwa Gems, the sacred Buddhist relics. The relics, which were taken by an Englishman from their resting place in India in 1898, were returned to the country last year, the Ministry of Culture said.
Here are glimpses from the Grand International Exposition of Sacred Piprahwa Relics in Delhi. I call upon all those passionate about culture and Buddhism to come to this Exposition. pic.twitter.com/gzCV0Bkl3j
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) January 2, 2026
The exhibition will feature the Buddha relics, as well as an “immersive display of 88 antiquities” and the repatriation gallery along with a model of the excavation site, according to the Ministry of Culture.
The exhibition in New Delhi’s Rai Pithora Cultural Complex will be made open to the public from Sunday.
The relics, “found buried together in reliquaries with the corporeal relics of the Historical Buddha”, have been described by Sotheby’s, the auctioneer, as being “among the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of all time”.
What are the Piprahwa Gems?
The antiquities include a collection of 349 gemstones, which were unearthed in 1898 by William Claxton Peppé, an English estate manager, at a Buddhist stupa in Piprahwa, a village in UP’s Siddharthnagar district, near the border of Nepal.
The British Crown claimed the found relics from Peppé under the 1878 Indian Treasure Trove Act. Most of the gems and precious metals, comprising nearly 1,800 pearls, rubies, topaz, sapphires, and patterned gold sheets, went to what is now the Indian Museum in Kolkata. However, a fifth of the total find, including duplicates of the main collection, was retained by Peppé.
These gems were passed down for generations in the Peppé family and were put up for auction by Chris Peppé in 2013. The gems had been listed for auction last May by Sotheby’s Hong Kong, which estimated an estimated selling price of over $100 million.
Also part of the collection are the sacred bones and ash, believed to be of Lord Buddha himself. Viceroy Elgin had donated these to Siamese King Rama V.
How did New Delhi recover the relics?
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After the auction was announced, the Ministry of Culture sent a legal notice on May 5, 2025, to Sotheby’s and the Peppé family, demanding the “immediate cessation” of the auction and the repatriation of the relics to India.
According to the Indian legal notice, the collection includes “bone fragments, soapstone and crystal caskets, a sandstone coffer, and offerings such as gold ornaments and gemstones”, which were “excavated…from the Piprahwa Stupa – widely identified as ancient Kapilavastu”, the capital of the Shakya “republic” of the 5th-6th centuries BCE where Prince Siddhartha lived before leaving home in his search for the truth. The relics, the notice says, are an “inalienable religious and cultural heritage of India and the global Buddhist community”, and their sale “violates Indian and international laws, as well as United Nations conventions”.
The Archaeological Survey of India also requested the Consulate General of Hong Kong to immediately stop the auction.
While the auction was halted, India’s legal claim over the Piprahwa gems fell in a grey area, since Peppé had excavated the relics on land allotted to him by the British government, which his family privately held for 127 years. Moreover, the gemstones were taken out of India long before India’s Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972 came into being. Despite this, the Ministry of Culture asked the Financial Investigation Unit to coordinate with its counterpart in Hong Kong to highlight the alleged illegality of the auction and ensure compliance with international laws.
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Indian industrialist Pirojsha Godrej also had a part to play, purchasing the entire collection of 349 gemstones for an undisclosed amount. Godrej has agreed to loan a “large portion” of the collection to the National Museum for a period of five years, and display the entire collection for three months upon its arrival.While an unconventional move, this protected the government from having to make a commercial transaction for the antiquities, which would have raised ethical issues.
