In November 2025, V&A South Kensington was pleased to welcome Professor Naman Ahuja, Professor of art history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, to deliver a public lunchtime lecture.
Professor Ahuja’s talk, titled Artefacts or Relics?, examined a collection of gems taken from the Piprahwa stupa in Northern India along with remains said to be those of the Buddha himself. Excavated in 1898 by the engineer William Caxton Peppé during the British Raj, the gems were the subject of an attempted auction earlier in 2025, which was subsequently stopped.
In his lecture, Professor Ahuja explored the status of the Piprahwa gems as holy relics, inseparable from the sacred bodily remains of the Buddha, and examined how attitudes, understandings and ethical debates around the treatment of such material have changed since their discovery.
