Globalisation And Cultural Heritage: Who Decides What The World Gets To Keep?

Globalisation has reshaped the contemporary world into a densely interconnected economic and cultural sphere, enabling unprecedented circulation of goods, ideas, and populations. Its economic promises are frequently celebrated in narratives of growth and opportunity; yet its cultural consequences — particularly within post-colonial societies — demand more searching scrutiny. The very mechanisms that facilitate global integration have also accelerated processes of cultural homogenisation, commodification, and asymmetrical power relations in the preservation and restitution of heritage.

Culture, in its deepest sense, is not reducible to a tradable commodity nor to aesthetic spectacle. It is a lived continuum sustained by language, memory, ritual, and collective identity. However, globalisation — propelled by market rationality and global media ecosystems — increasingly reframes cultural expression as consumable output. Indigenous art forms, music, ritual practices, and traditional knowledge systems are often repackaged to satisfy global demand, frequently severed from their social and historical moorings. Such commodification risks hollowing cultural meaning while marginalising the communities that remain custodians of these traditions.

India's vast linguistic and cultural plurality illustrates this tension with particular clarity. With hundreds of languages and dialects, the Indian civilisational fabric is grounded in pluralism. Yet the institutional and economic ascendancy of English as a global lingua franca has contributed to the erosion of indigenous linguistic ecosystems. Tribal and regional languages — repositories of ecological knowledge, oral histories, and community epistemologies — increasingly confront extinction. This attrition represents not merely linguistic evolution, but a substantive cultural impoverishment that diminishes humanity's intellectual diversity.

Traditional crafts and artisanal industries reveal a similar pattern of displacement. Handloom weaving, folk painting, wood carving, and natural dyeing — once embedded within intergenerational systems of knowledge transmission — struggle to survive within a marketplace dominated by mass production and efficiency metrics. As artisans migrate toward economically viable livelihoods, practices rooted in accumulated expertise gradually recede. The decline of such crafts is therefore not solely an economic phenomenon; it reflects a systemic undervaluation of cultural labour within global market structures.

The vulnerability of traditional knowledge under global intellectual property regimes exposes deeper structural inequities. The well-known disputes concerning turmeric and Basmati rice illustrate how indigenous knowledge, historically preserved through oral and communal traditions, becomes susceptible to appropriation when measured against formal documentation frameworks. Although legal challenges succeeded in these instances, they underscore a persistent asymmetry between global regulatory architectures and local epistemologies. Protection is frequently reactive rather than preventive, revealing the inadequacy of existing systems in recognising non-Western knowledge traditions.

Perhaps the most politically charged dimension of cultural heritage in a globalised order concerns the repatriation of artefacts. Objects such as the Koh-i-Noor diamond and the Peacock Throne are not mere artefacts; they are carriers of historical memory and symbolic sovereignty. Yet their restitution remains constrained by institutional authority, legal formalism, and geopolitical calculus. Museums and cultural institutions in former colonial powers often rely on acquisition doctrines that disregard the coercive contexts under which such objects were removed. In this respect, globalisation has not consistently corrected historical imbalance; it has, in many instances, reinforced institutional privilege over ethical accountability.

Within this landscape of institutional inertia, an unconventional — though limited — role has emerged for private actors. Indian business leaders and collectors have occasionally intervened to repatriate culturally significant objects through international auctions. The purchase of Tipu Sultan's sword by an Indian industrialist is emblematic of private capital being mobilised in the service of cultural restitution. While such acts reflect an evolving sense of cultural stewardship, they also highlight the absence of robust state-driven mechanisms capable of securing heritage through diplomatic or legal channels.

Private repatriation efforts, however, are not free from ethical tension. Acquiring artefacts through market transactions risks normalising the notion that historically dispossessed nations must repurchase their own heritage, thereby inadvertently legitimising prior expropriation. Yet these interventions simultaneously reveal how economic leverage can achieve outcomes where formal diplomacy falters. They illuminate the uneven distribution of power that continues to characterise global heritage governance.

Cultural narratives themselves are shaped by prevailing power structures. Museum displays, historiography, and academic interpretation often privilege dominant perspectives while marginalising alternative or community-centred histories. Contestation over narrative authority complicates repatriation debates, transforming history into a terrain of negotiation rather than recognition.

Responding to these challenges requires more than incremental reform; it demands a reconceptualisation of heritage governance. Legal doctrines alone cannot adequately address claims rooted in historical injustice. Ethical engagement, collaborative curation, shared custodianship, digital repatriation, and strengthened local institutions offer more inclusive pathways. Such mechanisms recognise cultural heritage not as an isolated possession but as a collective human inheritance demanding equitable stewardship.

Globalisation need not be inherently antagonistic to cultural preservation. Properly structured, it can facilitate cross-cultural dialogue and shared custodianship. Yet without deliberate efforts to align economic integration with cultural justice, it risks perpetuating historical inequities under contemporary guises. Heritage protection is therefore not merely a matter of ownership; it is a question of accountability, memory, and dignity.

In an increasingly interconnected world, the central question persists: will cultural restitution continue to depend upon private wealth and episodic moral initiative, or can globalisation evolve into a framework in which historical justice is institutionalised rather than auctioned?

The author is working at Dr. Rammanohar Lohia College of law, Bengaluru. Views are personal