Indian translocated Buddhist sculpture and the decolonial potential of cultural digital twins

This chapter is focused on research and prior work underpinning a joint Indian-Swiss project titled Digital Twins: negotiating identity and translocated heritage in the global age, which commenced in late 2023. It explores the novel production and application of cultural digital twins as the basis for new forms of museological access to contribute to the decolonial repair of the sacred sculptures removed from Indian Buddhist temple sites and relocated to Indian museums. The chapter is structured in three parts, first to introduce the Buddhist sculptures in question and their postcolonial and museological contexts, then to consider the decolonial possibilities of the methodologies and technologies being explored through the Digital Twins project, and finally to explore how a blockchain framework might support the shared custodianship of the project’s digital twin datasets and address issues of mixed or contested copyrights.