"It seems to me a suicidal and indefensible policy to allow the country to be looted of original works of ancient art". Who gave this statement?

H.H. Cole

The correct answer is Option (1) → H.H. Cole

In 1854, Walter Elliot, the commissioner of Guntur (Andhra Pradesh), visited Amaravati and collected several sculpture panels and took them away to Madras. (These came to be called the Elliot marbles after him.) He also discovered the remains of the western gateway and came to the conclusion that the structure at Amaravati was one of the largest and most magnificent Buddhist stupas ever built. By the 1850s, some of the slabs from Amaravati had begun to be taken to different places: to the Asiatic Society of Bengal at Calcutta, to the India Office in Madras and some even to London. It was not unusual to find these sculptures adorning the gardens of British administrators. In fact, any new official in the area continued to remove sculptures from the site on the grounds that earlier officials had done the same.

One of the few men who had a different point of view was an archaeologist named H.H. Cole. He wrote: “It seems to me a suicidal and indefensible policy to allow the country to be looted of original works of ancient art.” He believed that museums should have plaster-cast facsimiles of sculpture, whereas the originals should remain where they had been found. Unfortunately, Cole did not succeed in convincing the authorities about Amaravati, although his plea for in site preservation was adopted in the case of Sanchi.