 "Saviours of the deity: The men who bring back stolen idols")
“Thieves have stolen our gods, made and given to us by our great, great grandfathers, and sold them abroad. The old people say if someone steals the property of Shiva, his entire clan is cursed, but the thieves don’t seem to care. Due to the wrath of the gods, the rains are not coming on time, and the land has turned barren,” Easter reads it out in a documentary called The Real-Life Indiana Jones (2015). “We prostrate in front of all people and governments of any country which have our gods; please return them back.”
Written in Tamil, the letter was translated for Easter by S Vijay Kumar, a Singapore-based accountant with a shipping company. Kumar, who has roots in Chennai, is one of the unsung heroes engaged in the battle to bring back the gods referred to in the letter.
Kumar works with agencies like Homeland Security and experts such as Pulitzer-finalist Jason Felch who details art crime around the globe on his blog, Chasing Aphrodite.
Alarmed by the number of stolen Indian artifacts which he found displayed in international galleries, Kumar teamed up with Singapore-based Anuraag Saxena, the Asia Pacific head for UK’s World Education Foundation, to bring them back. Together, they formed the India Pride Project which banks on 200 volunteers.
When former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott returned two antiques in 2014 to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it was the culmination of the countless days Kumar and other heritage enthusiasts had put in to trace Vriddhachalam Ardhanarishvara and Sripuranthan Nataraja.
In 2013, Kumar had noticed that the Ardhanarishvara at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales was strikingly similar to the sculpture in Tamil Nadu’s Vriddhachalam Temple. This particular Ardhanarishvara, an androgynous form of Shiva and Parvati in stone, is over 900 years old.
After a volunteer with India Pride Project got photos of the statue from the actual site and Kumar compared those with pictures available with the French Institute of Puducherry (it has been studying temples in south India for decades), Kumar realised that the villagers had been worshipping a replica of the deity.
The sculpture had been pinched in 1974 from Vriddhachalam, and the switch had gone unnoticed for decades. The Sydney-based gallery had bought the piece from controversial art dealer Subhash Kapoor for more than $300,000 in 2004.
It was Kapoor who sold a statue of “Dancing Shiva” to the National Gallery of Australia in 2008 for $5.1 million. The Chola-era bronze Nataraja was allegedly stolen from the Brihadeeswarar temple in Sripuranthan, Tamil Nadu, in January 2006. When a picture of this Sripuranthan Nataraja appeared on the website of Tamil Nadu Police’s Idol Wing, Kumar matched it to the piece acquired by Australia. (The Idol Wing comprises a handful of officers who look into temple thefts in the state; it is the only such force in the country.)
To a trained eye, spotting differences almost works like a game, says Kumar. The lost wax process once used for making bronzes helped Kumar spot the similarities between the statue in Australia and the records that he had access to. He even put up a video on YouTube detailing the similarities between India’s lost Sripuranthan Nataraja and the piece Australia had procured from Kapoor.
“It caused a lot of public embarrassment in their country, causing galleries to look at what they had bought from Kapoor,” says Kumar.
Owner of a gallery called Art of the Past that once stood proudly on New York’s Madison Avenue, Kapoor was arrested in Frankfurt in 2011 and then extradited to Chennai on the charge of moving artifacts out of India.
It was seven crates labelled ‘marble garden table sets’ that led to Kapoor’s arrest and eventual extradition to India: there was no garden furniture in these crates being sent to the US from India, but 3,000 pounds of stolen antiquities. Kapoor is awaiting trial in a jail in Trichy, Tamil Nadu.
Investigators believe there are others equally complicit in the innumerable thefts from temples in India.
In 2003, Vaman Ghiya was arrested for creating a black market for Indian artifacts overseas: 900 antiques were seized from him in Jaipur. Ghiya was initially sentenced to life imprisonment but he walked out in 2014 after the Rajasthan High Court cited “tardy investigation” by the police.
Kirit L Mankodi,
“Deenadayalan used to live in the heart of Chennai,” says Kumar, indicating the stolen antiquities couldn’t have found a more ‘prime’ location to be tucked away.
The India Pride Project claims many victories. Kumar spotted a 1,000-year-old bronze Ganesha which The Toledo Museum of Art in the US had purchased from Kapoor in 2006. Another find was the Pratyangira, or the Lion Lady, which was stolen from the same temple as the Ardhanarishvara — Kapoor had sold this to the National Gallery of Australia for $247,000, and it continues to be in Australia.
“Agencies like Homeland Security are working with us because they were frustrated with India’s lax attitude; they wanted someone who would go the whole mile,” says Kumar.
The ‘whole mile’ doesn’t end with retirement, and Mumbai-based Kirit L Mankodi, who writes to Prime Minister Modi every time he goes to the US, signifies this. At 76, this retired professor of archaeology is awaiting the return of a number of stolen artifacts.
Two sandstone sculptures had gone missing from the Gadgach temple in Atru, Rajasthan, where Mankodi was working seven years ago. “Very few people had seen these sculptures. Buried for thousands of years, these were in perfect condition,” he says.
Identified as two amorous couples, or mithunas, a popular motif in Indian art, these went missing in 2009: one ‘disappeared’ in April, the second in September.
Laws under the 1970 UNESCO Convention prohibit export and import of illegally-acquired antiques, but one of the Atru sculptures was advertised in a catalogue by an antique dealer in London just six months after it was stolen.
After Mankodi was tipped off about the advertisement, he wrote to the Archaeological Survey of India which forwarded the message to the Indian High Commission in London, and from there a theft alert notice was sent to Scotland Yard. “By the time Scotland Yard raided the dealer’s studio, the sculpture had been moved to New York,” recounts Mankodi.
“We have pictures of the sculpture in situ and that establishes ownership of artifacts in cases like this.” Mankodi had also written to art scholars, alerting them of the ‘lost and traced’ object. “This dealer was bombarded with emails from his associates, all of whom questioned where the sculptures came from.”
By then, Homeland Security had stepped in and raided the dealer’s studio, recovering the sculpture. On January 14, 2014, Mankodi was informed that the Atru sculpture had been handed over to the Indian Consulate in New York. The Atru sculptures have been half-way home since then.
Mankodi hosts Plundered Pasts, a website with ‘theft alerts’ to caution investigators as well as art dealers about stolen antiquities, while Kumar runs a blog called Poetry In Stone.
While news of the US returning over 200 artifacts to Modi spread like wildfire last month, the little known fact is that these had been languishing in US warehouses since 2014 with no Indian authorities stepping up to claim them.
The legwork for Homeland Security’s Operation Hidden Idol, which gave us the 200 artifacts, began in 2007, and heritage enthusiasts have been part of the process every step of the way. American authorities seized artifacts worth over $100 million from Kapoor under Hidden Idol.
One of these items is the sandstone sculpture of Mahakoka, also known as the Great Bird-voiced Goddess. Recovered from a 2,200 year-old Buddhist stupa at Bharhut, Madhya Pradesh, in 1873, this deity was only photographed once — in 1977 when it was registered to a family under the 1972 Antiquities Act.
The goddess, worth at least $15 million, was recovered when Kapoor’s storerooms in Manhattan and Queens were raided by a team led by Easter. “Kapoor had papers that showed it came from Khartoum, Sudan,” says Mankodi. But the sculpture’s inscription (in an ancient Indian script) led Mankodi to believe that the papers were false and he identified the sculpture as the deity which ‘disappeared’ in 2004; he has since traced the statue back to the family it was stolen from.
In March, the search for stolen antiques took Homeland Security to Christie’s in New York, where it seized a 10th-century sandstone stele of Rishabhanata and an 8th-century sandstone panel of the equestrian deity Revanta (Surya’s youngest son) and his entourage. Bought from Kapoor, these were estimated to be worth $450,000 and were set to be auctioned off.
“Government officials have informed us that the evidence they uncovered determining that Lots 61 and 62 were problematic was not publicly available and, therefore, could not have been accessed by Christie’s for vetting purposes. We have withdrawn the lots (which had these sculptures) and are cooperating with the authorities,” a spokesperson from Christie’s says.
To address this plundering of heritage, laws of the land should be rigorously imposed, feels Colin Renfrew, one of Britain’s foremost archaeologists. “India should have a vigorous policy of seeking the return of items when these are discovered to have left illegally. A good photographic record should be established so that if these disappear, there is hope of recognising them when they appear overseas,” he says. “Italy has followed such a policy and has found success.”
Smugglers use all sorts of stories to keep people away from certain sites, shares Mankodi. While tales of haunted sites are in abundance in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, in Tamil Nadu, the tale of killer bees keeps people away.
An idol of Nataraja — the dancing Shiva — which belonged to the Chola dynasty of 11th-12th century was returned by the then Australian PM Tony Abbott to Indian PM Narendra Modi in September 2014
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The destruction of sacred items is profoundly destabilising, says Donna Yates, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow who specialises in combating antiquities trafficking. “Sacred art is part of the society, part of a living culture, part of how people interact with their world and the divine,” she says. “In a foreign art museum, the god is no longer able to perform its function to the community and the community is no longer able to interact with the god.”
The US alone has about 2,900 pieces that can be traced back to India — 200 are headed back; others will have to wait their turn.