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'Quite a character': The man challenging traffickers of Indian art

From 2017 to 2020, law enforcement recovered almost ten times more stolen objects worldwide than the number reported missing, according to Interpol's Works of Art team

Photo: Bloomberg
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Photo: Bloomberg

Kai SchultzUpmanyu Trivedi
From a tiny office in southern India, S. Vijay Kumar scans case files on his laptop with the precision of a forensic scientist. To an untrained eye, the width of a bronze Shiva’s nose or the definition of its knuckles are invisible details. To Kumar, these are clues on a statue that unlock some of history’s biggest art heists.

For more than a decade, Kumar has devoted himself to a singular cause: recovering smuggled artifacts from the world’s richest collectors. Along with other civilian detectives scattered across time zones, he has roiled an insular art crowd, helping to seize scores

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