How stolen art detectives India Pride Project tracked down 265 artefacts

Using research, legislative intervention and advocacy, India Pride Project has helped return artefacts, some of which were in museums across the world and others auctioned off in illicit art trades.

A 3rd-century limestone sculpture, stolen from a museum in Tamil Nadu in 1995, was formally handed over to the Indian ambassador to Belgium Santosh Jha on 11 March, 2022 | Photo: S Vijay Kumar

New Delhi: The serious threat of obliteration to tangible heritage seems to have created an ambiance of restitution. India Pride Project, a non-profit group of art enthusiasts who use archival material, social media and advocacy to track down stolen Indian artefacts and secure their return, is taking the lead in reclaiming India’s lost treasures.

They recently helped return a 3rd-century limestone artefact from the ruined stupas in Andhra Pradesh’s Nagarjunakonda, which is in the process of returning to India from Belgium. Earlier, they helped bring home 500-year-old bronze Hanuman idol stolen from Tamil Nadu in 2013.

While IPP has been hunting down idols on its own since 2014, their latest project was a joint effort with UK-based Art Recovery International (ARI).

Here’s how it happened: the limestone sculpture was housed in an Indian museum until 1995 when it was stolen. It was last photographed in the ’90s by an art historian who last year, reached out to IPP after discovering that the piece was being offered for sale at a Belgian art fair.

According to IPP co-founder S Vijay Kumar, the buyer had relied on a certificate of clearance from a UK-based organisation that mints such “documentation” instead of conducting due diligence. In January this year, Kumar informed ARI founder Christopher Marinello and his team about the sale, promoting them to track down the buyer and negotiating an unconditional release of the artwork to the Indian government.

On 11 March, the sculpture was formally handed over to the Indian ambassador to Belgium Santosh Jha. It is expected to reach India after insurance and export permits are approved.

At a handover ceremony in Brussels on 11 March Amb.@santjha received on behalf of GOI, a 3rd century sculpture, a part of ruined stupas at Nagarjunakonda, that had been gone missing from a museum in India.@MEAIndia @ASIGoI @IndianDiplomacy @artrecovery @IndiaPrideProj pic.twitter.com/7PiolBUpD4

— India in Belgium (@IndEmbassyBru) March 22, 2022

Asked which Indian museum the sculpture was in until 1995, Marinello told ThePrint, “I cannot name the museum at this time as law enforcement authorities in India are investigating the theft.”

The limestone relic is just one of over 265 stolen Indian artefacts that IPP has helped return to India. Some artefacts, such as a 500-year-old Hanuman idol, were sold in foreign auctions for tens of lakhs of rupees before returning to India.

According to a government audit in 2018, between 1992 and 2017, 4,408 items were stolen from 3,676 protected monuments across India. The actual figure is estimated to be more than thrice this number.

Hunting down the Hanuman idol

On 22 February, a 500-year-old bronze Hanuman idol stolen from a temple in Tamil Nadu returned to India, after it was auctioned in New York and acquired by a buyer in Australia.

The idol is believed to have sold for a whopping Rs 27.9 lakhs ($37,500) at Christie’s Auctions, a renowned auction house in New York in 2015.

It is said to have been smuggled from a temple in Tamil Nadu’s Ariyalur district in 2013 — an area prone to idol theft incidents. However, it wouldn’t have taken nearly a decade to return to India had local police not closed the case prematurely, Kumar told ThePrint.

“The theft happened in 2013. Then in 2014, the local police in Tamil Nadu closed the case as untraceable. Had the case been open, we could have stopped the auction in 2015,” he said.

Tracking down the idol was a lengthy process. In 2018, Kumar came across an oddly familiar Hanuman idol while sifting through the archives of the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP) which has a vast database containing photographs of idols in temples across Tamil Nadu clicked from 1956-1999.

He saw a photograph of the idol, which he then cross-checked on Christie’s website. In early 2019, Kumar, along with Tamil Nadu police’s special Idol Wing, began working with law enforcement in the US.

“I was shocked when I found out the theft case had been closed back in 2014. [Indian] police stations are graded by open FIRs and to show performance, they hastily close cases which ends up hampering a proper investigation. There were three bronze statues, including one of Lord Vishnu, that were stolen during the same theft that is still missing. The state and Centre must work to reopen all such closed FIRs for idol thefts and work with us,” said Kumar.

Tamil Nadu Idol Wing’s Additional Deputy Superintendent of Police, Rajaram, told ThePrint that further investigation into the theft of the Hanuman idol is underway to ascertain what else is missing.

Kumar and his team played a role in identifying the artefact, confirming its location and tracking it down, Rajaram added.

A dedicated group of volunteers

Founded in 2014, IPP is a group of volunteers dedicated to restoring India’s pride by returning stolen artefacts, through research, legislative intervention, and advocacy.

It first began as a small group headed by 48-year-old Kumar, a shipping company executive currently living in Chennai, in 2006. Kumar, who has studied the domain of Indian art and iconography since the early 2000s, created the team to document and study neglected Indian heritage sites. During trips to such sites, they learned of numerous thefts and began focusing on the illicit art market and the sale of smuggled Indian art in global markets.

By 2008-2009, the team began working with law enforcement both in and outside India who sought the group’s expertise. In 2013, Kumar met Singapore-based Anuraag Saxena, the other co-founder of the group, and a year later the IPP was officially formed.

IPP now consists of 30-40 regular contributors and nearly 400 volunteers. On-ground volunteers are tasked with clicking pictures of heritage sites or scanning certain books and archival material. This helps in locating the foreign places where smuggled artworks lie.

The group has a significant number of volunteers among the Indian diaspora in the UK. Pritesh Patel, a third-generation British-Indian and dedicated IPP volunteer, was quoted by Vice as saying: “We as a generation are established now…As a young British Indian person, I see it as [participating in] a global conversation around decolonisation.”

‘India has lost 10,000 major works of art every decade’

The 500-year-old Hanuman idol is just one of many stolen artefacts that IPP has helped trace and repatriate to India. It has helped return a 1,200-year-old Buddha idol from Bihar that resurfaced in Italy, 14 works of art from the National Gallery of Australia that were traced to notorious art smuggler Subhash Kapoor, and even a 10th-century goat head yogini statue from the UK.

Privileged to recover for repatriation priceless 10th century Vrishanana Yogini – missing since 1980s from Lokhari Temple, UP, India. Discovered in London in Oct 21, secured in @HCI_London. We thank all collaborators. @DrSJaishankar @harshvshringla @MEAIndia @PMOIndia pic.twitter.com/owyDbH1mKR

— India in the UK (@HCI_London) January 14, 2022

India has lost roughly 10,000 major works of art every decade from the 1950s, according to Kumar’s estimates, and therefore whatever has been recovered so far, could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Sanjeev Sanyal, Principal Economic Advisor to the Government of India and a close friend of Kumar’s, has also assisted the group in accessing old theft records, contacting relevant government authorities, and cutting through bureaucratic red tape.

“I first met Vijay through a friend of ours who is currently the chief economic advisor, Anantha Nageswaran. We met at Anantha’s house in Singapore in 2010-11, where Vijay actually gave a presentation about hunting down stolen idols. Since then, I’ve assisted the IPP in any way I can”, Sanyal told ThePrint.

Sanyal was also integral to identifying one particular artefacts — a 12-century Buddha statue stolen from a museum in Bihar’s Nalanda which was returned by the UK government in 2018.

“It was around 2017-18, when I met former director of Indian Museum, Kolkata, Dr Biswas. He had come to meet me for some other work and we started talking about the issue of stolen idols. Then he presented me with some photographs of some statues stolen in 1961 and 1962 which I passed onto Vijay, who eventually tracked down one statue in the possession of a London-based art dealer,” Sanyal added.

The main markets for these stolen artefacts are primarily the UK, EU, and the US, said Kumar.

(Edited by: Manoj Ramachandran)