The sleuths bringing back India’s stolen treasures

The Koh-i-Noor, first found in written records in 1628, has long been the subject of acrimony between India and its former coloniser, with a persistent demand by the Indian government and its citizens for its return. As this piece in India’s Mint newspaper explains bluntly, “The main controversy around the diamond is that the British give an impression to its younger generation that the Koh-i-Noor was a gift from India and make no official mention of the violent history behind acquiring it.”

The renewed uproar about the Koh-i-Noor has also led to intensifying questioning of all the other resources – not just the sparkly stones –  taken away from the Global South by western powers over centuries of trading and ruling. “Wear the diamond, give back the rest,” suggests this op-ed piece in The Indian Express.

Among the “rest” are priceless cultural artefacts – and this is what the India Pride Project concerns itself with. This citizen movement for the restitution of stolen and smuggled antiques (particularly statues) from public museums and private collectors across the world was started in 2013 by shipping executive S Vijay Kumar and public policy expert Anuraag Saxena from Singapore, although Kumar had already spent a decade helping to recover artefacts.

These sleuths, with the help of a small, anonymous global team of volunteers from various fields – who communicate mostly online – have brought back to India several millions worth of antiquities from countries like Australia, Singapore, Germany, UK and the US. Most recently, they made the news when their efforts aided the investigation that prompted the National Gallery of Australia to return antiques worth $2.2 million – stolen by art smuggler Subash Kapoor – to the Indian government. Their targets include both artefacts taken forcibly out of India during the British colonial era, and those more recently stolen and smuggled from temples and public collections.

How they go about their work

Kumar, who is now based in Chennai in south India, and Saxena, who remains in Singapore, talk with ease about field trips to document missing idols and sting operations with auction houses. While the information about missing antiquities has always existed, what was lacking was official will to push for their return, they say. Kumar puts things in perspective: between 1970 to 2012, the Indian government managed to bring back 19 artefacts, while it has restituted 600 in just the last 10 years (with their help).

This is not to suggest they are some kind of gung-ho art vigilante group, given the amount of plodding through paperwork and complex negotiation work they do. Their work involves advocacy, activism and coordinating between governments and law enforcement agencies such as Customs, Europol and Homeland Security within India and outside. Kumar says, “In the past when they reached out to India, nobody replied, so now we are doing that job.”

“India Pride project is more of a network than an organisation – we have no money, no employees and no authority,” admits Saxena candidly, even a tad proudly. The entirely volunteer team monitors and flags suspicious objects by following paper trails and making personal visits to auction houses, art galleries and museums, and then liaises with official agencies to make the case for repatriation.

Art expert and former Egyptologist at the British Museum, Lewis McNaught, who now runs Returning Heritage, an online resource about cultural restitution, thinks the IPP model of citizen activism is intriguing. “They go out and actively source information using a social network of supporters. And only when they are able to confirm that the object has been stolen, do they approach the government, which in turn applies pressure on the museum or other governments where the object is being held.”

There has been an established pattern of theft and trafficking of valuable art and artefacts from poorer countries in Asia and Africa to richer nations in the West – either directly by colonising forces or in more recent times, through a sophisticated network of smugglers. In his book The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (and in various other places), writer and historian William Dalrymple has called out the looting of thousands of priceless objects from India to Britain by the employees of the trading East India Company. “The Company’s conquest of India almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history,” he writes.

Long after the colonisers have retired, there still remains a flourishing multi-billion-dollar black market in stolen antiquities. Serendipitous discovery is rare, such as this story from the 2018 Met Gala when Kim Kardashian took a photo in her sparkling gold gown twinning with a resplendent golden mummy. The photo drew attention to, well, the mummy, which was then detected to have been smuggled out of Egypt unnoticed in the chaos of the 2011 Arab Spring, making its way into New York’s august Metropolitan Museum of Art. The ensuing media outcry forced the Met – which had paid $4 million for fake documents – to return said mummy to Egypt.

And before anyone feels too sorry for this museum’s loss, it is important to know that despite the 1970 Unesco Convention aimed at ending the illicit trade of antiquities, museums including big ones like the Met and The British Museum (the largest receiver of stolen goods, some say) have continued to buy from art thieves such as the now-convicted Subhash Kapoor. Kumar, who has written about his long pursuit of Kapoor in his book The Idol Thief, says this is simply because of the standard market economics of supply and demand. In a 2020 piece for the New Indian Express entitled: “When the buying by museums stops, the looting stops”, Kumar called out museums for turning a blind eye to the origins of coveted antiquities.

Acquiring antiquities has long been a competitive sport among major museums, with respected names like Thomas Hoving, the late Met Director and “treasure hunter” leading the pack. He is said to have boasted of his “piracy” style of art collection and wrote about his long list of “smugglers and fixers” in his 1994 memoir. Kumar says that even years after Kapoor has been caught, idols and statues connected to him continue to show up at art galleries and curio shops.

Given the huge demand for antiquities, there is a constant supply of illegally-traded objects from countries like India, abetted by a combination of poor documentation and governmental apathy. Kumar says with firm conviction, “We’re losing at least 1000 high value objects every year.” Then there is the string of complicit insiders at every step, passing on valuable artefacts from temples, archaeological sites and even minor museums.

The debate around restitution

In general, it has been easier for IPP to track and recover recently trafficked and smuggled artefacts than the spoils of colonial pillaging. That’s in part because of the ongoing debate about the ethical necessity of returning those spoils at all. Museums around the world are facing increasing pressure from citizen groups like the IPP, Returning Heritage and Art Recovery, but the narrative they often sell is that these precious antiquities deserve to enjoy global attention while staying safe in secured museums. A recent New York Times article summed up the colonial age thinking that continues around restitution, suggesting that “in America, critics of the surge in returns worry that museum collections built over time by scholars and imbued by a sense of context are being randomly depleted. Should US audiences, they ask, be deprived access to iconic objects that they suggest belong, not to individual nations, but to humankind?”.

The fundamental flaw in this argument is that many of these artefacts are not art pieces to be “enjoyed” but sacred objects cherished and worshiped through generations before they are snatched away. Saxena explains that they are potentially symbols of faith and identity to communities, and have cultural and emotional significance: “These idols are lovingly clothed and bathed, and believed to be the living embodiment of a larger energy.”

Kumar, an expert on Chola bronzes from South India, adds, “I find it insulting that the idols of gods, which in Tamil we call thirumeni, or the divine body, are openly auctioned at cocktail parties and end up in private bedrooms and gardens.” Both Kumar and Saxena describe joyous instances where stolen idols were brought back to India and ceremoniously reinstated at their original temples.

McNaught affirms that “the most sought-after items tend to be those with enormous religious significance, or of great value to the history, culture and character of a nation.” He refers to other examples, such as Nigeria’s controversial Benin Bronzes, and Ethiopian Tabots (sacred plaques of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church taken by British forces in 1868), saying, “I think they have a justification for saying we want that object back.”

And there is simply no acknowledgement that much of this looted art is tainted by the atrocities of colonialism, Kumar says, “In Cambodia, the returns are easier because it’s linked to blood antiquities, the Khmer Rouge. It’s like Holocaust art – in Europe, no museum wants to touch that. But colonialism has not reached that stage yet.”

Dalrymple, who co-authored a book on the Koh-i-Noor with Anita Anand, has also criticised this disparity. “If you ask anybody what should happen to Jewish art stolen by the Nazis, everyone would say of course they’ve got to be given back to their owners. And yet we’ve come to not say the same thing about Indian loot taken hundreds of years earlier, also at the point of a gun,” he told the Smithsonian magazine in 2017.

When direct pressure fails to make an impact (as it often does, given IPP’s persona non grata status), they occasionally resort to unconventional tactics. A few years ago, a group of young IPP volunteer British Indians went into London museums armed with small printed cards that they placed next to objects of interest as speech bubbles that read, “I was taken from India” and “Help, the Brits have kidnapped me” and so on. This non-violent protest understandably went viral, forcing authorities to the negotiation table.

One of IPP’s preferred hashtags on social media may be #BringBackOurGods, but Kumar claims to have no religious or political motivations with IPP. He affirms that they have recovered symbols of various religions, and been openly critical of government agencies. The IPP model has been an inspiration for India’s neighbouring countries, with both Sri Lanka and Nepal starting similar projects focused on cultural restitution.

All the India Pride project wants to do, says Kumar, is to restore India’s pride, one antiquity at a time. For, as Saxena is fond of saying, “History belongs to its geography”.

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