Meet the art sleuths bringing India's stolen heritage home

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi returned from his foreign travels on Friday, in his luggage was a consignment of 200 antiquities, including a beautiful 1,000-year-old Ganesha bronze, that the US government handed over to him. What few know that is behind the goodwill gestures and photo-ops highlighting cultural cooperation is a group of very committed idol chasers who helped investigative agencies in the US crack the cases of stolen antiquities.

In March, when special agents in the US seized two stolen Indian artefacts -a sandstone stele of Rishabhanata and a panel with Revanta and his entourage -from an auction in New York as part of the ongoing decade-long Operation Hidden Idol, among the first to identify the 10th century Rishabhanata was Vijay Kumar, an accountant working for a shipping company in Singapore.

Kumar has been photographing and documenting Indian antiquities for the past 12 years, trying in his own way to prevent their theft and ensure the return of stolen artefacts to India. In 2014, he and fellow heritage lover and art enthusiast Anuraag Saxena began the India Pride Project (IPP) to "restore the nation's pride through restoring its culture".


(US Attorney General Lorreta Lynch and PM Minister Narendra Modi look at the
Khajuraho statue, 12th century, during a ceremony
marking the repatriation of over 200 artifacts to the Indian government)



IPP began with 20 members and has since grown to 4,000, including researchers, art-loversturned-private-investigators, bloggers, freelance photographers and journalists. It is managed by a core team of 40 people.

Except for Kumar and Saxena, the rest have chosen to stay anonymous, providing expertise and inside information to the group. "Our members are heritage enthusiasts, scholars, archaeologists... many help but want to keep their identity private," says Kumar, who grew up in Chennai and was drawn to heritage conservation after reading 'Ponniyin Selvan', a Tamil historical novel based in the Chola period. "My whole sense of cultural pride comes from the book," he says.

IPP helps track and restore stolen artefacts by contradicting the provenance that museums are provided by not-so-legitimate art dealers. Volunteers use photographs of the artefact in its original site from the IPP database or from archives to prove that it was stolen. For example, in the case of a Nataraja idol that Australia returned to India in September 2014, IPP volunteers matched photographs taken by the French Institute Pondicherry (IFP) in November 1994, frameby-frame, to prove that the idol on display at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) was stolen from Sripuranthan in Tamil Nadu.

Saxena, a banker-turned-education executive who is also based in Singapore, says IPP depends on a network of volunteers. "We are spread across the world and are from various background and professions. It is very normal for a volunteer who is a CEO in Singapore to work with another who runs a cloth-shop in a small village in Tamil Nadu," he says.

IPP also scans catalogues of art galleries to track down looted antiquities. Kumar used a print cata logue from in ternational art thief Subhash Kapoor's Art of the Past gallery to match a stat ue of Uma Parameshwari in Singapore's Asian Civilizations Museum with a photograph of a stolen idol from Ariyalur that the Tamil Nadu police's idol wing released.

It's a long, slow process to prove that the idols were stolen and then get them back. The latest seizures in New York came after three years of work, while proving that the Uma Parameshwari statue was the same one stolen from Ariyalur took five years with valuable time being lost mostly due to red tape in India, explains Kumar.

Kumar began photographing temple architecture and idols in Tamil Nadu as a hobby . These photographs have become a part of the database IPP volunteers are building to compensate for the lack of an official database. "We do documenting missions twice a year for two weeks," he says.

Besides field work, IPP also uses social media, encouraging members and volunteers to contribute photos to its archive.

After the arrest of Kapoor and his deportation to India in 2012, Kumar reached out to Jason Felch, an investigative journalist based in the US, who published a story about objects smuggled by Kapoor on display at NGA. "Vijay immediately began supplying me with detailed information about other objects in the NGA's collection and possible links to objects stolen from Indian temples," Felch told TOI in an email interview. "Soon, we developed a collaborative relationship with journalists in Australia and India, each of us working our sources and sharing information to advance the story ."

While Kumar leads research and analysis, Saxena handles coordination with government agencies and the media.

But Saxena does not want IPP to be seen as police informers."People are interested in the whodunit stuff, and we are often seen as khabris (informers). But our work is more than that," he says.

IPP's website has detailed information about how it helped to identify the Sripuranthan Nataraja, Vriddhachalam Shiva Ardhanari and sandstone Yakshi seized from Kapoor's warehouse in the US, a bronze Ganesha in Toledo Museum, and the Uma Parameshwari statue in Singapore. Vijay says they are currently tracking more 4,000 antiquities.

It's work that has gained them the respect of enforcement agencies around the world. US Homeland Security Investigations special agent Brenton Easter told TOI: "They have been helpful as have other academics and institutions, like the French Institute of Pondicherry . Without the record keeping and image recognitions done by these individuals and entities many of our recoveries would take much longer."