A Piece Of India’s Heritage Is Now Stuck In Australia

The murky world of illegal trade in antiquities has been dealt a body blow by the events of the last few years due to growing global activism, as nations have become increasingly aware of their rights and striven to enforce their laws. Now more than ever, museums and dealers are no longer able to hide behind the opaque walls of history and have started to atone for their past blunders of due diligence.

India has been a bit slow on riding this tide and has contented itself with a few token high profile idol returns. Today, we see another example of this tokenism in Australia. We had shown last year how tokenism dents the efforts of even the few who champion this cause; of the case of abandoned artefacts in Australia despite damning evidence to show that they were illicitly removed from India and sold with patently fake provenances.

The media outrage that followed our exposes forced an independent review of the National Gallery of Australia’s (NGA) collections. The review was made public recently and, unsurprisingly, received poor coverage in the Indian media. Every object and evidence that we laid in public domain has been accepted and our stance was vindicated, but that is not the subject of this post. The expose that we present today is of an artefact that surprisingly doesn’t feature in the NGA’s review.

The NGA review goes to great lengths to set the timelines for collecting artefacts, with specific reference to the UN statute. The report says, “The significance of the 1971 date is that the following year India passed the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act 1972, which prohibited export of antiquities from India except by the Indian Government or an authorised agent of the Indian Government.”

This so called ‘1970/1971 cut off’ as per the UN statute – Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, signed in Paris on 14 November 1970 and which was ratified by India only on 24 January 1977 – is not accepted by many scholars as a legal cutoff whereby the ownership of any object acquired prior to 1970, by any means whatsoever, is sacrosanct and outside the purview of international law.

Further, The Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972 is to be read in addition to, and not in derogation of, the provisions of the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act, 1904, the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958, the Indian Treasure Trove Act of 1878 and other laws in force in India. This is important as in the case of Sivapuram Nataraja, the actual theft happened in 1956. It is another matter that India agreed for an out of court settlement (a decision which still baffles scholars) for the Nataraja and has not pursued the rest of the stolen bronzes.

Pertinent also is the statement of the NGA review which says, “It has been described as ‘a sad irony’ that, on its well-published return to Tamil Nadu in 1991, the Pathar Shiva finished up in a concrete vault, safe from local art thieves, but virtually unworshipped and inaccessible to the public.” The reference is to the Pathur Nataraja and not the Pathar. It is ironical that this is being put forth as a veiled argument for holding on to stolen loot. The main reason for this is the lavish amounts spent by museums and collectors in buying stolen objects that cannot be protected in their source countries.

Further, Pathur Nataraja was actually found as part of a buried hoard and was not stolen from an actual temple as in the case of the Sripuranthan Nataraja Idol which the NGA recently returned to India.

We now come to the main expose – the Standing Sambandar was acquired in 1989 by the NGA and till December 2015, no provenance information was available. Their website has since been updated as below:

The art dealer William Wolff passed away in 1991 – that is, 2 years after the NGA’s purchase – having closed his antiquities business in 1990.

This is what the Los Angeles Times says about Wolff’s collecting ethics:

So we find it hard to understand why this ‘new’ information has not found mention in the NGA review.

The French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP) released the book Shadows of the Gods, officially launched by the French and Indian premiers in New Delhi, this month. The book has an entire page acknowledging the role of private investigators in combating heritage crime. A copy of the book reached us last week and a casual glance was enough to find the Standing Sambandar. The NGA’s Sambandar is a perfect match to the Sirkazhi Sayavanam bronze. The IFP recorded this from the temple in the year 1958.

What is interesting is what has been left unsaid. While the IFP’s comment on the bronze statue read, “Status: Traced. Not yet confirmed”, the NGA’s website says, “The French Institute of Pondicherry holds an archive photograph taken in 1958 that closely resembles this sculpture. The significance of this is being investigated.” The NGA thus leaves out any reference to the temple’s name etc.

It is not difficult for hardened investigators, who track every Indian artefact that is overseas, to make the match in minutes.

Now let’s look at this case holistically, comparing it with the Nataraja that was returned by Australia. The Nataraja too had a pre-1971 provenance. The dealer Subhash Kapoor has since been arrested and is under trial. In fact, every object in the Kapoor case the world over has a pre-1970 fake provenance. The art world is well aware of this ‘pre-1970’ ruse and William H Wolff was no saint either. The bronze was in situ, that is, under worship in a living temple in 1958 in the town of Sirkazhi – the Sayavanam temple.

A more logical approach would have been to make all information public and seek the support of the Sirkazhi public, the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious & Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department and Adheenams, to see if there are any reports of thefts from the Sayavanam temple post 1958, and work on returning the saint to India at the earliest, instead of creating layers and veils which, in today’s circumstances, are at best counterproductive.