The project had humble origins — an informal effort by S Vijay Kumar, a Singapore-based shipping manager, and other interested art aficionados — to visit temple sites, especially those not well-known, and document the idols and antiquities in his blog. It was during these trips that they realised that several sites had key idols missing, with neither the local custodians nor the law enforcement agencies in the know about these thefts. 

“That was when we started tracking Indian art in auction houses and catalogues and found that many didn’t have personal records. In 2009, we started a campaign on social media, asking people to take a photo of the idol, wherever they went, and send it to us, which were used to create an archive. Whenever we come across a stolen idol, we referred to our material and the offline ones at French Institute Puducherry. That was when we realised the efforts put in by custodians were shallow — sometimes, not even an FIR was filed,” said Vijay. 

For a long time, India Pride Project was run as an informal group, assisting from the background, but it was getting increasingly difficult to build traction within India, especially with governmental agencies. “So, it was in June 2014 that a chance meeting with Anuraag Saxena — an ex investment banker and activist in Singapore — that we came up with the idea of starting India Pride Project. The awareness campaigns have since gained much traction and our #BringOurGodsHome on twitter is sending out the right message,” said Vijay. 

The team has played a key role in tracking several stolen sculptures and helped apprehend art smugglers like Deenadayalan and Subash Kapoor. The effort is crucial since previously due to lack of proper follow-up even major smugglers like Vaman Ghiya have been acquitted due want to evidence. 

“We found that the National Gallery of Australia and Art Gallery of New South Wales had objects from Subash Kapoor’s collection, with questionable provenance — Vriddhachalam Shiva Ardhanari, stolen somewhere between 1994 and 2004. We asked our volunteers to take high resolution pictures and did a bit-by-bit match with the archives by the French Institute before it was stolen. Idol wing launched a complaint, following which Kapoor was brought down — but without restitutions, he would have gotten away like Ghiya. Similarly, the Sripuranthan Nataraja, after our intervention and media campaign, was returned by Australian Premier Tony Abbott,” explained Vijay, adding that based on evidence, US authorities raided Kapoor’s storage facilities there, where 2,622 artefacts valued at 108 million dollars and 35 idols from Tamil Nadu.