Perpetrators arrested. Idols not found. Case closed. In India, heritage thefts often go unreported for years and even when reported, crime records are closed with vague summaries such as this. The country lacks a central database for documenting heritage losses, making it harder to recover stolen artefacts. For a long while, India did not dedicate enough resources to tracking its looted cultural property, making the country’s art an easy target in markets flooded with unprovenanced artefacts or fake provenance documents.
This issue was highlighted by the comptroller and auditor general’s 2013 performance audit on monuments and antiquities, where it was noted that globally organisations take steps to monitor auction catalogues, post thefts on websites and the international art loss registry, sharing stolen object photographs with dealers, and inform scholars. Meanwhile, in India, hardly any such efforts are made. As a result, artefacts such as King Bhoj’s Saraswati idol now in the British Museum, have been sold or displayed abroad.
Over the past few decades, there have been efforts to build a volunteer-driven network to create a comprehensive archive that documents stolen art. Relying on crowdsourced material such as books, ASI reports, magazine archives and scholarly articles, the archive is data-mined for region, period, dynasty, religious affiliation and stylistic markers to map India’s 5,000-year heritage. The network relies heavily on tech to help with the tracking.
Bots are deployed to scroll Instagram and X accounts for matches to missing artefacts. Leads have even begun streaming in from YouTube. There was an instance of a posh US villa offering ‘for sale listings’ where volunteers spotted Indian idols in gardens and lining swimming pools. Stolen artefacts are found in the homes of the rich and famous, invariably showing up in house party pictures. Here are two cases where tech helped locate stolen artefacts.
The peacock returns
Peacock vahana (vehicle of Lord Murugan) in bronze; dated to 10th century CE (Chola dynasty); dealer involved was Subhash Kapoor; stolen in 2004-2006.
The last official documentation of the idol, conducted by the French Institute of Pondicherry in 1961, placed it at a temple in Suthammalai village of Tamil Nadu. After a theft in 2004-2006, two larger bronzes, Nataraja and Sivakamasundari belonging to this temple, were traced to Subash Kapoor’s gallery Art of the Past’s March 2010 catalogue. After he was indicted, records revealed 17 idols linked to the theft, but one bronze remained unaccounted for — a peacock. Searches of catalogues, advertisements and auction records, along with reverse image searches also did not reveal any matches.
Volunteer idol hunters made a breakthrough in 2014 during a virtual exploration of the address 1242 Madison Avenue, New York, associated with Art of the Past. Using Google 360-degree street view, investigators noticed a bronze peacock vahana displayed in the dealer’s store matching an earlier description in dealer records, which listed the artefact with an offer price of $175,000. Further investigations confirmed that the peacock’s iconometry matched the proportions prescribed in silpa texts for a vahana accompanying Lord Subramanya. The artefact’s solid-cast design supported its connection to the Subramanya set from Suthammalai. But it was absent from known auction catalogues and advertisements, making the street view discovery even more important.
The bronze was later seized during raids on Kapoor’s storage unit in New York. Listed under inventory as ‘Peacock with snake in beak’, it has since been restituted to the Consulate General of India in New York, awaiting repatriation.
Trailing Kubera
Kubera (Hindu god of wealth, depicted as deformed dwarf) in black schist; dated to 14th-15th century CE; stolen in 1996.
In 2022, Unesco, New Delhi hosted a workshop on the protection of cultural property, where the theft of a kubera, and two other idols, from a temple at Deulbaria village in West Bengal in 1996 was mentioned. A history teacher who had surveyed the site for his PhD thesis in 1995 had partially documented the artefacts. Investigators sourced the thesis, which provided a partial photograph. Data mining led to pre-theft in situ images from ASI reports of 1930-1934.
Despite these findings, no matching references for the idols showed up on Google image references and keyword searches with auction house listings or dealers’ catalogues. Investigators used Google street view to virtually explore known art dealers’ locations in the US, which revealed the idol at a dealer’s premises. The dealer’s private catalogue confirmed its listing, while provenance checks with Sotheby’s corroborated its identity. The evidence was relayed to law enforcement in India and the US. The dealer had to return the idol.
I was among the investigators in the cases of the vahana and kubera. A few months after the seizure of the kubera idol, I visited the temple and met the priest there. Inside, I saw a replica of the idol, a photograph of the original taped to the wall. When I informed the priest that the idol had been located and seized, he broke down and begged us to find the two other idols. It is moments like this that are the reason we will never stop in the fight to bring gods back home.
(The writer is founder of India Pride Project citizens initiative that tracks down stolen art worldwide)