The heritage warriors

By day, Vijay Kumar and Anuraag Saxena are regular successful NRI professionals – the former, a senior executive in a shipping company in Singapore, and the latter, a special advisor with British school-rating agency World Education Foundation. By night, however, they turn into gritty sleuths investigating stolen Indian antiquities.

The India Pride Project (IPP), as they call their endeavour, has been trying to uncover the sophisticated network of thieves who remove a statue, manuscript or map from a temple, library or archive in India, smuggle it out of the country and ensure its sale to a collector, a gallery, museum or an auction house in the west. The duo liaises with authorities in various countries to recover and, hopefully, send them back to India.

IPP, which has been around for five years, has had astonishing successes, considering the Indian government's failure in this regard.

"The raid on Christie's Asia Art Week this March was our handiwork," reveals Kumar. "We worked with US law enforcement agencies on the six major coordinated raids over a week, which led to the seizure of two Indian antiques." These were a 10th century sandstone stele of Rishabhanata valued at $100,000-$150,000 and an 8th century sandstone panel of Revanta and his entourage, estimated at $200,000-$300,000.

For Kumar, it was the culmination of a decade-long search. He had found "robber photos" – images taken shortly after a theft to send to potential buyers – of the sculptures and tracked it to a sale in London in 2006. "But we missed it," says Kumar. This time, when he chanced on an image of the sculptures in the Christie's auction catalogue, he got in touch with US authorities who followed up on the lead.

IPP, says Kumar, also had a hand in the two statues "gifted" by Australian prime minister Tony Abbott in 2014 – a 10th century Chola bronze of Nataraja and a 9th century stone statue of Ardhanareeshwara. The IPP also helped establish that a 10th century Chola bronze of Ganesha at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio was stolen from the Brihadeeshwara temple in Tamil Nadu, and another bronze of the goddess Uma in the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, was from a temple in Ariyalur district in the state.

Kumar and Saxena claim to have a list of 250 stolen artefacts in museums or with collectors, part of which they've passed on to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).

Kumar says he's always been interested in temple art. "I come from a small village near Kollathur (in Tamil Nadu); my great-grandfather had built temples. I used to go around taking photographs of temple art and had built a huge collection. Friends told me that I should talk about it and so I started a blog, a sort of dummy's guide to Indian art."

That was 10 years ago. The blog, Poetry in Stone, is a popular one, with lucid, informative discussions on iconography, aesthetics and illicit trade in antiquities. The blog's global reach meant that it had off-line volunteers and followers in countries across the world who supplemented its database with photographs and information on Indian art objects in museums across the world.

"We have comprehensively documented 150 sites in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and a couple of sites in Madhya Pradesh and Orissa," Kumar says. All of this tied in neatly with IPP's detective efforts, he explains, since "it had the source data to match images of antiques that come up for sale in an auction, or in museums, with those in temples."

In recent years, the IPP has become sufficiently known for law enforcement agencies appealing to them directly for help with investigations.

When a 2,600 year old statue of Mahavira was stolen from a temple in Bihar's Jamui district in November last year, the Bihar police dialled IPP.

"We asked for a copy of the FIR and an image of the idol and put it up on social media. That simple act made the artefact unsaleable – no museum or collector in the world will touch something that is proven to be stolen. In a week, the statue was found in a ditch along the highway where the robbers had dumped it," says Saxena, whose concern for Indian heritage began when he was studying in the US. He was struck to find how much care that country took of its historical objects and sites.

"People perceive India as being a no consequence zone. You go to an art dealer in London and he'll tell you, 'Yeh India ka hi maal hai, le lo. Mein guarantee de sakta hoon ke kuch nahi hoga.' That's because no one has ever gone to jail in India over heritage theft. We don't have a dedicated squad for art theft; the Italians, in contrast, have a 3,000-strong force called the Carabineiri. Even a small country like Vietnam has one. Besides, art crimes have deep connections with money laundering, terrorism, drug and human trafficking," he says.

Kumar adds, "India has been losing an estimated 10,000 pieces of art every decade. It's about time the government took a tough stand on this. Catalogue every piece of art – statues, maps, manuscripts, paintings – that we have in our palaces, museums, temples." Is anyone in the government listening?