People associate antiquities with Egypt, Greece and Rome

I'm hoping to work on what sort of global market there is for stolen sacred art and what component of this constitutes Indian works. I can't be sure as there has not been a lot of work done on the market *right now* for such pieces. This is something I am hoping to work on in coming years. Historically at least, the market has been large. One only need look at Western 'Asian Art' museums or the Asian collections in international museums to see this. Indian art is almost always a major component of these collections.

My colleagues Simon Mackenzie and Tess Davis produced one of the first Criminological trafficking network analyses for Asia (and, well, anywhere) specifically looking at Hindu sculptures coming out of Cambodia.

When it comes to India, there is not a lot of academic work on this front (again, something that I am hoping to work on very soon), but the work of people like V J Kumar and Jason Felch on the Subhash Kapoor case, specifically exposing how some of his more prominent stolen objects moved is extremely useful. I think the information being exposed here, even if it is at the extreme high end of the market, is a good starting point. I do caution that this is the highest end of the market. The theft, trafficking, and sale of smaller pieces may look very different.

Why has the theft of sacred art been neglected for so long? I don't know! I am surprised. I used to work primarily in Latin America and over the past few years the rate of theft of sacred objects from Churches seems to have gone up without much notice of it. For example, the Virgin of Copacabana, Bolivia's patron saint and the holiest site in the country was robbed and few people said anything outside of Bolivia. I wondered, who buys the crown of the Virgin of Copacabana? This lead me to look for "hot spots", places where Sacred Art is being robbed right now and thus India has come up. If you monitor just the English language the Indian press, there seems to be more or less one idol theft every week, sometimes more. And that is just what makes it to print. That is quite a lot.

One issue may be that when people in the West (and thus the people in many antiquities market countries) think about 'antiquities trafficking', they think of Greece, Rome, and Egypt. I think that this has always been an issue when it comes to the appreciation and understanding of art and archaeology from "non Western" settings. Ancient Latin America, for example, has been dismissed on the Art Market as "Primitive" and "Tribal" art, despite being produced by vast complex situations. Indian objects, in the West and on the art market, are less viewed as "antiquities" and more viewed as art objects which is quite dismissive of context and meaning. Not to go too far into details, but this may mean that when museums, collectors, and other antiquities buyers were trying to 'clean up their act' and started to be more careful about buying looted antiquities, they simply didn't see Indian objects as antiquities, even when they were ancient... Maybe. I can't say for sure, that is just a working hypothesis at the moment.

I think the protection laws are as good in India as they are anywhere. Of course laws need to be tested, evaluated, and reformed, but I don't think they are the real issue. One of the main security issues when it comes to Indian sacred art (and this is very similar to Latin American churches I should say), is that it must be accessible for it to be used. If you take an idol out of a temple that is open to the public, it cannot be used by the community as it should be. You lock it in a museum, you remove the very devotional aspects, the very function of the idol. Think of all the small public shrines and open temples in India, how do you secure those while still allowing people to worship? It is a daunting task. I'm not even sure it is possible. A motivated thief will be able to find a way to take such things.

Thus the issue is the market. The people out there who are absolutely willing to buy sacred art, no questions asked, no matter where it came from. If there was no demand for such things, the things wouldn't be stolen.

An important issue: resources. A country can have the strongest law in the world, but that is meaningless if it can't enforce it. Underfunded police and customs naturally will consider antiquities crimes to be less important than, say, murders or something like that and I don't blame them. Some states in India seem to take idol theft rather seriously. That Tamil Nadu has an Idol Wing in their Economic Offenses Wing of the Police department, for example, is a very good sign. They have a website, too, which is an essentially free way to raise awareness of the issue

The single most important reason that allows for the theft of a country's sacred traditional art is the accessibility of the art, that the art is there, touchable, on the street, in open temples and shrines. Of course, there is no getting around that, it MUST be accessibility. It is a Catch-22.

India is moving to legalising the export of antiquities. When I saw that I nearly spit my coffee out onto the floor in surprise. It is the single worst thing that India could do. That is like saying "I am going to reduce the number of murder convictions in the country by legalising murder". It is changing the law to accommodate criminals rather than exploring new, effective ways for protecting Indian heritage. There is a LOT of academic research stretching back decades that shows that no open antiquities market works. A good example is Morag Kersel's work in Isreal which, technically, allows the sale of some antiquities. Dr Kersel found significant law breaking and deception within this so-called legal market.

I do caution that I have not seen any specifics about this plan. Maybe there aren't specifics. My opinion might change when such information is released.

I would challenge the lawmakers calling for this to tell us which country's system they are modeling this on. I would also challenge them to speak with experts on this issue before they went rushing to change things. My colleagues and I have been conducting research on international policy regarding antiquities for decades and this suggestion goes against everything that we've found. I ask, if Indian authorities are having so much trouble simply preventing antiquities from being smuggled out of the country (in other words, having so much trouble preventing a black market), how will they implement a complicated, regulated system of export complete with permits and so on? That doesn't seem realistic.

The author is Lecturer in Antiquities Trafficking and Art Crime, University of Glasgow.