TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
which was followed up by the
Indian police, provided the final
piece to a long-running investi-
gation into Kapoor by Bogda-
nos’s office and the U.S. Depart-
ment of Homeland Security.
Kapoor was arrested on an
Interpol warrant in 2011, ac-
cused of trafficking antiquities.
Today, he is still on trial in India,
while more than 1,000 pieces of
South and Southeast Asian art
remain in the custody of the
Manhattan District Attorney’s
Office, which is seeking his extra-
dition to the United States. Ka-
poor has pleaded not guilty.
Since 2011, Kumar has played
a role in U.S. authorities’ seizing
a sandstone sculpture of the Jain
spiritual figure Rishabhanatha
from a Christie’s auction. He has
helped recover a Buddha statuelooted from Nalanda, one of the
oldest centers of Buddhist learn-
ing. In 2016, after his tipster told
him about the bronze stashed in
the London dealer’s backroom,
Kumar launched into one of his
most difficult cases.
He cracked it almost by hap-
penstance. One day in 2018,
Kumar was tracing the prov-
enance of a figurine depicting
the Hindu god Hanuman in a
Singapore museum when he
spotted in his database a 1956
photograph of the same statue
taken by anthropologists in a
Tamil Nadu village called Anan-
da Mangalam. Next to the Hanu-
man stood a Ram bronze that
resembled the one stored in
London, along with two other
deities. They were part of a set,
Kumar realized.
He tipped off the police, and
investigators found local records
showing villagers had indeed
reported four statues pilfered
from the same temple on Nov. 21,- Before long, police in Brit-
ain visited the London gallery,
confirmed the match and
reached an agreement with the
dealer to quietly surrender three
out of the four pieces; the fourth
idol remains in Singapore. The
villagers welcomed the pieces
back on Nov. 21, exactly 43 years
after they disappeared.
That day, residents lit fire-
works, carried the statues in a
two-mile-long procession and
immediately resumed worship-
ing them, recalled Madhavan
Iyer, the temple’s head priest.
“We celebrated grandly,” Iyer
said. “But it’s not complete until
the fourth deity returns. Kumar
has promised it.”
These days, Kumar cannot sit
for long before he is interrupted
by messages and calls from his
sprawling network. As Kumar
planted himself in his cubbyhole,
Madhu, a volunteer who ad-
dressed him as “boss,” called for
advice on whether a village tem-
ple should install surveillance
cameras. Iyer wanted a progress
update on the sculpture in Singa-
pore. Christopher Marinello, a
London-based lawyer who spe-
cializes in recovering lost art,
nudged Kumar over WhatsApp
to discuss the matter of the
dealer in Milan who wanted to
return an ill-gotten bronze —
quietly. Oh, Marinello added, he
had also tracked down another
case in Brussels.
When he wasn’t distracted by
calls, Kumar scrolled through his
laptop. There were ongoing cases
and cracked cases. There were
photos of bronzes and sandstone
sculptures filed in folders upon
folders. There were blurry pho-
tos sent in from tipsters who had
attended private art sales in New
York, showing women in black
dresses and men in polo shirts
clutching their wine glasses,
beaming next to centuries-old
objects of worship.
Kumar rubbed his eyes in
disbelief, or exhaustion.
For all his efforts, he said,
antiquities trafficking was so
pervasive that in absolute terms,
he was not recovering even a
significant fraction.
“But finding one out of 100 can
still be a deterrent,” he said. “It’s
akin to wildlife: When the buy-
ing stops, the looting stops.”
Kavitha Muralidharan contributed to
this report.BY GERRY SHIHchennai, india — On a cool
night in February 2016, S. Vijay
Kumar, amateur art detective,
got a hot tip from an informant.
A student in London reported
that he had glimpsed a bronze
statue in the backroom of an art
gallery in Mayfair, partly visible
behind a door that was left ajar.
The tipster forwarded a smart-
phone photo: It was surrepti-
tiously shot, but clear enough for
Kumar to make out a 14th-centu-
ry statue of the Hindu god Ram,
its left arm gracefully bent sky-
ward, the figure’s provenance
almost certainly questionable.
So began one of the many
cases that Kumar has taken on as
part of a mission he has pursued
for more than a decade: to track
and recover the thousands of
religious idols that have been
looted from Indian temples and
sold to museums and wealthy
collectors via a flourishing inter-
national gray market.
Since 2008, Kumar, 48, has
helped recover nearly 300 an-
tiquities, from exquisite 10th-
century bronzes of dancing Shi-
vas to a hulking 2nd-century B.C.
Buddhist sculpture carved out of
sandstone. He has reclaimed ob-
jects from art dealers in Amster-
dam, private collectors in Lon-
don, and institutions including
the National Gallery of Australia
and the Honolulu Museum of
Art. He says he and Indian
officials are working with the
University of Oxford’s Ash-
molean Museum of Art and Ar-
chaeology on returning a piece
and have discussed with the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York to do the same for a
half-dozen artifacts.
“Because of lax law enforce-
ment, India was always consid-
ered fair game for trafficking
antiquities compared to places
like Italy,” said Kumar, who
works in the shipping business
by day but runs his side opera-
tion — his real passion — out of a
tiny, rented office in Chennai, his
hometown in southern India.
“The difference between In-
dia, Italy or Egypt,” he said, “is
you’re stealing a god that some-
body was literally worshiping
the day before. These are living
gods that we’re trying to bring
home.”
India was one of more than
100 countries that ratified a 1970
United Nations convention that
bans the trafficking of cultural
heritage and requires the restitu-
tion of items that are provably
stolen. That convention and oth-
er laws in various countries give
Kumar the legal grounds to pur-
sue items stolen from India since
the 1970s, and they explain why
he focuses less on large-scale
looting that occurred during In-
dia’s colonial period.
Antiquities have been heavily
trafficked in the modern era. The
market is greased by the push-
and-pull of thieves in poor villag-
es who loot and sell their own
communities’ prized idols — and
by the continuous demand of
wealthy collectors and museums
half a world away.
In the 35 years before 2012,
India recovered fewer than two
dozen stolen pieces, according to
a government audit. But the
number of items recovered has
soared in the past decade, thanks
in part to Kumar’s volunteer
group, called the India Pride
Project, which scholars say is
unique in the scale of its opera-
tion and in its track record.
“When we hear about Indian
cultural objects being returned
by private and public collections,
in fact Vijay’s often the one
behind the scenes,” said Emiline
Smith, an expert at the Univer-
sity of Glasgow on art crime in
South and Southeast Asia. “The
strength of his operation is that
it’s secretive and it’s crowd-
sourced, so no one knows who
his team really is. Is it one guy?
Or is it a hundred?”
In reality, Kumar says, it’s
about 40 people.
The India Pride Project has
volunteers across the world who
scour museums and galleries,
collect and scan auction cata-
logues, and infiltrate private art
showings and buy-and-sell
groups on Facebook. “We’re
lucky there are I.T. guys from
India working in every city,”
Kumar joked.
Whenever he receives new
information about a piece of
Indian art, whether it’s tucked
into a dealer’s backroom or
openly displayed in a museum,
Kumar looks for distinguishing
marks — metal casting imperfec-
tions, chipped bases, nicks and
bruises. Then he runs them
against his most prized tool, a
database of about 10,000 pieces
of temple art that he maintains
on a laptop he carries every-
where. If there’s a match, and
Kumar can prove that the item
was initially stolen, he first in-
forms law enforcement — most
of the time.
In recent years, Kumar has
become so active, and so well-
known in South Asian art circles,
that he is seen as both a blessing
and a potential headache to
some law enforcement officials.
Matthew Bogdanos, a veteran
prosecutor who heads the An-
tiquities Trafficking Unit in the
Manhattan District Attorney’s
Office and has worked with Ku-
mar on several cases, described
him as an “extraordinarily valu-
able asset” who could also be
overzealous with publicly sham-
ing dealers and galleries.
“The bad guys definitely fol-
low him,” Bogdanos said. “We’ve
had investigations where the
museum curator or auction
house sits down and says, ‘Oh,
this is coming from Vijay, right?
We’ve already seen his tweet.’ ”
In the social media era, vigi-
lantes like Kumar can “go public
a little too fast,” Bogdanos said.
“Information and evidence that
might have been available disap-
pears.”
As he was growing up in Tamil
Nadu state, Kumar recalled, his
grandmother nurtured an in-
tense interest in Indian history
after giving him a Tamil-lan-
guage historical fiction series
that narrated the imagined ex-
ploits of the Chola dynasty
founder, Rajaraja the Great.
Kumar studied accounting in
college, then launched into a
career booking vessels for ship-
ping companies in Singapore.
But he spent most of his off-work
hours in online forums, churn-
ing out essays on Indian antiqui-
ties. In 2006, he launched a blog
called Poetry in Stone, likening it
to a “dummy’s guide to temples.”
Soon, Kumar was accumulat-
ing a readership in India and
abroad, and he would organize
week-long tours around India to
visit and document temple art.
“I’m not a religious person,” he
said. “I would show up just to
look at the art but soon realized
so much of it was missing. I said,
‘What’s going on?’ ”
Kumar had his first big break
as an art sleuth in 2011, when he
noticed that items being sold by
the New York art dealer Subhash
Kapoor had been documented,
with photographs, in French
studies of temples in Tamil Nadu
in the 1950s. Kumar’s discovery,Volunteer sleuthssniff out lootedIndian antiquitiesA team of about 40 has helped track down
and return cultural items to their homesGERRY SHIH/THE WASHINGTON POST
TOP: In 2016, S. Vijay Kumar r eceived a tip that would result in the return o f three 13th-century Hindu
statues to a temple in southern India. ABOVE: Kumar heads the India Pride Project, a volunteer group
that seeks to track and recover antiquities stolen from Indian temples. Since 2008, he has helped
recover of hundreds of antiquities from around the globe.S. VIJAY KUMARS0129-3x2.
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