The Idol Thief

by Kumar

a team of HR&CE department officials went to the Sripuranthan temple intending to shift the idols to an icon centre. ‘But the villages restrained their process and promised to safeguard the idols by providing a new grille gate. After the grille gate was ready, on 18.08.2008, HR&CE officers, local police and the villagers tried to open the lock and found the lock was broken. Idols were stolen away.’5 This means that when the officials visited the temple in June 2008 they didn’t even open the temple to see if everything was all right. Instead a grill door was commissioned to protect the eleventh-century idols that had already been exported to the US two years earlier!

These were The Chola Temples series by S.R. Balasubrahmanyam, Early Cola Bronzes by Douglas Barrett and Bronzes of South India by P.R. Srinivasan.

Alternatively, they would approach the regional Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) office, show them the same photographs of the replicas, as well as the replicas themselves, and secure a non-antiquity certificate. It helped that the exporter was required to bring the items to the ASI office for inspection, rather than the ASI official inspecting them at the time of shipping. A certificate, valid for 180 days, to export would then be given. In the deliberately undervalued export consignment, the genuine antique would, once again, be shipped off along with the replicas.

What they didn’t know was that even buried idols legally belong to the government thanks to the Indian Treasure Trove Act of 1878. You cannot walk home with them!

Fencing means disguising the stolen nature of an object by keeping it hidden from the public eye until the search for it becomes a vague memory, and also by adding middlemen in the journey of the object from the thieves to the final buyer.

The full information of all the seizures and the first official photos were released on the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement website thereafter. There were raids in a total of six locations. Overall 2622 items were recovered, valued in Kapoor’s books (mostly on 2006–09 costs) at a whopping $107,682,000! As mentioned earlier, this was just his holding stock or inventory in known storage locations. Kapoor had been in business for thirty-five years. You do the maths on what the lifetime value of the loot would add up to. Jason put this figure in perspective for the shocked art world. He wrote in 2012, ‘The FBI’s art squad has seized a total of $150 million in art since its inception in 2004.’ In the Kapoor case, $100 million of art was recovered in just a few months.1