The India Pride Project is looking to get smuggled art worth billions back to the country

You shouldnrsquot be fooled when Vijay Kumar and Anuraag Saxena jovially call themselves overweight middleaged versions of James Bond The Singaporebased NRIs are currently in India travelling from New Delhi to Bengaluru and Chennai and just because they tickle your funny bone it doesnrsquot mean you can take them lightly Last year Saxena spoke at a convention in Mumbai it was the first time he was talking about a secret project thatrsquos bringing back Indian heritageIndian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks with his Australian counterpart Tony Abbott flanked by the Nataraja idol and the Ardhanariswara statue prior to a delegation level meeting in New Delhi on September 5 2014 PICAFP India Pride Project founded in 2013 is a citizensrsquo group behind some key heritage repatriations in the recent past One that public memory will recall is the handing over of an 11th century Chola statue of a dancing Shiva by the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott to Narendra Modi in September 2014 The idol called the Sripuranthan Nataraja was among Indiarsquos antiquities peddled by the now infamous New Yorkbased art dealer Subhash Kapoor who faces trial in Chennai for allegedly running an international art smuggling racket worth 100 millionA 900yearold Jina sculpture from Mount Abu is thought to have been illegally sold to an Australian museumTracing lost heritageThere is a strong recall of an Indiana Jones or Tintin adventure when Kumar and Saxena speak of these heists but the duo would rather skip the aura and talk about chori ka maal stolen goods Vijay and I lived outside India for a relatively longish time and we were bowled over by the pride other nations have in their heritage And some of these arenrsquot even as ancient as India We thought about what heritage meant to communities in real India mdash in villages a temple or a banyan tree has so much significance mdash that we decided to do something says Saxena who works as AsiaPacific CEO for the World Education Foundation UK Every decade India loses about 20000 objects to an organised international network of politicians bankers and smugglers If one village loses its deity it affects the whole nation he addsAnuraag SaxenaIndian art is sitting in various museums and we have to study their documents and provenances carefully The same goes for auction data says Kumar who works as a general manager in a shipping company His blog wwwpoetryinstonein became the stumbling ground for discovering fake modern replicas of antiquitiesVijay KumarIn 2006 a curiositystricken Kumar was studying the image of the Ardhnari Shiva and was led to a stone sculpture in the Sri Virudhagireeswarar Temple in Vriddhachalam Tamil Nadu The Chola sculpture thought of as made between 9th and 10th centuries CE was estimated at 3 million in 2004 The French Institute of Pondicherry had records dating back to 1958 and Douglas Barrett former keeper of Indian art at the British Museum had photographed the halfmanhalfwoman sculpture To Kumarrsquos surprise the present statue at the temple looked nothing like the one in the records The missing arms had reappeared and the sculpturersquos curves were sharper Reaching out to friends Kumar discovered that the original statue had left Indian shores passed hands through smugglers and somehow ended up at the Art Gallery of New South Wales Australia The culprit was Shubhash Kapoor againIndia needs to step upFollowing the discovery of their slipup the Art Gallery took the display off and the Australian Ministry of External Affairs sought to return the sculpture to the Indian government Australia was publicly shamed and took immediate steps But India was slow in following this up and it was a good six months before the repatriation took place says KumarAt this point we go from being James Bond to Devdas Other countries are more helpful in returning art than India is in claim what is rightfully ours says Saxena Both evoke a 2013 report by the Comptroller and Auditor General CAG to the Archeological Survey of India ASI which states There is a need for a more concerted approach for retrieval of Indian art objects stolen or illegally exported to other countries The ASI as the nodal agency for this purpose needs to be more proactive and vigilant in its efforts The reprimand and India Pride Projectrsquos roadshow are welltimed In the last 40 years for instance the ASI has seen through only 13 repatriations Compare this with the UNESCOrsquos 2011 estimate that 50000 idols and artefacts were stolen out of India till 1989 a number which could have trebled by nowIndia Pride Projectrsquos focus is not on the colonial plunder of the subcontinentrsquos artistic and cultural wealth but on artefacts that disappeared after the UNESCO convention prohibiting the trafficking of cultural property What about the KohiNoor you ask Not now would be India Pride Projectrsquos answerSaxena encourages the ASI to join hands with citizensrsquo initiatives and experts to hasten repatriations We need a police heritage wing When a constable cannot do what the cyber crime cell can why do we not have the same focus for antiquities he urgesIndia Pride Projectrsquos roadshow has been sloganeering on social media with the hashtag Bring Our Gods Home In the current sociopolitical climate perhaps gods should be kept out the picture Saxenarsquos response is clear We have traced heritage artefacts from Islam Buddhism and Christianity across the world This is not Hindu Pride Project