1,000-year-old guardian of the Brihadeeswara temple, Shiva Nataraja goes missing from his abode
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Palaniswamy, whose family guarded Brihadeeswara Temple in
Sripuranthan for centuries, lights a lamp at an empty spot now
Reality
ends beyond the cracked mud huts of Sripuranthan, 300 km off Chennai. A
rubble path winds past scraggy cattle and frolicking children, into the
eerie quiet of a tumbled ruin: Brihadeeswara temple. A man-sized stone
warrior guards the doorway, half-sunk in sand. Hundreds of bats whirl
overhead, shrieking at the intrusion. Exposed beams, textured by time
and mould, add to the musty smell in the air. Cobwebs on prayer lamps
enhance the sense of abandonment. The altar is stripped bare, like a
frame without a picture: It's a temple without a god. The 1,000-year-old
guardian of the temple, Shiva Nataraja, is missing from his abode.
But all is not lost
The
Lord of Cosmic Dance has travelled 9,000 km to the National Gallery of
Art (NGA) in Canberra, Australia. How did he get there? Ask Subhash
Kapoor, 65, a New Delhi-born and New York-based antiquity dealer,
considered an art connoisseur as well as one of the biggest idol
smugglers in the world. He sold the Nataraja to NGA for Rs.31 crore in
2008. Ask the men of the Idol Wing, the antiquity theft squad of Tamil
Nadu Police's Economic Offences Wing (EOW.) They will tell you how the
master art thief worked a network of lowlife criminals to loot timeless
treasures and sell them to the highest bidder. Ask the Homeland Security
Investigations (HIS) of America. They accuse Kapoor of stealing over
150 idols worth $100 million from India. The missing god is at the
centre of a curious trial that has just started in a district court in
Tamil Nadu.
It's
the old story of human greed and relentless pursuit of profit. But it's
new in its span, complexity and daring. It blends two vastly different
worlds, art and police intelligence, spanning across continents: India,
Thailand, US, UK and Australia. "Art and antiquity theft is one of the
most lucrative crimes," says IPS officer Prateep V. Philip, currently
additional director general, EOW, in Chennai. "It outbids drug
trafficking, arms dealing, and money laundering." Hence the odds of
recovering stolen treasures are abysmal, one in ten. But in this case,
the Idol Wing has managed to trace eight of the 28 idols stolen from
Sripuranthan and the nearby village of Suthamalli, to various museums
and galleries across the world. The case promises to be one of the most
significant courtroom tests on how to track art and antiquity crimes in
an increasingly networked world. But ultimately it's a searing morality
tale, where arrogance, pride and hubris lead to individual downfall.
A mastermind
Is
there anything unique about Kapoor? Yes, say the officers of EOW: His
right ear is half-bitten. It happened when he was kidnapped as a young
boy. His captors had chewed off half his ear. Anything else? Yes. The
divorcee has left a trail of girlfriends across continents who help him
in fabricating documents. In fact, it is a ditched lover who provided
vital clues to the Interpol.
Police find visual match between the Nataraja stolen from the Sripuranthan temple in Tamil
Nadu (left) and the sculpture displayed at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (right)
Kapoor
possibly learnt his trade from his father. Parshotam Ram Kapoor, who
had a gallery in Delhi which allegedly trafficked in stolen antiquities
sourced from temple thieves of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. "Kapoor,
too, has contacts spanning across India, Pakistan, Afghanistan,
Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Dubai, Cambodia and Bangkok," says
Philip. Kapoor and his family earned a reputation as respectable and
enlightened art collectors in the US. "But that was a front," says
Philip. Kapoor roamed the London and Frankfurt book fairs, bought books,
did his research and then travelled to countries rich with objets
d'art, set up middlemen who could procure those and used a wide network
of collectors, museum curators and dealers to ship and sell his
ill-gotten art with fake documents.
Big man, big money
It's
hard to imagine Kapoor at the district court of Jayankondam. About 270
km away from Chennai, it's a rural outpost that has suddenly spouted
wings on huge lignite deposits, new power, mining and cement factories.
But at its core, it remains a small temple town. No other language but
Tamil works here (no wonder, Kapoor asked for a translator). 'Nidi Turai
Kutravial Naduvar Nidhimandram,' reads a signboard on the judicial
magistate's court, a colonial red brick building with a high ceiling and
slow-spinning fans, crammed with litigants, lawyers, visitors and
touts. Lawyers here often boycott proceedings demanding "better
courtrooms". Clad in crisp blue business shirts, with a white towel
covering his face, Kapoor comes here in a prison bus to attend the
hearings. The only thing he says is that he is innocent: "They have no
case."
Subhash Kapoor was at Frankfurt book fair when interpol detained him.
A
far cry for a man who spent more than 30 years in the tony ZIP codes of
Manhattan, New York. With his flourishing private museum, Art of the
Past, Kapoor hobnobbed with the well-heeled and well-funded, was the
person to drop in on for anything to do with Indian art and was
ever-present at major art dos across the world. He also ran a fine-art
storage business, Sofia Storage, and a lucrative import-export business
of antiquities, Nimbus Import Inc, in New York.
According
to A.G. Pon Manickavel, deputy inspector general and in-charge of the
Idol Wing, Kapoor stayed at the five-star Taj Connemara hotel every time
he visited Chennai and met local art dealers. The network of local
temple thieves was lured with the promise of big money. By his own
confession to the police (later retracted), he had paid $700,000 through
his HSBC Bank account for the 28 idols-nothing compared to what he
earned for them, but big enough to lure the thugs. "The client is a big
man. Stick with us and you will get so rich that you won't have to work
ever," one of the seven local thugs, Marisamy, was told after he handed
over 10 idols and received Rs.25 lakh.
Unsafe for gods
No
one really knows when the temples were looted. No one guessed that the
three-foot, 150 kg Nataraja was one of the finest specimens of Chola
art. Made of metal alloy, pancha loha, with one part gold and the rest
silver, copper, bronze and lead, it didn't just have sacred
significance. It was also immensely precious and expensive.
With
the local priest of Sripuranthan packing up and leaving for Chennai
around the mid-1970s, daily worship had stopped. "About 10 years ago,
there was an attack of visha vanddu, poison bugs," says 35-year-old
Palaniswamy, whose family has watched over the temple for generations.
Villagers followed a tradition of bringing an idol of mother goddess,
Kaliamman, over to the Nataraja temple once every three years to
celebrate harvests. During one such occasion, swarms of highly venomous
giant hornets had attacked villagers. Ever since, the big black door had
stayed shut, the ancient padlock gathering rust. And people forgot
about it, making it extremely easy for professional and knowledgeable
temple thieves to raid and loot.
Daily worship had stopped at the 800-year-old Sundareswara Temple in Suthamalli.
In
nearby Suthamalli, daily worship had stopped at the 800-year-old
Sundareswara temple. With cracked beams and sagging ceiling, about 10
bronze idols were moved to a smaller Vishnu temple, Varadaraja Perumal,
close by. It was guarded by an old village woman, Kalyani amma, who
lived in a little hut next to the temple. She had the keys and wouldn't
let anyone in. But Kalyani left the village suddenly, making the temple
an easy prey for looters.
It happened one night
They
came in the dead of night. Seven men in a lorry-sometimes together,
sometimes in batches. They had come before to do a recce. And they had
no fear of god, they had stolen enough temple treasures. All that
mattered was money and they had been promised a lot by a Keralite art
dealer Sanjeevi Asokan of Chennai, who they trusted and who knew old
temples in and around Tamil Nadu like the back of his hand. He was
looking for antique metal idols of the Chola era for a big client and
had discovered that the Sripuranthan and Suthamalli temples were
crumbling, locked and unused.
According
to the confession reports of two of the temple thieves, Rathinam and
Pitchaimani, one night in January 2006, they parked a lorry on one side
of the wide bed of a dried-up lake near the Nataraja temple, far from
the village. They just pulled at the temple's lock and it came unstuck.
They removed three of the eight idols inside, glued the lock back
together with adhesive and left. Asokan collected those, purchased new,
cheap statues that looked similar and mingled the lot together. He
bribed some customs officials and obtained an export certificate for
what he claimed was a handicraft collection. This was then shipped from
Chennai harbour via Hong Kong and London to Kapoor in New York.
All
was well until June 2008, when officers from the Tamil Nadu Hindu
Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department turned up in
Sripuranthan, suggesting that the idols be taken away for safe storage.
Unwilling to hand over their gods, the panchayat promised to secure the
Lord Nataraja with a collapsible iron gate. In August, as a crowd
gathered for gate installation, the lock was found to be broken and
precious idols missing. The story of looting 18 idols from Suthamalli in
February 2008 is exactly the same. By the time the theft came to light
two months later, when a visiting priest opened its doors, the idols had
already reached Hong Kong.
Ganesha gives a clue
It's
a tiny four-inch Ganesha that in a way solved the case, says DIG Pon.
The intricately carved and uniquely styled Vinayagar with Devi is one of
the rare representations of the god, with mother Parvati sitting on his
lap. According to Pitchaimani's confession, he had found the tiny
figure and put it in his pocket during the Suthamalli raid. When others
objected and threatened to report him to Sanjeevi, he had said, "I don't
care." That proved to be his undoing. While on a trip to Kerala, the
police stopped the car he was in to check if he was smuggling alcohol.
They found the little Vinayagar, suspected antique theft, arrested him,
and alerted the Tamil Nadu Police. Pitchaimani says in his confession
report that ever since he was arrested for the Ganesha, his family faced
great hardship: "My reputation was lost. Nobody would lend us a rupee. I
could not take it anymore." He decided to spill the beans. In the
meantime, the Idol Wing had arrested three men in another case. One of
them, Rathinam, part of the temple heist team, also decided to confess.
And
Kapoor emerged as the mastermind. Accordingly, all the accused were
arrested. Once the Idol Wing collected relevant documents, evidence,
customs bills, courier receipts and bank documents for every
transaction, the CBI floated a Red Corner Notice to the Interpol. Kapoor
was detained at Frankfurt airport in 2011, while attending the book
fair. Since 2012 he has been lodged in judicial custody at the Puzhal
jail in Chennai.
Pictures don't lie
The biggest
weakness of the case was that there was no photographic evidence linking
the idols to the temples. The investigation faced a roadblock because
the HR&CE has no data or documentation and initially claimed that no
theft had taken place. Public memory was also not reliable, as
villagers do not photograph their deities and daily worship had stopped
at both the temples years ago.
Unexpected
help came from the Indologists of the French Institute of Pondicherry
(IFP), which has been documenting temples of South India over the
decades. "We have an almost fully digitised archive of 150,000
photographs, more than half of which are from Tamil Nadu," says N.
Murugesan, researcher of photo archives at IFP. "Our scholars had taken
photographs of both the temples during field trips. When the police
approached us, we could give them clinching photographic evidence, going
as far back as 1958-1961 and as recent as 1994, matching the idols
displayed at NGA as well as images recovered from Kapoor's phone. It's
on the basis of these that the Interpol arraigned Kapoor.
"Criminals
sometimes are over-confident," says Philip. "However smart, they leave
tell-tale evidence." Nobody could have touched Kapoor but for the
footprints he left in court and on the Internet, by engaging in
acrimonious exchanges with a former girlfriend. Paramaspry Punusamy, a
Singapore-based gallery owner, had been dating Kapoor since 1997. Born
to a Tamilian father and a Chinese mother, she used to sell Kapoor's
artefacts. But sometime in 2008, they broke up. And soon, Punusamy began
posting vitriolic messages on museum websites, on chat threads, in blog
posts, questioning his credibility. It ended up in a legal suit at a
Singapore court in 2010, with the two suing each other for millions of
dollars. They just gave investigating agencies- the CBI, HSI and the
Interpol-the leads to trap Kapoor.
Wrath of Shiva
Beware
the wrath of Shiva. The Lord of Sripuranthan is dancing his terrible
cosmic dance, villagers whisper. He won't stop until he returns home.
Nor will he rest until the raiders who sold him are scorched by his
fire. Palaniswamy, who was suspected by the police as an accomplice, is
overjoyed. "I was innocent. So the gods made sure that real thieves were
caught," he says.
Six
of the 28 gods have already been identified in museums and private
collections across the world: Canberra, New South Wales, Chicago, Ohio
to Singapore. The Australian government has ordered NGA to remove the
Nataraja from display. EOW has started a census of the 45,000 temples of
the state. But with the trial on course, the villagers are desperate to
claim their god back. They are raising money to repair the temple.
"When are you bringing him back?" asks a woman casually as she strolls
by, dragging a goat on a string. But will Nataraja want to return to a
nation that allows cobwebs to settle in temples? The outcome of the case
will tell if his wrath has been appeased for now.
