Why trafficking antiquities should be deemed a crime against humanity

For very obvious reasons, the fact that in 2022 US authorities confiscated 29 antiquities from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art collection—from ancient India, Italy, Greece and Egypt—has not been very widely publicised. After all, it would eliminate the moral high ground that western museums and collectors take of ‘preserving’ ancient treasures, implying these are better off in their vaunted premises and vaults than in their countries of origin. So the news last week that the Met will return 15 more such illegally acquired antiquities to India should be responded to with a robust “About time” riposte rather than a polite “Thank you” for this belated display of conscience. The myth that those antiquities are acquired works of ‘art’ rather than stolen objects of veneration has been allowed to persist for far too long. There is no legal method by which at least Indian antiquities could have been acquired and/or sold. It is also not surprising that it took a New York Supreme Court order on 23 March 2023 to seize ‘stolen property’ for the Met to generously announce a week later its intention to return 15 Indian artefacts. The release of the results of an in-depth probe by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and its media partners into the role of shady antiquities traffickers in the acquisitions by the Met, clearly also had a role to play in this sudden burst of generosity. This demonstrates just how brazen many prominent western museums are when it comes to such treasures. Unless shamed and/or forced, they have no qualms about persisting with their questionable acquisition practices, particularly concerning antiquities. Law enforcement agencies of those nations are generally lax too; some are probably even complicit in this shameful organised wrongdoing. That is why antiquities remain the world’s largest unregulated market. There is no way that, say, images of Vishnu and his many avatars, were created centuries ago as just personal works of art. They were all made for temples, either as the main deity or as part of the pantheons represented on the walls, pillars and steeples. It is difficult to understand and impossible to justify how knowledgeable collectors, dealers and institutional ‘experts’ could then ‘believe’ the dubious provenances provided by sellers when acquiring old artefacts. It is easy to pin the blame only on the notorious Subhash Kapoor for Indian treasures that ended up in museums and collections all over the world—including the 15 that the Met plans to return. But what about the ‘respectable’ people who willingly believed his stories about how he got his hands on them, and worse still, happily accepted ‘donations’ from collectors who also sourced them from shady dealers like Kapoor and others? Should they not be named and penalised? That Kapoor is finally serving a sentence in Trichy jail is no cause for India to rest easy either, as authorities are not proactive about prosecuting art traffickers. While the Idol Wing of Tamil Nadu Police has done great work to bring Kapoor to justice, he has stolen from other states too, as the antiquities activist S Vijay Kumar has often pointed out. Odisha, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and other states should also register cases and ensure he pays for all his crimes. The motivations of many western museums and collectors to acquire antiquities have also been less than savoury: to bolster their reputations as the guardians and custodians of art and civilisation. Hubris and one-upmanship at its worst. But America came late to that particular party: colonial nations such as Britain and France had happily filled up their museums and private collections in a more permissive era, sometimes by intimidation but mostly by barefaced loot. The collections of the British Museum bear shocking witness to this. Many of their objects were simply carted off on ‘official’ Raj orders while others arrived on British shores as part of the private chattels of Britons returning from India and were then ‘donated’ to the institution by them or their descendants. Cases in point are the Amaravati stupa friezes sent to UK from India in 1880 and Benin bronzes carried off by British troops after a massacre in Nigeria in 1897. Americans could not use the same (illegal) means to fill their museums so many resorted to other (equally illegal) ways. Under a very go-getting director in the 1960s, Thomas Hoving, for example, the Met spent millions in a decade to acquire treasures from Italy, Greece, Egypt, India and South-East Asia, regardless of the sellers’ antecedents. It is now known that at least 1,109 objects—mostly without proper provenance—have been acquired from criminal sources. Astonishingly, Hoving even admitted in his 1994 memoir Making the Mummies Dance that he acquired objects from ‘smugglers and fixers’ to build the Met’s collections and wrote he had a huge list of them to draw upon. So he justified his complicity in smuggling: even illegal businesses depend on sustained demand in order to flourish. And yet no one did anything about it. Nod-nod, wink-wink and the business of ‘preserving’ ancient treasures continued unabated. Among the 2 million “objects of art” held by the Met, the ones that hail from the Indian subcontinent and south-east Asia—especially Hindu and Buddhist deities in stone, ivory and bronze—are almost certainly purloined from places of worship. The same goes for similar antiquities in most ‘great’ museums in the US, besides smaller ones like the Simon Norton Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum, both under the scanner for illegally acquired Indian idols. While US museums eager to ‘catch up’ with their European counterparts have been valued customers of traffickers, the role of Continental ‘early birds’ in keeping smugglers in business cannot be ignored too. In 2016, for example, Copenhagen’s Ny Carlsburg Glyptotek finally agreed to return hundreds of antiquities to Italy, admitting at last that “the objects had been unearthed in illegal excavations” and “exported without licence”—in other words, “stolen”. Though investigations by Italy in 1995 revealed that US museums like the Met, the Getty and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts had acquired ancient Roman artefacts sold by another infamous antiquities trafficker Giacomo Medici, raids on his warehouses proved that French, Danish (ie, the Glyptotek), German, Swiss and Australian institutions had also done business with him. The name of another discredited dealer, Robert Hecht, also featured in that investigation. The 29 items seized from the Met in 2022 via search warrants became part of a repatriation exercise by the US, in which 58 objects were returned to Italy and 16 to Egypt. But most museums remain unrepentant instead of taking a cue from the National Gallery of Australia that has decided to stay away from the antiquities market altogether after returning 14 stolen artefacts acquired from Kapoor to India. Impenitent museums and collectors must own up and make amends. Especially since the most serious implication of trafficking remains unaddressed: temples deprived of gods become hollow monuments, age-old traditions die and people lose their priceless heritage. After all, unlike Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia and Egypt whose original civilisations have died out, deities of South and South East Asia are venerated by over 2 billion people. Killing living cultures by stealing their heritage is a crime against humanity. It must be dealt with accordingly. The author is a freelance writer. 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