Town prays for its stolen god Shiva to return

EVERY day at dawn, noon and dusk, Palanisamy Kasi prays for good fortune and the return of his god.

Subhash Kapoor arrives for his trial at Jayankondam’s courthouse in Tamil Nadu last night

EVERY day at dawn, noon and dusk, Palanisamy Kasi lights lamps in the dark, empty altar of the Hindu temple behind his house and prays for good fortune and the return of his god.

The prayer is directed heavenwards, to the Hindu god Shiva, but also southeast across the Indian Ocean and the width of a continent to Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia, where the crumbling temple’s stolen 900-year-old bronzed Shiva deity is now believed to sit in the India wing.

NGA director Ron Radford denies his Shiva is the same one that’s causing such consternation in India. But the trail connecting it to Sripuranthan village in Tamil Nadu via a web of chicanery spun by the alleged looting mastermind Subhash Chandra Kapoor is incredibly compelling.

Kasi is a subsistence farmer and father of five. He has carried a heavy burden since villagers in his rural town first discovered the theft of the Shiva and seven other idols, and questioned how a man whose modest house abuts the walls of the temple compound could fail to have noticed anything suspicious.

Kasi’s family has lived next door to the long-neglected temple for several generations and he and his wife Amudha were married outside its grounds in 1994 (it was closed even back then).

For months after the theft was discovered in 2008 the family remained under suspicion and Amudha says life became close to unbearable.

“Our family were ready to commit suicide, to drink poison and die,” she says of the many accusations and police complaints filed against them by neighbours before police instead pointed the finger at professional temple raiders working under the direction of New York-based antiquities dealer Kapoor.

“We suffered so much and now we want justice to be served. We’re very sure some locals are connected to the scam because otherwise it could not have been done. But it wasn’t us.”

Kasi says he was thrilled when police traced the idol to Australia.

“When the god comes back, our village will flourish,” he says.

It might not be as simple as that. Arriving in a nearby town in a prison bus just before 1pm local time yesterday for the start of his trial, Kapoor professed his innocence in a brief exchange with The Weekend Australian. “They can say whatever they like, it doesn’t make it true,” he said. “They have no case. That’s the reason they’re dragging this out.”

After a five-hour drive from Chennai, then a 90-minute wait in the stifling bus, Kapoor spent just seconds in court yesterday, long enough for the magistrate to once again delay the trial until March 21 due to a boycott by case lawyers seeking a “better courtroom”.

Dressed in beige pants and an open-necked, blue striped business shirt Mr Kapoor was not required to speak. However he told The Weekend Australian before his appearance that the prosecution was deliberately dragging out the trial in search of a stronger case.

Kapoor is a sophisticated operator who, according to US investigators, became “one of the biggest commodities smugglers in the world”. The former Madison Avenue antiquities dealer was born in India’s north, in New Delhi, and lived for four decades in New York but on his many business trips to India he always visited Chennai, capital of the temple-rich southern state of Tamil Nadu.

According to documents prepared by the economic offences wing of Tamil Nadu police for Kapoor’s trial, on one such trip in September 2005 Kapoor stayed at the five-star Taj Connemara as usual and while there met art dealer Sanjivi Asokan.

Kapoor’s request to Asokan was specific. He wanted the dealer to source metal idols from the Chola period of the 9th to the 13th century when the Tamil region was the centre of power in South Asia.

Since the early 1970s it has been illegal to move cultural heritage across international borders but Kapoor fostered many contacts like Asokan. In India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bangkok, Cambodia, Dubai and Hong Kong, these contacts could rely on Kapoor to pay well and be wily enough to overcome legal impediments to doing business.

Asokan accepted a down payment and, having studied maps and archeological books on the riches of South Indian temples, went to Sripuranthan village in the remote Ariyalur District, five hours’ drive southwest of the capital.

Asokan preferred to target poor farming areas where temples were neglected and crumbling because villagers in these areas were less likely to immediately discover pieces missing.

Sripuranthan village elder Ramayan Ulaganathan, district secretary of the Communist Party of India, told The Weekend Australian daily pujas (worships) at the Shiva temple stopped when rumours spread that a plague of scorpions had colonised it.

“There were a few instances that the poisonous insects bit people and even a priest was bitten, which scared a lot of people.”

Asokan found the temple locked and unused. A local art merchant introduced him to two thieves who, one night in January 2006, broke the temple’s lock and removed three of the eight idols inside. As they left the building they glued the lock back together so it looked like it hadn’t been tampered with.

The following day Asokan collected the three pieces in exchange for 200,000 rupees, then worth $6000. Asokan then purchased new statues that looked similar to the stolen three. He mingled the lot together and obtained an export certificate for what he claimed was a collection of new pieces, which then were shipped from Chennai harbour via Hong Kong and London to Kapoor in New York.

Four months later the thieves returned to the temple and collected another three pieces, which were exported in the same way. From the original collection of eight idols in the temple, by August only Vishnu and Shiva remained.

The temple was dedicated to worship of Shiva, so the big dancing Shiva as Nataraja, surrounded by a ring of fire, that has come to reside in Canberra was the grandest and most important piece in the place.

Sripuranthan’s Shiva was forged from bronze by craftsmen between 800 and 1200 years ago, a remarkable feat given the age, but less remarkable in the context of the artistry proliferating in Tamil Nadu, where so many temples are adorned with myriad stone carvings. Bronze idols are rarer than stone idols and each temple tended to house a stylistically connected set made by the same craftspeople.

For this reason, Indians who are passionate about their heritage become upset by the dispersal of these pieces to sterile museum collections, worlds away from the context of their temple and others in their set.

Due to Shiva’s generous dimensions of a little over 1m in diameter, the thieves needed two additional pairs of hands and a small truck to transport it to Asokan in Chennai. Their efforts were rewarded with a $9000 fee and, according to Tamil Nadu police’s idol wing, “Lord Nataraja and Vishnu were sent off to USA on 25.11.2006 from Chennai harbour by Sanjivi (Asokan)”.

“For this illicit export of cultural heritages of Tamil Nadu, Sanjivi was paid dollars equal to more than one million rupee ($30,000) from Kapoor’s account in HSBC Bank, New York,” the documents reveal.

Long after the pieces had arrived in New York and been readied for sale, the thefts remained unnoticed in Sripuranthan. Two years later, in June 2008, heritage officials arrived at the town having been directed by the central government to collect the antiques for safeguarding.

Upset at the thought of their property being removed, villagers asked the officials to give them a chance to safeguard the temple themselves; they built a grille and in August the group gathered to install it. Only then did they find the lock had been broken and all the idols were missing.

Within six days the two idol thieves were arrested in Chennai; Asokan was detained the following March. From these arrests came the Interpol warrant for Kapoor, who was detained at Frankfurt airport in October 2011 and repatriated to Chennai in July 2012 where he has been held on remand.

When Kapoor eventually received the Shiva in early 2007, he priced it at $US5 million and created a sales document claiming: “This is the largest, most significant Chola Period sculpture of this subject to appear on the market in a generation”.

NGA’s Radford echoed that sentiment this week, saying: “Shiva Nataraja, of course, is the ultimate Indian icon for an Indian collection.” Within months Radford and the NGA’s then chairman Rupert Myer viewed Shiva with Kapoor in New York. The piece was shipped to Australia later that year and the sale finalised in March 2008.

Kapoor’s office manager Aaron Freedman in December pleaded guilty to creating documents to give the piece a bogus collecting history and facilitating its sale to Australia. The NGA is suing Kapoor to recover its $5m-plus costs.

Still, Radford is “not convinced” the statue is one and the same and Kapoor is expected to plead not guilty.

A weakness in the case has been the lack of photographic evidence linking Shiva to the temple. It can be considered sacrilegious to photograph deities, but also cataloguing India’s abundant riches is an unfinished task.

A long-established antiquities research institute in Pondicherry produced one grainy picture of the Shiva, then last month a 30-year-old photograph taken for a local religious festival was discovered that removed any lingering doubts for some that the NGA’s statue is the missing Shiva.

Yesterday, Ponn Manickavel, the officer in charge of the investigation, told The Weekend Australian that a copy of the photograph of the missing Shiva was found on Kapoor’s phone, while another copy was found in the home of one of Kapoor’s co-accused.

As Kasi treads carefully along the temple’s broken flooring to light another evening lamp in its dank interior, he says the statues must come home.

“Many villagers are depressed and feel the identity of their village has been lost,” he says.

“We want the statues to be brought back so we can worship here again. Then the village will get back its sheen.”

Additional reporting; Pramila Krishnan