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Punjab-origin jailed idol smuggler charged in US
Jailed art dealer Subhash Kapoor has been charged by prosecutors in Manhattan with stealing and possessing artefacts worth millions of dollars, with officials at
Jailed art dealer Subhash Kapoor has been charged by prosecutors in Manhattan with stealing and possessing artefacts worth millions of dollars, with officials at the Metropolitan Museum of Art now looking into whether the looted antiques sold by him have ended up in its collection.
Kapoor was arrested by Interpol in Germany in 2011 and is in jail in India. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance’s office filed a criminal complaint last month against Kapoor and several others. The complaint charges Kapoor with 86 counts of criminal possession of stolen property, grand larceny and scheme to defraud for possessing artefacts worth millions of dollars.
Kapoor’s father Parshotam also operated in antiques since 1947 from Jalandhar. In 1962, Parshotam along with his two sons relocated to New Delhi to accommodate the growing demands if antiques. Both Subhash and his brother Ramesh moved to New York in the mid-1970s.
A report in The New York Times said that since 1990, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired about 15 antiques that passed through Kapoor’s hands during a period in which “his smuggling ring was active and he routinely sold or donated rare and costly artefacts to at least a dozen American museums”. The discussions among officials in India and the US are part of a major push by New Delhi to recover some of the tens of thousands of sacred idols and ancient relics that have been looted and sold over the last few decades by smugglers and temple raiders, the NYT report said.
It added that the first set of antiques sourced from Kapoor to arrive at the Metropolitan Museum were first-century terracotta rattles in the shape of “Yaksha”, a nature spirit. The last Kapoor-related piece to enter the collection, an 11th-century celestial dancer carved from sandstone, came in 2015.
“Each of the 15 objects was either gifted or sold to the Met (museum) by Kapoor or obtained from collectors who had acquired them from the art dealer or his New York gallery ‘Art of the Past’ on Madison Avenue,” it said.
Officials at the Met museum have begun a thorough review of the antiques that track back to Kapoor. “As we have since learned of the multiple law-enforcement actions and in the spirit of our enhanced procedures over recent years, we are now seeking to identify additional provenance information,” the museum said in a statement to The Times. The report said Indian officials appreciated the Met’s move to review the collection that could have been sourced from Kapoor.
“It is a good initiative,” DM Dimri, a spokesman for the Archaeological Survey of India, said of the Met’s effort. “We hope other museums will follow suit too and verify the source of their acquisitions in case they have our stolen antiquities,” Dimri said.
Leading cultural organisation The Asia Society is also studying the provenance of at least one item — a 12th-century copper-alloy statue of the deity Shiva dancing in the centre of a spoked circle — that Indian officials believe was looted, the report said, adding that it does not have a lineage that tracks to Kapoor.
“In the past, the institution has supported the return of objects that were found to have been acquired illegally,” Asia Society’s executive vice president Tom Nagorski said. “In this particular case, we are taking active steps to investigate and determine the validity of the claim.” UNESCO estimates that more than 50,000 idols, icons, artefacts and antiques have been stolen from India.
