The Idols Who Travelled Far From Home

Brut India

A looted statue from a Hindu temple was found displayed in a museum in Texas, of all places. Nepal finally retrieved it, almost 40 years later. India is also trying to dismantle these vast smuggling networks, one antique at a time.

Transcript

00:00Museums are for kids, old people and school teachers.

00:30Art, crime, both old and new cases are real and present and this is targeted looting on

00:52industrial scale where buyers and buying agents are coming to India, they are on recce trips,

00:59they pick and choose the best of Indian art, so there are a lot of these smuggling networks

01:03that are prevalent.

01:13Having worked closely with law enforcement worldwide, it's becoming increasingly obvious

01:19that museums, curators knowingly deal in freshly looted stuff, there are a lot of stuff that

01:27gets pilfered from even archaeological sites as excavations are going on, plus you know

01:32India has so much art on offer, so people just pick them off because we are so lax in

01:38our documenting and our borders are porous, they get nabbed.

02:39It's a big network and unfortunately India has still not woken up to the threat of dismantling

02:47these networks.

02:48We are still content with photo ops getting one ideal back, not realising that hundreds

02:53are leaving our shops.

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