India Pride Project, 2013
India Pride Project
- co founded by S Vijay Kumar in 2013
- returned to Bharat in 2021
- helped get back 600 artefacts stolen from Bharat
Forum for Naga Reconcialition
The Forum for Naga reconciliation (FNR), which works for peacebuilding in Nagaland, is facilitating the repatriation dialogue between the Naga people and the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Stolen artefacts and their current locations
- The Koh-I-Noor has been a part of the British crown since 1849
- The sandstone statue of Harihar (fused representation of Vishnu and Shiva), now in the British Museum
- The ruins of Andhra Pradesh's Amaravati Stupa, built between the 3rd century BC and 250 BC, are also displayed at London's British Museum.
- The large metal Buddha sculpture discovered at Jharkhand's Sultanganj is currently housed in Birmingham.
British Museum Act, 1963
- prohibits the repatriation of art treasures
- if the British Museum starts repatriating items, nothing will remain there
- The Pitt Rivers Museum in England, which in 2020 removed the human remains from display, houses the largest Naga collection in the world.
1970 UNESCO convention
- Bharat ratified the convention
- There is a complex procedure involved in tracking and repatriating stolen and looted Indian-origin antiquities that are not covered in the clauses of the 1970 Unesco Convention.
Procedure to repatriate the antique
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if the antiquity surfaces in a foreign country, then the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) approaches Indian Missions abroad through the culture or foreign ministries for their repatriation.
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The ASI provides evidence of Indian origin and illegal transport of the antiquities.
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Diplomatic negotiations are needed for antiquities smuggled out before 1970 as the UN convention doesn't cover them.
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The ASI verifies authenticity and retrieves the items, transferring them to India for custody, potentially returning them to their state of origin if provenance is clear.
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! Of the 358 antiquities retrieved from different countries in the last 20 years, 345 were brought back since 2014
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@ October 2021, the US returned 248 antiquities
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& In 2023, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art said it would return 15 sculptures, dating from the 1st century BCE to the 11th century CE, to India
Italy experience
Italy has a 300-strong central art crime squad that has recovered over 3,00,000 artefacts since 1970.
Italy's success is attributed to a dedicated team of investigators, data analysts, web crawlers, and lawyers working towards a unified goal
Current change
Handing over seized Indian artefacts to the Prime Minister on his foreign visits after 2013 "has led to some attitude changes in our Embassies and High Commissions to act more diligently on our inputs".
This has resulted in a 70% drop in the open-market sale of stolen Indian art.
Major museums aren't buying doubtful art objects now, thereby discouraging art smugglers.
- $ There is a competition now among countries to return stolen artefacts to India - PM Modi
