‘They're stealing a god that somebody was literally worshipping the day before'

S Vijay Kumar and his group of amateur sleuths have tracked down thousands of artefacts looted from India and sold to western museums on the grey market.

- Gerry Shih

On a cool night in February 2016, S Vijay Kumar, amateur art detective, got a hot tip from an informant.

A student in London reported that he had glimpsed a bronze statue in the backroom of an art gallery in Mayfair, partly visible behind a door that was left ajar. The tipster forwarded a smartphone photo: it was surreptitiously shot, but clear enough for Kumar to make out a 14th-century statue of the Hindu god Ram, its left arm gracefully bent skyward, the figure’s provenance almost certainly questionable.

So began one of the many cases that Kumar has taken on as part of a mission he has pursued for more than a decade: to track and recover the thousands of religious idols that have been looted from Indian temples and sold to museums and wealthy collectors via a flourishing international grey market.

Since 2008, Kumar has helped recover nearly 300 antiquities, from exquisite 10th-century bronzes of dancing Shivas to a hulking second-century BC Buddhist sculpture carved out of sandstone. He has reclaimed objects from art dealers in Amsterdam, private collectors in London, and institutions including the National Gallery of Australia and the Honolulu Museum of Art. He says he and Indian officials are working with the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum on returning a piece and have discussed with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to do the same for a half-dozen artefacts.

“Because of lax law enforcement, India was always considered fair game for trafficking antiquities compared to places like Italy,” says Kumar, who works in the shipping business by day but runs his side operation – his real passion – out of a tiny, rented office in Chennai, his hometown in southern India.