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.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
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.