India’s heritage: For sale to the highest bidder

In the West there has emerged a booming market in antiques, which include old idols, icons, coins, manuscripts, old books, paintings, etc. The volume of demand for them has been soaring at an ever-accelerated rate. To match this almost insatiable demand, smugglers and looters have been increasingly active. No amount of government surveillance and legal enactments has been able to decelerate, not to speak of stopping, this plunder.

…Take the case of India, its temples, old forts, and museums are continuous targets of the looters and smugglers. Not many years ago the dresses of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zaffar and the empress Zeenat Mahal were stolen in spite of heavy security around the historic Red Fort and, till now, they have not been recovered. The government and the public are aware of the scale of pilfering of the antiques from Orissa, H.P., U. P., Rajasthan, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh…

…The boom in the market for the antiques and paintings may be underlined by the fact that, according to The Economist (May 26), “Sotheby’s set a record total for contemporary art auction this month, raising $254.9m in one night, including the highest amounts ever paid for 15 individual artists. But within 24 hours the figure was smashed by Christi’s, its rival, with a $384.7m buying binge, including 26 artist records.” A prominent Manhattan dealer, Richard Feigen, corroborates this by asserting that “There’s a mood of speculation that I have never seen before in my 50 years in the business.”