Why has idol theft been neglected?

Historically at least, the market for Indian art has been large. One only needs look at Western 'Asian Art' museums or the Asian collections in international museums to see this. Indian art is almost always a major component of these collections.

My colleagues Simon Mackenzie and Tess Davis produced one of the first criminological trafficking network analyses for Asia (and, well, anywhere) specifically looking at Hindu sculptures coming out of Cambodia.

When it comes to India, there is not a lot of academic work on this front, but the work of people like Vijay Kumar and Jason Felch on the Subhash Kapoor case, specifically exposing how some of his more prominent stolen objects moved is extremely useful. I think the information being exposed here, even if at the extreme high end of the market, is a good starting point. I do caution that this is the highest end of the market. The theft, trafficking, and sale of smaller pieces may look different.

Why has the theft of sacred art been neglected for so long? I am surprised. I used to work primarily in Latin America and over the past few years the rate of theft of sacred objects from churches seems to have gone up. For example, the Virgin of Copacabana, Bolivia's patron saint and the holiest site in the country was robbed and few people said anything outside of Bolivia. I wondered, who buys the crown of the Virgin of Copacabana? This lead me to look for 'hot spots', places where sacred art is being robbed right now and thus India has come up. If you monitor just the English language Indian press, there seems to be at least one idol theft every week. That is a lot.

One issue may be that when people in the West (and thus in many antiquities market countries) think about 'antiquities trafficking', they think of Greece, Rome, and Egypt. I think that this has always been an issue when it comes to the appreciation and understanding of art and archaeology from 'non Western' settings. Ancient Latin America, for example, has been dismissed on the Art Market as 'Primitive' and 'Tribal' art, despite being produced by vast complex situations. Indian objects, in the West and on the art market, are less viewed as 'antiquities' and more as 'art objects', which is quite dismissive of context and meaning. This may mean that when museums, collectors, and other buyers started to be more careful about buying looted antiquities, they simply didn't see Indian objects as antiquities...

I think the protection laws are as good in India as they are anywhere. One of the main issues when it comes to Indian sacred art is it must be accessible for it to be used. If you take an idol out of a temple that is open to the public, it cannot be used by the community as it should be. You lock it in a museum, you remove the very devotional aspects, the very function of the idol. Think of all the small public shrines and open temples in India, how do you secure those while still allowing people to worship? It is a daunting task. I'm not even sure it is possible.

There are people out there who are willing to buy sacred art, no questions asked. If there was no demand, they wouldn't be stolen.

Dr Donna Yates, Lecturer in Antiquities Trafficking and Art Crime, University of Glasgow.