Mystery of the missing 1000 yr old Gods in INDIA - Traced to USA and Australian National Gallery Of Art

Mystery of the missing Gods: 1,000-year-old guardian of the Brihadeeswara temple, Shiva Nataraja

 Sripuranthan, 300 km off Chennai, The altar is stripped bare, like a frame without a picture: It's a temple without a god. The 1,000-year-old guardian of the temple, Shiva Nataraja, is missing from his abode-Where did it go- details here-
The Lord of Cosmic Dance has travelled 9,000 km to the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Canberra, Australia. How did he get there? Ask Subhash Kapoor, 65, a New Delhi-born and New York-based antiquity dealer, considered an art connoisseur as well as one of the biggest idol smugglers in the world. He sold the Nataraja to NGA for Rs.31 crore in 2008. Ask the men of the Idol Wing, the antiquity theft squad of Tamil Nadu Police's Economic Offences Wing (EOW.) They will tell you how the master art thief worked a network of lowlife criminals to loot timeless treasures and sell them to the highest bidder. Ask the Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) of America. They accuse Kapoor of stealing over 150 idols worth $100 million from India. The missing god is at the centre of a curious trial that has just started in a district court in Tamil Nadu. SO THIS IS BOUGHT ILLEGALLY BY USA GOVT AND AUSTRALION GOVT OR PRIVATE ORGANIZATIONS,KNOWING IT IS STOLEN FROM INDIA. Criminlas act,but INDIA is so busy in its own downfall,it has not time but to still devide and get ruled by same people who tends to divide it again in name of AAP,CONGRESS. By the way Soniya Gandhi's sistet was also doing same trade of IDOL BUSINESS.
It's the old story of human greed and relentless pursuit of profit. But it's new in its span, complexity and daring. It blends two vastly different worlds, art and police intelligence, spanning across continents: India, Thailand, US, UK and Australia. "Art and antiquity theft is one of the most lucrative crimes," says IPS officer Prateep V. Philip, currently additional director general, EOW, in Chennai. "It outbids drug trafficking, arms dealing, and money laundering." Hence the odds of recovering stolen treasures are abysmal, one in ten. But in this case, the Idol Wing has managed to trace eight of the 28 idols stolen from Sripuranthan and the nearby village of Suthamalli, to various museums and galleries across the world. The case promises to be one of the most significant courtroom tests on how to track art and antiquity crimes in an increasingly networked world. But ultimately it's a searing morality tale, where arrogance, pride and hubris lead to individual downfall.

Kapoor possibly learnt his trade from his father. Parshotam Ram Kapoor, who had a gallery in Delhi which allegedly trafficked in stolen antiquities sourced from temple thieves of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. "Kapoor, too, has contacts spanning across India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Dubai, Cambodia and Bangkok," says Philip. Kapoor and his family earned a reputation as respectable and enlightened art collectors in the US. "But that was a front," says Philip. Kapoor roamed the London and Frankfurt book fairs, bought books, did his research and then travelled to countries rich with objets d'art, set up middlemen who could procure those and used a wide network of collectors, museum curators and dealers to ship and sell his ill-gotten art with fake idols.
He spent more than 30 years in the tony ZIP codes of Manhattan, New York. With his flourishing private museum, Art of the Past, Kapoor hobnobbed with the well-heeled and well-funded, was the person to drop in on for anything to do with Indian art and was ever-present at major art dos across the world. He also ran a fine-art storage business, Sofia Storage, and a lucrative import-export business of antiquities, Nimbus Import Inc, in New York.

According to A.G. Pon Manickavel, deputy inspector general and in-charge of the Idol Wing, Kapoor stayed at the five-star Taj Connemara hotel every time he visited Chennai and met local art dealers. The network of local temple thieves was lured with the promise of big money. By his own confession to the police (later retracted), he had paid $700,000 through his HSBC Bank account for the 28 idols-nothing compared to what he earned for them, but big enough to lure the thugs. "The client is a big man. Stick with us and you will get so rich that you won't have to work ever," one of the seven local thugs, Marisamy, was told after he handed over 10 idols and received Rs.25 lakh

 

 

 

 It happened one night
They came in the dead of night. Seven men in a lorry-sometimes together, sometimes in batches. They had come before to do a recce. And they had no fear of god, they had stolen enough temple treasures. All that mattered was money and they had been promised a lot by a Keralite art dealer Sanjeevi Asokan of Chennai, who they trusted and who knew old temples in and around Tamil Nadu like the back of his hand. He was looking for antique metal idols of the Chola era for a big client and had discovered that the Sripuranthan and Suthamalli temples were crumbling, locked and unused.
According to the confession reports of two of the temple thieves, Rathinam and Pitchaimani, one night in January 2006, they parked a lorry on one side of the wide bed of a dried-up lake near the Nataraja temple, far from the village. They just pulled at the temple's lock and it came unstuck. They removed three of the eight idols inside, glued the lock back together with adhesive and left. Asokan collected those, purchased new, cheap statues that looked similar and mingled the lot together. He bribed some customs officials and obtained an export certificate for what he claimed was a handicraft collection. This was then shipped from Chennai harbour via Hong Kong and London to Kapoor in New York.
All was well until June 2008, when officers from the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department turned up in Sripuranthan, suggesting that the idols be taken away for safe storage. Unwilling to hand over their gods, the panchayat promised to secure the Lord Nataraja with a collapsible iron gate. In August, as a crowd gathered for gate installation, the lock was found to be broken and precious idols missing. The story of looting 18 idols from Suthamalli in February 2008 is exactly the same. By the time the theft came to light two months later, when a visiting priest opened its doors, the idols had already reached Hongkong.
Six of the 28 gods have already been identified in museums and private collections across the world: Canberra, New South Wales, Chicago, Ohio to Singapore. The Australian government has ordered NGA to remove the Nataraja from display. EOW has started a census of the 45,000 temples of the state. But with the trial on course, the villagers are desperate to claim their god back. They are raising money to repair the temple. "When are you bringing him back?" asks a woman casually as she strolls by, dragging a goat on a string. But will Nataraja want to return to a nation that allows cobwebs to settle in temples? The outcome of the case will tell if his wrath has been appeased for now.

 

DEMOLISHED INDIAN TEMPLES BY MUSLIMS, MANY LIKE BABRI MASJID

There are many mosques all over India which are known to local tradition and the Archaeological Survey of India as built on the site of and, quite frequently, from the materials of, demolished Hindu temples. Most of them carry inscriptions invoking Allah and the Prophet, quoting the Quran and giving details of when, how and by whom they were constructed. The inscriptions have been deciphered and connected to their historical context by learned Muslim epigraphists. They have been published by the, Archaeological Survey of India in its Epigraphia Indica-Arabic and Persian Supplement, an annual which appeared first in 1907-08 as Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica.
 



1) destruction of Hindu temples continued throughout the period of Muslim domination;

(2) it covered all parts of India-east, west, north and south; and

(3) all Muslim dynasties, imperial and provincial, participated in the “pious performance.”

1. Quwwat al-Islam Masjid, Qutb Minar, Delhi: “This fort was conquered and the Jami Masjid built in the year 587 by the Amir… the slave of the Sultan, may Allalh strengthen his helpers. The materials of 27 idol temples, on each of which 2,000,000 Delhiwals had been spent were used in the (construction of) the mosque…” (1909-10, Pp 3-4). The Amir was Qutbud-Din Aibak, slave of Muizzud-Din Muhammad Ghori. The year 587 H. corresponds to 1192 A.D. “Delhiwal” was a high-denomination coin current at that time in Delhi.

2. Masjid at Manvi in the Raichur District of Karnataka: “Praise be to Allah that by the decree of the Parvardigar, a mosque has been converted out of a temple as a sign of religion in the reign of… the Sultan who is the asylum of Faith … Firuz Shah Bahmani who is the cause of exuberant spring in the garden of religion” (1962, Pp. 56-57). The inscription mentions the year 1406-07 A.D. as the time of construction.

3. Jami Masjid at Malan, Palanpur Taluka, Banaskantha District of Gujarat: “The Jami Masjid was built… by Khan-I-Azam Ulugh Khan… who suppressed the wretched infidels. He eradicated the idolatrous houses and mine of infidelity, along with the idols… with the edge of the sword, and made ready this edifice… He made its walls and doors out of the idols; the back of every stone became the place for prostration of the believer” (1963, Pp. 26-29). The date of construction is mentioned as 1462 A.D. in the reign of Mahmud Shah I (Begada) of Gujarat.

4. Hammam Darwaza Masjid at Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh: “Thanks that by the guidance of the Everlasting and the Living (Allah), this house of infidelity became the niche of prayer. As a reward for that, the Generous Lord constructed an abode for the builder in paradise” (1969, p. 375). Its chronogram yields the year 1567 A.D. in the reign of Akbar, the Great Mughal. A local historian, Fasihud-Din, tells us that the temple had been built earlier by Diwan Lachhman Das, an official of the Mughal government.

5. Jami Masjid at Ghoda in the Poona District of Maharashtra: “O Allah! 0 Muhammad! O Ali! When Mir Muhammad Zaman made up his mind, he opened the door of prosperity on himself by his own hand. He demolished thirty-three idol temples (and) by divine grace laid the foundation of a building in this abode of perdition” (1933-34, p.24). The inscription is dated 1586 A.D. when the Poona region was ruled by the Nizam Shahi sultans of Ahmadnagar.

6. Gachinala Masjid at Cumbum in the Kurnool District of Andhra Pradesh: “He is Allah, may he be glorified… During the august rule of… Muhammad Shah, there was a well-established idol-house in Kuhmum… Muhammad Salih who prospers in the rectitude of the affairs of Faith… razed to the ground, the edifice of the idol-house and broke the idols in a manly fashion. He constructed on its site a suitable mosque, towering above the buildings of all” (1959-60, Pp. 64-66). The date of construction is mentioned as 1729-30 A.D. in the reign of the Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah.

Though sites of demolished Hindu temples were mostly used for building mosques and idgahs, temple materials were often used in other Muslim monuments as well. Archaeologists have discovered such materials, architectural as well as sculptural, in quite a few forts, palaces, maqbaras, sufi khanqahs, madrasas, etc. In Srinagar, Kashmir, temple materials can be seen in long stretches of the stone embankments on both sides of the Jhelum. Two inscriptions on the walls of the Gopi Talav, a stepped well at Surat, tell us that the well was constructed by Haidar Quli, the Mughal governor of Gujarat, in 1718 A.D. in the reign of Farrukh Siyar. One of them says, “its bricks were taken from an idol temple.” The other informs us that “Haider Quli Khan, during whose period tyranny has become extinct, laid waste several idol temples in order to make this strong building firm…” (1933-34, Pp. 37-44).
Literary evidence of Islamic iconoclasm vis-a-vis Hindu places of worship is far more extensive. It covers a longer span of time, from the fifth decade of the 7th century to the closing years of the eighteenth. It also embraces a larger space, from Transoxiana in the north to Tamil Nadu in the south, and from Afghanistan in the west to Assam in the east. Marxist “historians” and Muslim apologists would have us believe that medieval Muslim annalists were indulging in poetic exaggerations in order to please their pious patrons. Archaeological explorations in modern times have, however, provided physical proofs of literary descriptions. The vast cradle of Hindu culture is literally littered with ruins of temples and monasteries belonging to all sects of Sanatana Dharma – Buddhist, Jain, Saiva, Shakta, Vaishnava and the rest.

Almost all medieval Muslim historians credit their heroes with desecration of Hindu idols and/or destruction of Hindu temples. The picture that emerges has the following components, depending upon whether the iconoclast was in a hurry on account of Hindu resistance or did his work at leisure after a decisive victory:

1. The idols were mutilated or smashed or burnt or melted down if they were made of precious metals.

2. Sculptures in relief on walls and pillars were disfigured or scraped away or torn down.

3. Idols of stone and inferior metals or their pieces were taken away, sometimes by cartloads, to be thrown down before the main mosque in (a) the metropolis of the ruling Muslim sultan and (b) the holy cities of Islam, particularly Mecca, Medina and Baghdad.

4. There were instances of idols being turned into lavatory seats or handed over to butchers to be used as weights while selling meat.

5. Brahmin priests and other holy men in and around the temple were molested or murdered.

6. Sacred vessels and scriptures used in worship were defiled and scattered or burnt.

7. Temples were damaged or despoiled or demolished or burnt down or converted into mosques with some structural alterations or entire mosques were raised on the same sites mostly with temple materials.

8. Cows were slaughtered on the temple sites so that Hindus could not use them again.

The literary sources, like epigraphic, provide evidence of the elation which Muslims felt while witnessing or narrating these “pious deeds.” A few citations from Amir Khusru will illustrate the point. The instances cited relate to the doings of Jalalud-Din Firuz Khalji, Alaud-Din Khalji and the letter’s military commanders. Khusru served as a court-poet of sex successive sultans at Delhi and wrote amasnavi in praise of each. He was the dearest disciple of Shaikh Nizamud-Din Awliya and has come to be honoured as some sort of a sufi himself. In our own times, he is being hailed is the father of a composite Hindu-Muslim culture and the pioneer of secularism. Dr. R. C. Majumdar, whom the Marxists malign as a “communalist historian” names him as a “liberal Muslim”.

1. Jhain: “Next morning he (Jalalud-Din) went again to the temples and ordered their destruction… While the soldiers sought every opportunity of plundering, the Shah was engaged in burning the temples and destroying the idols. There were two bronze idols of Brahma, each of which weighed more than a thousand mans. These were broken into pieces and the fragments were distributed among the officers, with orders to throw them down at the gates of the Masjid on their return (to Delhi)” (Miftah-ul-Futuh).

2. Devagiri: “He (Alaud-Din) destroyed the temples of the idolaters and erected pulpits and arches for mosques” (Ibid.).

3. Somanath: “They made the temple prostrate itself towards the Kaaba. You may say that the temple first offered its prayers and then had a bath (i.e. the temple was made to topple and fall into the sea)… He (Ulugh Khan) destroyed all the idols and temples, but sent one idol, the biggest of all idols, to the court of his Godlike Majesty and on that account in that ancient stronghold of idolatry, the summons to prayers was proclaimed so loudly that they heard it in Misr (Egypt) and Madain (Iraq)” (Tarikh-i-Alai).

4. Delhi: “He (Alaud-Din) ordered the circumference of the new minar to be made double of the old one (Qutb Minar)… The stones were dug out from the hills and the temples of the infidels were demolished to furnish a supply” (Ibid.).

5. Ranthambhor: “This strong fort was taken by the slaughter of the stinking Rai. Jhain was also captured, an iron fort, an ancient abode of idolatry, and a new city of the people of the faith arose. The temple of Bahir (Bhairava) Deo and temples of other gods, were all razed to the ground” (Ibid.).

6. Brahmastpuri (Chidambaram): “Here he (Malik Kafur) heard that in Bramastpuri there was a golden idol… He then determined on razing the temple to the ground… It was the holy place of the Hindus which the Malik dug up from its foundations with the greatest care, and the heads of brahmans and idolaters danced from their necks and fell to the ground at their feet, and blood flowed in torrents. The stone idols called Ling Mahadeo, which had been established a long time at the place and on which the women of the infidels rubbed their vaginas for (sexual) satisfaction, these, up to this time, the kick of the horse of Islam had not attempted to break. The Musulmans destroyed in the lings and Deo Narain fell down, and other gods who had fixed their seats there raised feet and jumped so high that at one leap they reached the fort of Lanka, and in that affright the lings themselves would have fled had they had any legs to stand on” (Ibid).

7. Madura: “They found the city empty for the Rai had fled with the Ranis, but had left two or three hundred elephants in the temple of Jagnar (Jagannatha). The elephants were captured and the temple burnt” (Ibid.).

8. Fatan: (Pattan): “There was another rai in these parts …a Brahmin named Pandya Guru… his capital was Fatan, where there was a temple with an idol in it laden with jewels. The rai fled when the army of the Sultan arrived at Fatan… They then struck the idol with an iron hatchet, and opened its head. Although it was the very Qibla of the accursed infidels, it kissed the earth and filled the holy treasury” (Ashiqa).

9. Ma’bar: (Parts of South India): “On the right hand and on the left hand the army has conquered from sea to sea, and several capitals of the gods of the Hindus, in which Satanism has prevailed since the time of the Jinns, have been demolished. All these impurities of infidelity have been cleansed by the Sultan’s destruction of idol-temples, beginning with his first holy expedition to Deogir, so that the flames of the light of the Law (of Islam) illumine all these unholy countries, and places for the criers of prayers are exalted on high, and prayers are read in mosques. Allah be praised!” (Tarikh-i-Alai).

The story of how Islamic invaders sought to destroy the very foundations of Hindu society and culture is long and extremely painful. It would certainly be better for everybody to forget the past, but for the prescriptions of Islamic theology which remain intact and make it obligatory for believers to destroy idols and idol temples.

Courtesy - Indian Express, February 19, 1989