The Tale of the Tengapura Durga’s Jeddi Knights

“You will never succeed in getting her back” pronounced Dr. Pratapaditya Pal with sadness, frustration and anger intermixed in his voice. We were seated in a restaurant in NYC oblivious to the frenetic activity of the commerce ants around us. It was the start of the summer of 2011 and Memorial Day had just passed us by.

I stared intently at the leading art historian of India. He had been honored with a Padma Shri in 2009 for his gigantic contributions to India’s heritage.  As Curator at several major US museums and the person who had occupied the Ananda Coomaraswamy Chair in Boston he is a giant among men in his field of endeavor. With over 60 books and 250 scholarly papers to his credit he is a Yodha.

But if he truly believed in what he had said then why had he painstakingly shared the story with me? A story of skullduggery, genocide art, international smuggling, intermixed with terrorism and intersecting with a world of great wealth and institutional nobility.

Pratapada, as he is affectionately known to his admirers, and I had first met in the Fall of 2007 when Dr. Vishakha Desai, the ex. dynamic President of Asia Society, had organized The Art of Kashmir exhibition in New York City. Pratap served as the exhibition’s curator and his standing room only, inaugural lecture, had left me and others spell bound. The ex-Crown Prince of Kashmir, Dr. Karan Singh had come as the Chief Guest and among other luminaries there was Salman Rushdie along with other eminent folks from the State of Jammu and Kashmir as also many hundreds of Indophiles. Here was a person who had done so much for Kashmir and I as a Kashmiri had not only done nothing when it came to matters concerning my heritage but was a moorkh, a total ignoramus, the greatest sin in the eyes of Goddess Durga. Something triggered itself inside me. “I promise you I will do whatever is in my power to recover and restore the Tengapura Durga to our country. Come what may I will leave no stone unturned in the mission. His eyes crinkled in a smile at my foolhardy acceptance of his challenge. “Then the very first step is for you to fly to India and meet Dr. Gautam Sengupta, the Head of the Archaeological Survey of India. I will introduce you to him and then the rest is up to you. Don’t ever forget that I warned you that there is a long queue of objects that I have alerted the Indian Government onto for which nothing has been done, absolutely nothing.” When I left Pratap my head was spinning. What had I got myself into? Then the waves of his story washed over my heart and head once more. Twelve hundred years ago, around the last quarter of the eight century, an extraordinary people in Kashmir had consecrated the moorthy of an eighteen armed Durga. They had venerated it in Tengapura village making it the longest continuously worshipped Durga within the Indian subcontinent. In his introductory note to Dr. Sengupta on my behalf, Pratap wrote, “I can assure you that apart from the sculpture's religious import for the Kashmiri Pundit community, it is the only surviving example of such an Indian Durga image and is therefore art-historically even more important than the other sculptures we are trying to repatriate.” During the genocide of 1990 in Kashmir of the Pundits, the indigenous residents of Kashmir committed by Islamic militants, this Durga had disappeared without a trace and without a whisper of protest!

Pratap’s book, Goddess Durga The Power and the Glory, arrived shortly thereafter. I opened the book carefully and on Page 15, for the first time, my eyes contemplated her. She was simply alive. There was a silvery sheen to her as if she was bathed in moonlight. Perhaps you are not into religion or into art or into history or culture especially if it is in the form of a moorthy. Why should the return of the Durga matter then? Equally, what was it about this moorthy that made it the oldest continuously worshipped moorthy in the subcontinent?

Looking at the lower left of the Moorthy one begins to find the answers. One sees a kneeling donor holding up a horn and making an offering perhaps of a ring wreath. What is it that the donor saw as valuable here that one could learn from?

She was incarnated in her moorthy roopa in the eighth century out of green chlorite stone. She is approximately 68.6 cm in height and 43.2 cm wide. She is in pristine condition. Consistent with the unique style of Kashmir she rides in a chariot with wheels on the side drawn by two lions over the mountain ranges. A diminutive charioteer in in charge as is typical in Surya, the Sun God’s chariot. Jingling Bells hanging from the balustrade, supported by six pillars, announce her arrival. She stands in the alidha (warrior) stance telling us to be forever fearless.

The two lions grip the buffalo tightly but it is the third lion that crushes within its powerful jaws the mace armed demon of ignorance, which as the egoist essence of the physical buffalo has been released from inside it. The Durga tells us to never be a believer because a believer is bound by ignorance and is a Pashu an animal. Instead one should be a fearless seeker of Truth.

This Durga is eighteen armed. Again, Kashmir with the Nilamatapurana text was the earliest in giving a representation of the Durga as having eighteen arms when ten was the rule for all pre 7th century portrayals. In two of her left arms she holds the demons Sumbha and Nisumbha over whom she gained Victory. The right hand holds the lance, a quiver of arrows, a ring wreath, a club, an axe, an upright sword, a vajra and a mace while the left-hand holds a bow, a round shield, a bell, a Kamandalu, a trisula, a horn and an askamala with one hand placed on her left thigh. She wears a tight bodice and a long lower garment with a sash tied across her thighs, the end falling between her legs and a chain girdle of bells around her waist. Annular earrings and bracelets along with a trefoil crown complete her dazzling attire.

She is the ruler of eighteen dimensions and she is beautiful. She tells us that a fearless seeker becomes free and freedom is a prerequisite to overcoming Tamas the darkness of inertia. It is only freedom which yields the experience of the beauty of the ultimate truth of reality!

So this is what my Holy Grail was. When we had the Tengapura Durga within our midst and said Jai Durga we were saying Victory to Truth, Freedom and Beauty. These were the cornerstone of what Kashmir’s civilization once was. It was a heritage worth recovering, a future worth recreating!

When Pratap had briefed me my mind had had a flashback about how around the year 1999 I had been accosted by a genial Indian, Subhash Kapoor who had represented himself as an art dealer and invited me to come visit his gallery, Art of the Past, on Madison Avenue in Manhattan for a cup of tea. The Indo American community today is blessed with billionaire success stories but at that time I was one of only five Indian CEOs who was running a large publicly traded company in the US. My compensation and role was in the public domain and it was not surprising to me to be accosted by folks offering hospitality so as to sell their wares. At that time I had politely put aside the invitation but sometime later happened to walk past his NYC store. When I entered the store Subash Kapoor recognized me right away and was most solicitous. He gave me a matter of fact tour around his well-stocked store. There were Devas and Devis there, each more pristine than the other, stunning renditions of man’s contemplation of higher consciousness. Subhash advised me to make a long term buy and that he would give me a good deal. I was inclined to do so since an art buy was appealing to a CEO’s ego. But as I looked at one of the Devis in the store something made me shudder. I was reminded of the hundreds of temples in Kashmir which had been destroyed, desecrated, pillaged and looted in the Islamist frenzy in 1990. Those temple deities were sentient entities in their domains and now they were frozen for eternity; objects of desire as opposed to purification; merely eye candy when they were engineered to open the eye of the heart; aids to social mobility as opposed to liberation. I hastily made an excuse and left. Subhash’s parting words to me were to do visit again. He always had new supplies coming in and there was always a chance I would find a piece next time that I connected with.

Karma took its first punitive step when Pratap had visited Subash Kapoor’s store and spotted the Tengapura Durga. He immediately recognized it since it was published in an ASI report and warned the dealer that it was a stolen piece. Subhash had feigned ignorance, promised to rectify the error and the matter had rested there. Imagine Pal’s horror when later he was invited as a guest speaker to the Linden museum in Germany. There he was given a tour of the museum’s collection and he found the very same moorthy stashed away in the basement of the museum! It did not take long to piece two plus two together. The unscrupulous Subhash Kapoor had brazenly disregarded Pal’s warning and sold the piece to the unsuspecting Linden curator for around $ 250,000, a highly discounted price for the moorthy with such rare provenance which perhaps reflected Subhash’s panic that it was a “hot” item. Pal shared his assessment with the Curator but it was likely by then that the Curator had picked up that it was a troubled asset and therefore it had not been kept for public display. 

Dr. Sengupta and I had our first meeting on September 1, 2011 at 5 pm. The offices of the Archaeological Survey of India are adjacent to the National Museum but one can drive by the imposing black gates, exuding imperial authority, several times before realizing that it is there that the trustees of our heritage reside. Prior to my meeting I had done some research on this institution and was shocked to learn that their annual Budget was only around $ 90 MM. Having travelled through the vast expanse of India and seen the scope of their responsibility this was a mere pittance. I entered the offices with a sense of enormous respect for the folks there who toil away on the long cycles of India’s civilization so near and yet so far away from the day to day vicissitudes that rock its populace. 

Dr. Sengupta, Director General ASI, was accompanied by Dr. B. R. Mani, Assistant Director General ASI and Madame Sunanda Srivastava, Superintendent Archaeologist. Once they sensed the genuine and sincere interest that I brought to the table we quickly got down to brass tacks. Joy of joy Dr. Mani confirmed that when he had gone for a visit to Kashmir as a junior official he had seen a Durga which fit the description that Pal had provided. We agreed that we would partner on putting together a fact database. Then I would send a formal request to ASI to initiate the international recovery and return process of the purloined Durga. We discussed my request that if we were successful that the moorthy would be returned back to the KP community since for us it was a sentient deity with its own rights and we were merely her representatives. The ASI team cautioned me that just securing the return back to India would be near nigh impossible. Under the possibility that it would come back the modus operandi to give it back to the KP community was subject to a complicated thicket of ill-defined J&K State laws and their collision with the equally arcane Indian laws. 

I pointed out to the precedent of the Hazratbal disappearance episode which was the incident in 1963 of the disappearance of a hair - believed to be of the Islamic prophet Muhammad from the Hazratbal shrine in Jammu and Kashmir. The hair was reported missing on 26 December 1963. There were mass protests all over the state on the disappearance of the Mo-e-Muqaddas (the Hair of the Prophet) with hundreds of thousands out in streets. Awami Action Committee was formed to recover relic. On 31 December Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru made an official broadcast to the nation on the disappearance of the sacred relic. The relic was recovered on 4 January 1964 and returned back to the Kashmiri Muslims and the shrine. We agreed that the secondary discussion item could be pushed to later and that we needed to first focus on putting together our case for the Germans.

I left the meeting with a sense of exhilaration. These were humble but very knowledgeable, competent and good folks. In a thank you note I wrote to the ASI team that “This journey will take time but we will be patient yet persistent until we succeed.” I provided them with background material including an article that I had written in a newspaper where I had lamented the loss of the Durga. I carried back a message from Dr. Sengupta to Vishakha Desai to have her mail him the copy of the Gandhara exhibition catalog. My wife sent me an encouraging note happy that the first meeting had gone well. In his response back to me DG Sengupta was very encouraging, “…We will all try our best towards repatriation of the Kashmir Durga.  I am sure Dr. Pal and you will play very important role in this initiative.” 

  Disaster struck within just 4 days. The photograph of the Durga which Mr. Mani had seen in Kashmir was sent to him by the Jammu based photographer who had accompanied him. Located in Khrew it did not match the one that Pal had provided me. Mani felt that there was nothing more that they could do. More depressingly this Durga too was missing. We had only a single photograph from Pratap and nothing else to establish the provenance. Moreover, Pratapaditya was very despondent that there would be any progress by the bureaucrats. I had no locus standi in the matter so all doors seemed to be closed.

As if to rub my nose into the ground, on my return back to New York, I attended an art exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum on October 2nd 2011. The exhibition was on Vishnu Hinduism’s Blue Skinned Savior. Fate willed that my wife and I were seated on the same table as Subhash Kapoor. Unaware that I was onto him he was most urbane and charming and prattled off the pieces that he had donated to various museums around the world, proof positive that he was a generous and caring individual. Luckily for me I had a scholarly lady who was affiliated with the Ananda Coomaraswamy Chair next to me and I kept my mind focused on her areas of research. The mongoose and the snake thus kept their peace dining on the choice fare that North American museums serve their patrons in the hope that they would loosen their wallet as they loosen their belts. It was then that I noticed for the first time that one of Subhash Kapoor’s ears was partially missing. Much as American society teaches us to be indifferent to any cosmetic handicap later on I did enquire discreetly as to what the cause could have been. The scuttlebutt was that Subhash had been kidnapped when he was young. The kidnappers had demanded ransom but his father the prominent Parshotam Ram Kapoor reportedly had refused. The kidnappers had then chopped off part of Subhash’s ear and sent it as a message to the father to not be obdurate. Whether the story is true or not it sure presented an individual who had been exposed to criminal hardball at a very young age. In the moment however, I felt that my world was crashing around me. Not just the Durga but even Vishnu the two iconic ultimate warriors of Dharma, were failing me. It truly was Kalyuga, the era that Hindus believe we are currently in which is ruled by the demons.

Then lightning struck in Germany! A brief news announcement in the papers stated that Subhash Kapoor had been arrested at Frankfurt airport Germany on October 30 2011. More news trickled out slowly. The Indian authorities had had Kapoor on their scanner going back to 2007 when they had given a heads up the American authorities that he was the recipient of stolen antiques marked as marble garden furniture. Unfortunately, he got tipped off, shrewdly denied any knowledge of being the recipient and abandoned the property. But the Homeland Department put a bug on his assistant Aaron Friedman and began closing in. Meanwhile, the police in India had caught a few thugs who had been paid around $ 5,000 for three hauls from ancient Hindu temples. A famous Nataraja which had disappeared showed up in the catalog for Art of the Past. While the police were working on his thefts the break came when his Singapore-based ex-girlfriend Paramaspry Punusamy who had had a falling out revealed details of his transactions. It was enough for the police to issue an arrest warrant. Kapoor fled the country but he was followed by an Interpol notice and was caught and eventually extradited from Germany to India on July 14th 2012.

But all that was to come later. With his arrest I was now recharged by the Durga and made plans to travel to India and meet ASI. In April of 2012 I was once again with the team this time with the addition of Dr. R. S. Fonia, Director of Antiquity for ASI. I pressed ASI to formally communicate with the Indian police on the loss of the Tengapura Durga as they investigated the other stolen items.  I also pressed them to approach the Linden Museum to seek recovery of the Durga. They informed me that the protocol was quite precise. First, they would need to put together a bullet proof case. Then they would file their request with the Ministry of Culture who would approach the Ministry of External Affairs who would then instruct the Indian Embassy in Germany to file the case with their counterpart in Germany. Not wanting to wait I informed them that I would approach the Linden Museum directly on behalf of the Kashmiri Pandit community and appeal to their conscience. ASI was skeptical but did not object to my suggestion.

On my return back to New York I found a formal request from ASI awaiting me.  Dated 26th April 2012 it requested me to provide ASI the documentation in Pratapaditya Pal’s book and also the source photograph. I provided the information that I had but even I knew that it was sketchy. I had to find more information otherwise it would not fly in the face of the scrutiny that the Linden museum would subject it even assuming that it passed muster the internal Indian objections first. I sent a note to Pratapaditya requesting guidance and awaited his input on what else I could do.

Simultaneously I sent an email on May 3rd 2012 introducing myself and the subject of my concern to Prof. Dr. Inés de Castro, the Director of Linden-Museum Stuttgart State Museum of Ethnology. In it I formally laid claim for the Tengapura Durga on behalf of the Kashmiri Pundits but also stated, “Each one of us here, to a degree, is an injured party so merit lies in joining hands, doing the right thing and prosecuting the transgressors.” Not surprisingly I did not hear anything back. I was supremely unbothered by the lack of response since dealing with the Indian bureaucracy gives one patience. I sent the same request via DHL requesting a signed receipt. Sure enough I got one back signed by W. Adele, a staff member, dated July 17th 2012. Armed with that I resubmitted my email again to Dr. Ines with a copy of the receipt attached to it. Resistance was now futile and I did get a response back and of course it was the typical bureaucratic response that my email had been forwarded to the Ministry of Science, Research and Art. To my offer to help them and a request for a liaison name I was politely told that they would contact me if they needed me. I had some sympathy here and did not press too hard. Linden Museum was a victim of a con man running a major criminal enterprise. It would take time to come to terms with that realization and I needed the museum to accept my point that we had to join hands since we were all victims here.

In the meantime I had received a cryptic response to my request to Pratap. He gave me an introduction to an author dealer Dr. John Siudmak who is based in London.  John had worked at Christie’s and had done his PhD at Oxford University on the Hindu Buddhist sculptures of Kashmir. I corresponded with him and received his response on November 13th 2012. As I read it I realized that it was the clinching evidence that I was looking for. Hail John, Hail the witness who transports in Time and Space and provides karmic justice. I cannot do any better than reproduce his response below.

Dear Mr. Kaul

“I can confirm that I saw the piece in 1990 in the village of Tengapura with Prof. Simon Digby and Assadouleh Beigh, assistant curator, SPS Museum, Srinagar, who have now both passed on. It was in a small shrine protected by an iron grill. Ironically the villagers would not allow us to photograph the piece since they thought that this would result in it being stolen. Beigh supplied me with the photograph that was used in my Ph.D thesis (1994). The piece was previously unpublished, though it was seen by S.N. Jaiswaland S.N. Kesarwani who made a short notice of it in Indian Archaeology 1980/81, p. 91. There was no illustration.

At the beginning of the militancy I was informed that it had been stolen, and I sent copies of Beigh's photograph to Martin Lerner (MET) and Stan Czuma (Cleveland) to alert them. Dr. Pal was also informed and certainly knew about it in 1994 since he was one of my examiners. I used the Beigh photograph in my article on the rock-cut shrine of Nadihel - South Asian Archaeology 1991, published 1993. The Linden Museum curator, Kreisel, by this stage realised there was a problem, and we discussed it at some point in the early '90s, but I am not sure exactly when.”

Cross referencing to the Indian Archaeology magazine sure there it was in damning black and white

25. MEDIEVAL SCULPTURES, JUNGPURA, DISTRICT PULWAMA,—S.N. Jaiswal and S.N. Kesarwani of the North-western Circle of the Survey noticed stone sculptures of Mahishamardini and Vaikuntha-Narayana at Tengpura belonging to circa tenth-eleventh century AD. The sculptures are now placed in the modern temple of Mata. 

More importantly John had confirmed that already in the early 90s the Museum knew that there was a problem so the issue would not be a surprise, we had the moral high ground and now it was only a question of going through the formality of finding a face saving formula. John also told me that he was publishing a book which would come out in 2013 and have more details on the Durga. I would have to wait until it came out to get the clinching evidence that would permit me to tie everything together with a bow. 

Feeling sufficiently armed I flew again to Delhi to meet with ASI. In my meeting there was a new development that awaited me. Dr. Sengupta informed me that he was retiring at the end of the year. Yes, I had brought positive evidence but he felt that the matter should be best left to his successor. I pleaded with him that the wheels of the Indian Government moved slowly. The position could remain open indefinitely, he had been party to the history of the initiative. He could do no better than as part of his final contribution to ASI put his name to the formal request for the return of the Tengpura Durga. Dr. Sengupta was supportive but that did not mean it would happen. I left very uncertain whether I would be starting at base zero with his successor.

New Year 2013 could not have started off on a better note. Dr. Sengupta proved to be a man of his word. I received a copy of his note to Ms. Sujatha Singh the Indian Ambassador to Germany. It stated, 

Dear Ms. Singh, 

We have received a communication from Mr. Rakesh K. Kaul regarding a stone sculpture depicting Durga from Dengapura in Jammu & Kashmir.  According to Mr. Kaul the sculpture in question is now in the collection of Stuttgart Museum.  Since the object is of Indian origin which, legitimately be sent back to India. 

I shall be grateful if the matter is taken up with the Museum authorities and ASI is kept informed.

With best wishes,

Gautam Sengupta

I immediately wrote to Ambassador Sujatha Singh offering my help but did not receive any response. Yet when I Googled her and saw her image I drew comfort. This was a no nonsense lady. Her face projected warmth but also a steely determination. Lacking anything else one clings to straws and hopes. I was not disappointed. On February 20th 2013 a business like fax arrived in my office from her. In it she acknowledged my note to her. She informed me that she had contacted the Linden Museum and the then curator of the Museum Dr. Georg Noack as well as his predecessor, Dr. Kreisel, who had actually purchased the moorthy in 2000. They were willing to meet the ASI officials in this connection. 

The wheels of the Durga’s chariot were now finally moving! Dr. B. R. Mani wrote a letter on March 3rd 2013 to Ambassador Sujatha Singh referring to her reply to me that a team had been constituted to go visit the Linden Museum. Dr. D. N. Dimri, the DG Antiquities and Ms. Sunanda Srivastava, the Superintendent Archaeologist were deputed to visit the Museum on April 14th through the 18th. The Embassy was formally requested to coordinate the visit. 

The visit took place but I did not receive any update. I was not concerned because my presumption was that the first meeting was going to be the kind of sparring that boxers do in the first round when they feel each other’s weaknesses out. John Siudmak did inform me in May 2013 that his book had been published. At $ 200 was it expensive or what! But when it arrived it was a beauty. Now, finally, we had the evidence in the public domain from a reputed scholar, dealer and author. John followed up with a note that he was planning to be in New York. I invited him for lunch and in September 2013 we met at the Princeton Club. When he walked in my first reaction was that Durga’s lions came in the most non-obvious guises. John was a soft-spoken English gentleman. When I asked him to autograph his book for me his hand shook slightly as he scrawled his name for which he apologized profusely. But when he started talking about Kashmir’s antiquities the lion’s purr turned into a roar. He knew what he was talking about and he was passionate about it in a way that I had never seen any native-born Kashmiri display. At the very end he turned to me and asked whether it would be a reasonable thing if the Linden Museum was to convert the ownership of the Durga into a permanent loan to them. This way technically the moorthy would now legally belong to India but it would be in safe hands. Viewing this as a hypothetical question I reminded him that for us this was a Durga that had a sentient relationship with us and who had rights under the Indian legal system just like I did. I could no more agree to that request than if my mother was kidnapped and the kidnappers proposed that I agree to the criminal act be treated as a permanent loan.  I suppose he saw some merit in my argument though I took it as him signaling to me that the chances of getting the Durga back from the Germans were pretty small. 

The Year ended with positive progress that the police and the Government had formally filed charges against Subhash Kapoor. Durga was tightening its grip on him and I expected that he would be grilled on all of his shenanigans and not just the ones that he was being charged for. It would also send a signal to the Linden Museum that the dealer who had conned them would now have all the sordid facts spilling out in the public domain which would not be a good prospect for the Museum to find itself in.  

Meanwhile ASI had gone completely cold on my requests for information. I had read that there was a new appointee and presumably that meant that the department was preoccupied with change in command and was not communicating. A whole year had gone by and there was complete radio silence. There was no alternative but to pack my bags and go back to Delhi. The only way business gets done in India is face to face. So, on February 5th 2013 I boarded the United Airlines flight from Newark to Delhi. My wife had learnt to patiently accommodate this new-found obsession of mine though she was comforted by the knowledge that previous other such obsessions had faded away. All she had to do was to not notice them. But in the flight I felt very close to the Durga. Strangely even as I was seeking to rescue her I felt that it was she who was protecting me. Ever since I had embarked on this mission I felt that she was purifying me in my daily life helping me see the world through a different lens. It was as if an organ of feeling and seeing was slowly awakening. 

When I reached Delhi my first order of business was to meet Mr. Heiner Bielefeldt, the United Nations Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, who was visiting India in an informal capacity. While the meeting was focused on raising awareness at the UN level on the genocide that the Kashmiri Pandits had suffered I did also mention the subject of genocide art objects. I did not expect anything and my expectation was not belied when Heiner refused to even acknowledge follow up emails from me to him. Nonetheless, knowing how bureaucracy works somewhere in the trip notes that he must have submitted to his master, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, there was now the matter of the Tengapura Durga. The seeding had been done. I also met Rahul Pandita, the then editor of a well-known Indian newspaper. He had written the best seller book Our Moon has Blood Clots which was a damning indictment of the State and Civil Society who had failed to protect the Kashmiri Pandits from suffering genocide at the hands of the Pakistan inspired Jihadi forces in collusion with locals. I shared the Durga story with him but requested him to keep it confidential. He was extremely sympathetic and told me to continue pursuing the matter and if at an appropriate time the media could play a role then reconnect with him. It was interesting that he too in his darkest hours had a spiritual connection with the Durga that he had inherited from his father. I was buoyed by the meeting with a kindred spirit. 

The meeting with ASI took place on February 24 2014. I got to meet with the new DG Mr. Pravin Srivastava. He was a polite gentleman and immediately asked Dr. Mani and Dr. Fonia to join us. By now I felt that they were becoming old friends. Madame Sunanda also joined us and did most of the talking. The visit to the Linden Museum had confirmed the identity of the Durga positively, at least in the eyes of the ASI. However, as far as Linden was concerned the evidence was insufficient. They also had advanced the trial balloon that perhaps the Durga could be treated as being on “permanent loan” to the Linden Museum. So when John had floated that with me was he more aware than what I had given him credit for? In any case credit goes to the ASI that they had summarily rejected the proposal. The UN law was very clear, India would never agree to such a precedent and to the degree that the evidence needed to be strengthened time was on India’s side. But what would we do if the Linden Museum stonewalled the issue and simply took the position that whatever evidence we provided was not sufficient. I could not see the Indian Government going to the International Court of Justice to prosecute this so some other angle had to be found. 

As I began digging for new lines of attack I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there were others who had dedicated their lives to recovering stolen antiquities. One was a gentleman by the name of Kirit Mankodi who maintains an exhaustive database at a website  www.plunderedpast.in. He absorbed the facts of the case that I shared with him. He thought that there was a student by the name of Pran Gopal Paul who had aspired to do a PhD on Kashmir Art but never completed it. Kirit was of the belief that Pran would be able to provide added evidence on the Durga. Pran had moved to Amsterdam. Kirit gave me Pran’s wife’s email address to contact. He also connected me with Vijay who was based in Singapore and worked on restitution of Indian art. Vijay too had a website which sought to publicize the issue http://www.poetryinstone.in . Kirit too was not hopeful. He shared the case history of a Moorthy which had ended up with the Denver Museum. Inspite of all of the documentation there was no progress on the case since 2005. He ended by writing, “This is not to discourage you, but just to show how hard it is to get the ASI to act, and get anything back that was stolen that far back.” Meanwhile all attempts to track down Pran had run dry and he was not to be found. There had to be a way to shame if not claim the Durga back. 

It was then that I received an enquiry from Sumegha Gulati. She was a reporter for The Indian Express, a prominent newspaper in India. As part of her beat she had picked up that there was some activity going on regarding a certain Durga from Kashmir. Her initial conversation and exchange with me could not have been more inauspicious. I was willing to give Sumegha an exclusive but wanted her to not just report on the Durga as another case of robbery. This was not just a case but a cause. A robbery case would not get me anything. There were millions of smuggled antiquities and nobody cared. This had to be positioned as a symbol of the genocide that had been foisted on the Kashmiri Pundits by militant Islamists. Yet, choke, Sumegha who had actually spent five years in Kashmir differed and wrote back to me stating, “In the five years, since I first visited Kashmir, I have not come across a single temple that was destroyed by militants.” This was very much a conspiracy of silence position that had been taken by other respected media such as India Today which had earlier published an article, “BJP rants about temples in Kashmir being destroyed but claims fall flat.” This in the face of the declaration in the State Assembly by the J&K State Government itself in 2012 that out of 438 temples 208 had been destroyed. The Kashmiri Pundits themselves maintained that the militants had destroyed 550 temples and encroached or taken over the sacred lands. The 208 number also did not include the ancient monument and structures which were damaged further.

What to do? The Durga principle came to my aid here. Durga teaches us that sin is ignorance. Ignorance is not a lack of knowledge but incomplete knowledge. My best strategy was not to get into an argument with her but to keep educating Sumegha with facts, figures, information and insights. When the article came out it was obvious that Durga had worked her magic.

The headline positioned the battle lines accurately, “Stolen Valley Durga in Stuttgart ASI builds case for its return”. I was pleased that Sumegha in the very first sentence had inserted, “…in the height of militancy in the mid-1990s….” This was tacit recognition of my causal point. What was most important was that surprisingly the Curator of the Linden Museum Dr. Ines Castro had agreed to speak to Sumegha and stated for the record, “Germany too has lost a lot of Holocaust heritage but never got it back. Both sides need to do a lot of research to establish the claim of the rightful owner.” I was not surprised at the foot dragging since admitting a mistake would not come easily. The article did however accomplish several positives.  Dr. John Siudmak’s position was now in the public domain in the article. It had galvanized the activists within the Kashmiri Pundit community all of whom wrote to me asking as to how they could help. It also now firmly committed the Government of India publicly to the recovery of the Durga. We had now reached the point of no return in the battle for the Durga. In my note to ASI I wrote, “We will not be denied what is ours. Thanks to ASI and all of you for being steadfast in protecting our collective heritage. I look forward one day to joining you in receiving the Durga with the entire honor that she deserves.” The only note of caution I received was from Dr. Pratapaditya Pal. He was worried that I was getting into deep waters and challenging very unsavory characters. He cautioned, “There is a saying in Bengali, if the tiger touches you in one place sores appear in 18 spots.” I responded back that at this critical stage if I had taken the stance of see no evil then others would have slacked off too. This I felt was the critical difference between me and the other activists who were concerned about our heritage treasures. They were volunteers voicing concerns and raising awareness but I was a fighter with a just cause and would not concede one bit.

I also forwarded the Indian Express article to Dr. Ines Castro. In my cover note among other things I wrote - 

“(You have) communicated your position on the legal process which needs to be followed in such cases to establish provenance and ownership.

Having served on the Board of Trustees of the largest Asian Museum in the US I understand the internal evaluation that you will have to conduct on this matter to arrive at your considered final position. What I am happy about is that now ASI and you are in dialog and that you have shown an open mind to the issue that I have raised here in Germany and India. 

If matters proceed in the direction where you concede that the sacred moorthy was taken illegally and then sold to the Linden museum, in violation of the UNESCO convention, then please be assured that there is honor and a huge victory in the return of the moorthy back to its rightful community. Ultimately the mission of any museum is to promote cultural understanding and lead to greater integration. Sometimes the return of a museum holding may actually achieve that better than retaining it. I would ensure that in such a case the Linden museum would be honored for its’ constructive and noble action and that when the moorthy is re-installed a plaque would commemorate your role in safe keeping of the Durga during a troubled period in its home state of Kashmir. “ 

I woke up on my birthday in August 2014 to see an email from the Director ASI to me. It was strongly worded. It reported to me that ASI had forwarded all of the information to the Indian Embassy to file a formal claim with the Linden Museum for the recovery of the Durga. There was the Registration Form where the Durga was in the national registry, the First Information Report which is the police report that is filed for any violation of the law in the Indian legal system along with other supporting documentation. By now the Indian Ambassador to Germany had changed. I heard back from Ambassador Vijay Gokhale and he clearly did not miss a beat in picking up on the mission. He wanted some additional information from Dr. John Siudmak which I was happy to source for him. 

I followed up with a trip to India in February 2015 and met with ASI. By now they and I were like old friends. There was a quiet sense of confidence that we would not be denied and certainly my stance was an implacable one. On my return to New York I also heard from Ambassador Gokhale that he had received a query from the Linden Museum as to who I was and what my role was which he had responded to. I sent him my formal role as Head of India Programs for the Kashmiri Overseas Association and humorously told him that in this situation my additional title was “Pursuer”.

My self-given title was inspired by a novel that I had read in my childhood and which had left an indelible impression on me. The Moonstone is considered to be the first detective novel in the English Language. In it the diamond which is in the forehead of the moorthy at Somnath or the Moon God temple in India is stolen by a corrupt English soldier and brought to England. He is pursued by Brahmins who see themselves as hereditary guardians tasked by Lord Vishnu and who will stop at nothing to retrieve it. In the novel they succeed and the Moonstone is restored. But that was fiction, howsoever inspirational it may be whereas I was dealing with real life. Whether life would replicate art, only time would tell? Until then, I had to display the fortitude of the hereditary guardian and be an unstoppable Pursuer.

For six months there was complete silence from all sides. Meanwhile in India there had been a tectonic shift in May 2014. A new, dynamic, Prime Minister was elected. Narendra Modi is commonly recognized as being politically rooted in his Hindu heritage. I could see the bigger pieces aligning on the chess board. Now I just had to wait and let the battle play out in the higher spheres. Having dropped the pebble I now had to switch to the observer mode and see it get bigger and gain strength. Using the Durga template from a state of inertia described as Tamasic, we had gone to a state of action or Rajasic and now it was all in the state of truth and knowledge described as Sattvic. I had to have the confidence in my long shot bet that Satyamev Jayte, Victory to Truth was not hollow but the governing operative principle here. 

The light of a false dawn woke me up when the Daily Mail broke the news on July 13 2015 that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was planning to return the Durga to India as a goodwill gesture when she would come on a State visit in October. I hurriedly wrote to Ambassador Gokhale asking whether the miracle had happened. His quick response was that they were still working on it and the news was premature. He asked me to hang tight and not do anything during this period. However, Usha Devi is the Goddess of Dawn and she was not to be denied. On September 23 2015 Vijay sent me an email with the cryptic headline Congratulations! In it he had attached a link that said that the German government had decided to return the Durga back. The German rationale according to Arndt Oschmann from the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts was “for ethical reasons”.  Hail the German people for recognizing that it was not mundane legality that had prevailed but a higher truth and that they were bound by it.  Vijay followed up with the photograph from the event where the announcement was made. 

In the adjacent photo Vijay Keshav Gokhale, Indian Ambassador to Germany (L) and Baden-Wuerttemberg State Secretary for Art, Juergen Walter pose with the moorthy of the Tengapura Durga, in Berlin, Germany, 23 September 2015 

 I flew back from Barcelona to New York on October 5th and when I landed checked my IPhone for messages. One photograph said it all.  Ambassador Gokhale was so kind as to send me a very gracious note on the historic occasion. 

Dear Mr. Kaul, You may have learnt by now that the statue of Durga / Mahishamardini was handed over in New Delhi on 5 October by the Chancellor of Germany to the Prime Minister of India, and our PM conveyed his appreciation for the gesture of the German side in doing so voluntarily. May I express my appreciation to you for your efforts at bringing the location of this valuable antiquity to the attention of the Embassy and the ASI, and for your help in establishing its provenance. Because of your inputs we were able to present a credible case to the Government of Baden Wuerttemberg for the return of the statue. Thank you. With best wishes Vijay Gokhale All day long I was as if in a daze. How had this happened? My wife sensing my state asked me to join her for a Nepal Benefit concert at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew in Manhattan. The headliners were Krishna Das a noted Bhajan singer and Lama Tenzin. Over a thousand New Yorkers were there. Among other chants Krishna Das sang Jai Durga. He took a minute to explain the ancient song. When one says Jai Durga meaning Victory to Durga it meant Victory of the Heart. All these Jeddi knights who I had encountered in this Journey were ones who had connected with the Durga with the eye of their heart. It was this connectivity in Time and Space that had made them help me and made the impossible happen. In this journey I had grown which was Durga’s supreme gift to me, a humble volunteer. Now only one thing remained and that was for me one day to go to India, visit ASI, celebrate with them and then take the ultimate selfie with the Tengapura Durga invoked in all her majesty and glory within her moorthy. She resides in the Shri Pratap Singh Museum in Kashmir. Now I hand over responsibility to the community there to reclaim back what is rightfully theirs. Mission accomplished Pratapada! Dharma wins.

Rakesh Kaul is the author of the bestseller, The Last Queen of Kashmir. This article is published in honor of Hindu Samaj Mandir Mahwah, NJ gala celebrations on May 5 2018. He can be reached at [email protected]