I'm Glad to find more and more organisations holding regular heritage lectures and the latest I caught up with was the monthly series being arranged by the Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology. Its most recent lecture, a fascinating narration of a court case in London that let to the return of a bronze to Tamil Nadu, was by perhaps the Department's best-known Director in recent times, Dr. R. Nagaswamy, whom the London Court had described as being "an unequalled expert in Chola bronzes". The judge, who knew nothing about Indian art when the trial began but who had become an expert in it by the time the 41-day hearing was completed in 1986 and he, in due course, delivered judgement, was so obviously impressed with Nagaswamy's evidence that one of the grounds of appeal by the defence was the judge being so taken up with Nagaswamy, the witness and interacting with him throughout the trial, asking leading questions and seeking clarifications. Eventually, two appeals were dismissed and the Nataraja returned to Tamil Nadu in 1990.
The case of the peregrinating Nataraja began in 1976 when a farmer of Paththar, near Kumbakonam, digging near a temple in ruins, stumbled of ten bronzes, later to be dated to the Chola period. Shrewdly, he offered only one of the pieces, the Nataraja, to an itinerant trader and accepted Rs. 200 for it. The trader sold it to an art dealer in Madras for Rs.10,000 and the art dealer sold it in Bombay for Rs. 2 lakh, after which the Nataraja was lost from sight. In 1982, Scotland Yard received a tip that a Nataraja was being privately cleaned by an employee of the British Museum - and the investigation that followed led to the case that Dr. Nagaswamy, forensic scientist Dr. Chandrasekhar and IGP Rajasekharan Nair played key roles in London.
The three who had sold the Nataraja by turn narrated their transactions, the scientists reported the results of metal tests, soil tests and termite tests, which, overall, indicated that the London Nataraja MIGHT indeed have laid buried in the ground where it was found but were inconclusive, and then Nagaswamy offered four days of evidence and spent a fifth day on the stand being cross-examined. Offering evidence on the inscriptions and dating it to the Chola period, he also spoke of its styling and demonstrated that it was distinctively Chola. Then, citing the Agamas, he described how, when a temple was threatened by invaders, its deities should be buried in a particular manner, on a bed of river shore sand, and worship continued with ikons made of dharba grass. When he was asked how a temple in ruins and where no worship continued could lay claim to its deities, his Agamaic citations led to the judge concluding that if even one stone of the temple exists on its site, the temple exists. And so the Nataraja, from this and the weight of the other evidence, he ruled, belonged to the Paththar Temple.
This brief summary does no justice to Nagaswamy's gripping narration - accompanied by slides of some of the most beautiful Chola bronzes I have ever seen - and I hope he one day tells it all exactly as the case unfolded. Meanwhile, we can only regret with him the said fate that awaited the Paththar bronzes when they were returned to Tamil Nadu.
The Tamil Nadu Archaeological Department
has lined up and marked all the stones of the old temple for restoration.
They had also excavated and found the remains of the temple wall that clearly
showed the treasure had indeed been buried in the temple precincts. Only
the bronzes were awaited. But soon after they arrived with great fanfare,
everything on the site of the temple was bulldozed and a brick and mortar
temple raised to house the deities! With no stone of the old temple in
the new, I wonder what that makes of the judge's ruling on title. Be that
as it may, Nagaswamy's concluding remarks, that this case could be used
as a precedent to reclaim through the courts hundreds of India's bronzes
abroad, make me wonder. Those in public museums abroad are very likely
better off than here. But those in private collections, no matter how well
tended, deserve to be seen by a wider audience. Would citing this case
`smoke' them out and into museums is a thought to dwell on.