Much has been written about the famed Amaravati sculptures and their chance discovery and how hundred and twenty of the best of them are showcased in a magnificent special gallery in the British Museum, as they were considered far superior to the “Elgin – Parthenon Marbles. They are now displayed in a special room with controlled humidity and air conditioning in the BM.  The gallery includes a reconstructed section of the stūpa railing and a selection of 'drum slabs' that once decorated the exterior of the stūpa-proper. The gallery was sponsored by the Japanese publishing concern Asahi Shimbun after whom the space is named. 

Some history first before we start staking the claims – There are very museums in the world apart from the British Museum apart from the Museums in India that had access to the best of the sculptures from the site.  But am amazing percentage of the famed sculptures went missing even as they were being studied by the British!

http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/amaravati/homepage.html

The Mackenzie Amaravati Album is an extremely valuable document for archaeologists, art historians and museum professionals today, as it provides a reliable record of how the monument's foundations looked before they were disturbed and where the sculptures were positioned.

The drawings also reliably depict 84 of the sculptures that once adorned the sides of the stupa and the stone railing that surrounded it. Of the 84 sculptures documented in the Mackenzie Amaravati Album, only 27 of them have been identified.

This means that 57 of the sculptures drawn in 1816-1817 are missing. Perhaps some of these missing sculptures will be located in museums and private collections, and the history of their removal from the site can be more clearly understood.

That is the pathetic condition of the collection in Chennai (which till recently was under renovation for over a decade with many protests to their apparent neglect. http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-tamilnadu/in-madras-museum-antique-sculptures-in-neglect/article1315293.ece )

But we are going to explain three important aspects that need urgent attention about this historic site – which is our duty to the great souls who created these magnificent works of art more than two millennia before.

1. How are objects from the Amaravati still appearing in the art market for sale and why India is still not asking for the return of the objects which we have already proven as illegally removed from India
2. If so are there any illegal digs going on in the Amaravati region yielding such high quality art and slipping through our borders.
3. The high moral ground taken by the so called “encyclopaedic museums” and how they came to acquire the best of art from their colonies. With countries like Cambodia launching successful campaigns to reunite the famed Mahabarata sculptures of Koh Ker – enabling many museums, auction houses and private collectors to return the sculptures, India is shockingly left behind in not even making case for the return of the magnificent sculptures of Amaravati.

1. Amaravati artefacts for sale in open auctions that too with Provenance not going beyond the UN Statute of 1970?

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/sculptures-statues-figures/a-limestone-relief-with-the-dharmachakra-india-5538683-details.aspx?from=salesummary&intObjectID=5538683&sid=e7f1474f-383a-4691-baf3-f4d007dacbb9

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/sculptures-statues-figures/a-limestone-torso-of-buddha-india-amaravati-5538681-details.aspx

https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/20903/lot/36/

Coming to the larger problem – with the @kapoorloot arrest of Art of Past Gallery owner Subhash Kapoor – India is led to believe that he was a small time art smuggler who pillaged few temples in Tamil Nadu ( there are only 2 cases filed against him so far despite federal investigations in America yielding over 2655 objects valued at 108 Million USD !!).  But we have traced his hand in sale of pillaged Amaravathi Artifacts to Museums sales in Australia, Singapore for the first time a big Expose – by th Musee Guimet Abu Dhabi – Yes the yet to be opened super museum in the Gulf has a suspected stolen #kapoorloot.

The case with the National Gallery of Australia. This Amaravati fragment was purchased in 2005 for over half a million dollars.  Remember the Vriddhachalam Ardhanari stone sculpture which the then Austrlaian Premier returned to our Prime Minister – the provenance for that object which was proven to be fake is the same used for this object as well !

We can also reveal the robber photo of this artefact showing proof that it left India recently and illicitly.

The National Gallery of Australia has since removed this fragment off display and has been waiting for a request from India for the past 2 years !

We move on to the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore which recently return the Sripuranthan Uma – thanks to our work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kp9P8IaSKQ

In October 1997, Kapoor billed the ACM $22,500 for a 3rd Century limestone fragment from Amaravati, South India. “Examples from the Amaravait stuppa are extremely rare to find,” Kapoor wrote in text accompanying the sale. “This particular piece does not come from the stuppa proper, but from the outer rail copings that surrounded the stuppa. It is an exceptional example in both its size and in its illustrative qualities…The iconography of this fragment makes this a most interesting piece from the Amaravati area.”

https://chasingaphrodite.com/2014/05/25/singapore-sling-the-asian-civilizations-museum-paid-kapoor-more-than-1-million/

The representatives from the ASI have had several personal visit to Singapore after a delay of 3 years ( we exposed the UMA in 2013 !) and yet the above Amaravati artefacts are still on display and no provenance information has been shared.

2. So where are these authentic Amaravathi freizes coming up from Andhra Pradesh? They are fetching multiple crores in the Art Market and its time the Government of India revisits the historic site to check for illegal digs !!

3. Finally going back a century to show our friends who feel these artefacts are better off in foreign museums – aka Enclyopedic Museums.. read on.

The actual year has now been corrected to 1798 and the events of how the precious site was pillaged and shifted , subjects of intense bargaining  for money by British officials and finally split into parts and many shipped to London -  are described in the lives of just 5 of the pieces in this academic article

https://www.academia.edu/3808140/A_Colonial_History_of_Sculptures_from_Amaravati_Stupa

and how the stupa was dismembered

https://www.academia.edu/5595558/Amaravati_the_dismembering_of_the_mahacaitya_1797-1886_

Some extracts to remind our erstwhile colonial masters of their crime !

“They were now the only record ever made of the stūpa’s foundations before they were destroyed. In the early 1880s, Sergeant Coney photographed a panoramic view of the site consisting of twelve joined pictures.

The panorama shows the lamentable condition of the monument after J.G. Horsfall’s excavations. The Mackenzie Amaravati album is therefore extremely important to studies of this early Buddhist site for several reasons. Besides providing the most complete record of what the site looked like before its foundations were destroyed, these plans also show that the Mackenzie Amaravati stones, of which we have the Mackenzie drawings, were all excavated from the east side of the monument.”

The above passage shows how the unscientific excavations caused irreparable damage to the site. And what happened to the previous objects sent back to London for “scientific” study ? This passage highlights it:

“WD1061, f. 11. This large inscriptional stone was probably sent to Calcutta at about the same time as the sculpture now in the Indian Museum, but instead of it remaining in Calcutta, it was sent on to London, where it was deposited in a storage area of East India House on Leadenhall Street. Before it was sent to London, a facsimile of it was drawn by one of Mackenzie’s artists. At the time that the drawing was taken, the script on the stone was indecipherable, as is indicated by the drawing being upside down. In 1837 James Prinsep published his research on the decipherment of the Brāhmī script. Building off Prinsep’s work, G.. Marshall translated the inscription on this stone and published an article about it (cf. Marshall, 1837). In his article Marshall laments that he had only seen the facsimile drawing and not the original stone, as the original had gone missing. It was not until 1880 that this sculpture was rediscovered in a storage area of the British Museum (Know, 1992: 223).  It must have been sent to London by Colin Mackenzie in around 1820, and then was moved from a storage area of East India House to the British Museum in the 1850s. This was not the first piece of sculpture that Mackenzie had sent to East India House in London. In 1808 he sent a black stone sculpture of Parsvanath to East India House in an attempt to draw the Court of Directors’ attention to his antiquarian research in Mysore. The same sculpture is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Howes, 2004)”

Were the Amaravathi artefacts in real danger of destruction by the “natives”? Below observation is an eye opener.

“WD1061, f. 65. This drawing shows a roundel with people holding up an alms-bowl. Henry Hamilton, one of Mackenzie’s more experienced surveyors, made this drawing in April 1817. However, we know that it was not removed from the site until the 1880s because the very same sculpture was photographed on site by Sergeant Coney as part of William Burgess’ excavations. Burgess then arranged for it to be sent to the Madras Government Museum. Over sixty years passed between Mackenzie’s documentation of this sculpture and it being rediscovered at Amaravati in 1880. Tis gives us pause to doubt Elliot’s assertion in the early 1850s that the exposed sculptures at Amaravati should be ‘sent to Madras otherwise they might be broken up and burnt into lime by the inhabitants.’  Could Elliot’s assertion possibly have been a pompous Victorian exaggeration? If Elliot was correct, how did this particular sculpture survive being exposed for over half a century?

How did the sculptures fare when they arrived in Britain?

“The 121 "Elliot marbles" arrived in London in 1860 and remained at Beale's Wharf in Southwark for a year. This was the period when, in the aftermath of the 1857 Mutiny, the rule of the East India Company had made way for that of the British Crown. There was no place for the sculptures to go. In 1861, they were finally moved to the stables of Fife House where the India Museum had been housed. A few of the best pieces were placed along the outer wall of Fife House, while the rest continued to languish in the stables. Here, they lay till, in January 1867, James Fergusson found them.

The only neglect they experienced was after their arrival in London, where some of the slabs placed outside theMuseum at Fife House were so corroded by the  atmosphere as, in a great measure, to obliterate the delicate carving; the rest fortunately were covered by the hay in the stables of the Museum and so escaped a similar fate.”

And this interesting dialogue leads us to the larger question – shouldn’t these artifacts adorn their original site in Amaravathi –

“ Cole strongly expressed the view that valuable ancient antiquities should not be removed from India to England. He spoke of the Sanchi stupa having escaped two great dangers - one when in 1853, General Cunningham had advised the removal of the fallen gateways to British Museum, and the second in 1868,when the Eastern Gateway was nearly carried away to Paris {at the last minute it was decided to display a cast rather than the original at the Exhibition), Cole suggested that the needs of the British Museum in London and the Central Museum in Madras (which already housed several valuable marbles from Amaravati) could be met by displaying plaster casts, and that there was noneed to send any more stones to these places, If all beautiful and valuable remains are to be ruthlessly torn from their ancient sites, the the outlying districts of this country will be rapidly robbed of all their interesting records. I believe, moreover, that the policy of preserving ancient monuments for India is a sounder one than carting them away to European Museums.”

Cole summed up his last salvo thus:

“I submit that the province of the Archaeological Surveys is to write ancient History and not to go about the country pilfering tons of sculptures from well-known monuments.”

The time is for India to unite as one and stop the plunder of its cultural treasures – the clarion call should be for greater awareness of our ancient art to be retained in its sacred confines and not to openly traded as commodities!