The price of entry

1244 | THE HOYSALA EMPIRE, MODERN-DAY KARNATAKA, INDIA

The Hoysala Kingdom was one of the most important South Indian kingdoms during their time. They ruled most of present-day state of Karnataka in South India from the 10^th to the 14^th centuries, and are believed to have been powerful and fierce warriors and rulers. 
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To understand the global world in which the Hoysala kings were building their empire, here’s some context. At the dawn of the 11^th century, the world’s gross domestic product per capita (according to economic historian Angus Maddison and now eminently tweetable) was $435 measured in the 1990 valuation of the dollar, and income levels in Europe were lower than those in Asia and North Africa. Leif Erikson, son of Eric the Red, was leading an expedition with a crew of 34 men to the coast of North America. And, while this was happening all around the world, in South India, the Hoysala kings were building a fraught but culturally essential kingdom.
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The Hoysala kings inherited much of their administrative structures from the dynasty that dominated the region before their rise to power, the Chalukyas of Kalyana. Their economy was primarily agrarian. These rulers were devotees of both Shiva and Vishnu—two gods of the Hindu trimurti, the three principal Deities whose functions correspond with the universal ones of creation, sustenance and destruction. This said, as evidenced by some of their most famous temples today, Jainism and Buddhism were also practiced in the kingdoms. Many queens of the dynasty were Jain. The Hoysaleshwara temple at the modern-day town of Halibedu, Karnataka, the capital of the Hoysala kings in the 12th century, called Dvarasamudra under their rule, has statues of Jain monks that were built within the premises of the temple. 

In the Hoysala period, there were master architects, some of whose names have survived to this day, and there were the local craftsmen who were hired for their sculptural skill. The construction of every temple was predicated on the ability of both the architect and the artisan—both of these parties’ artistic sensibilities were of import—both of them were artists in their own right. Every artist during the Hoysala period was completely aware of their relationship to the temple as a collective whole, and most of them likely had no desire to differ stylistically from each other. That is to say, the Hoysala artist was not an “individual’s artist.”
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The artistic story of the Hoysala temples was carved and crafted to be read in its entirety, one piece leading the viewer’s eye to the next. It was about unity and precision. This philosophy of how they were meant to be read translates directly from that based on which they were designed. To the artists who worked on the temple, the requirements of the temple as a whole came before an idea of “auteurship.” The only differences one does find within the Hoysala statues are in the qualitative differences of the sculptures, rather than stylistic ones. 
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Whereas in the current Western paradigm, artwork from Hoysala temples (and myriad others) are kept in museums disparate from their social contexts, in many Indian contexts, and certainly within the Hoysala kingdom, artistic traditions were deeply integrated into society. What is a statue in the Western definition is a murti by the standards of the home culture. 

To those who follow the tenets of this philosophy, the murti is the Deity itself. And, to the artisan who was carving a murti, like the Sarasvati in the Art Institute, the carving and the process was an act of devotion on his part; they were an act of worship. 
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How then, did this murti of the Sarasvati find her way to the Art Institute, and become relegated to the status of representation of a time past, when she is so much more? 

2022 | CHICAGO, IL, USA

To answer that question, I began my search for the roots of this Sarasvati. 

My first task was to create a map of every temple in the region that this Sarasvati could have originated from. I knew she came from the 12^th century per the wall label, which meant I had a chance (albeit a low one) of discovering the exact temple she might have come from, by tracking down the Hoysala temples that dated back to the 12^th century in Karnataka, but that still needed to be narrowed down further. A quick search on the Art Institute’s website provided more context—the murti originated from the Mysore region of the state. This narrowed my search index a little bit more. However, this also presented me with my first hurdle—a typographical error on the part of the Art Institute. The wall label at the museum read that this Sarasvati dated to the 12^th century CE. Online, further inspection showed that while the title stated 12^th century, the date read 1201-1300 i.e., the 13^th century. To account for this, I color-coded my map to reflect both 12th and 13th century temples, though I prioritized the 13th century ones in my search. 

After this, I spoke to my father and enlisted his help in visiting these temples in person to talk with the guides and priests to find out more, to see if they knew of any missing murtis. Visiting temples that dated back to the 12^th century was a task enough, but to visit ones that spanned two centuries with no clear indication of which one was technically correct? That made things even more complicated. Regardless, I sent my father the map I created, along with a packet of questions and information that were useful context for him to consider while talking to the priests to set the Karnataka-based search in motion.  

Simultaneously, there was work I could do in Chicago, namely, exploring the connection the Sarasvati had to Marilynn B. Alsdorf, and her husband James Alsdorf—two individuals who are credited with gifting the Deity to the Art Institute. 
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That process took me back to Tuesday, June 10, 1997; the day of the press release that accompanied the AIC’s exhibition, “A Collecting Odyssey: Buddhist and Hindu Sculpture from the James and Marilynn Alsdorf Collection.” This was an exhibition curated by the renowned scholar Pratapaditya Pal, who was a Visiting Curator at the Art Institute at the time, and Stephen Little, the Pritzker Curator of Asian Art at the Art Institute from 1995 to 2002. The catalog is described as “a major survey of South and Southeast Asian art drawn from the Alsdorf Collection, one of the finest private collections of Asian art in America.”
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But who were James and Marilynn Alsdorf? And how did they build a collection so vast, it practically filled an entire gallery in the Art Institute? 
As it turned out, anyone affiliated with the museum, its associated educational institution, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (including myself as a graduate student at SAIC, and my advisors for this project), and multiple Chicago-based art institutions are enormously impacted by these two benefactors, whether they know it or not. The Alsdorfs were incredible patrons of the arts in the City of Chicago. Marilynn Alsdorf in particular was also an important supporter of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, and others. 
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Marilynn B. Alsdorf (née Bruder), was born in Chicago, and grew up in the north-side neighborhood, Rogers Park. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Her husband, James Alsdorf was a businessman and executive. The Asldorfs married in 1952, after which James Alsdorf, with Marilynn, devoted himself to operating Alsdorf International Ltd., an export and investment business started in 1911 by James Alsdorf’s father. The couple also began amassing what would eventually become one of the most renowned private collections of art till date.
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The Alsdorfs’ collection was known for its cultural diversity and for being “an example of cross-category collecting at its finest,” according to Christie’s Chairman of the Americas, Marc Porter. “It [was] crowned by masterpieces in the collecting realms of antiquities, works on paper, European and Latin American art, and Indian and Southeast Asian art.” Their collection also featured some of the biggest names of modern and contemporary art, like René Magritte, Frida Kahlo, Joan Miró among others.
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A large part of the Art Institute’s South Asian collection is attributed to a donation from Marilynn Alsdorf. Finding out more about the Sarasvati, and where or when she might have come into the US meant understanding more of what the Alsdorfs’ travel had looked like—when they visited the subcontinent, and what their interactions there were like.

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At this juncture, certain context is necessary to understand the complexity of the situation this Sarasvati finds herself in, and why uncovering her origins is important at all. Why is the possibility of restituting this murti, and others like her, so important?  
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Consider for a moment what it might be to step into the compound of a Hoysala temple—pick any one. The Somnathapura Cennakesava temple in the Somnathpura village, known to be one of the most well preserved temples remaining today, the Hoysaleshwara temple in town of Halebidu, Karnataka that is to date, one of the largest temples dedicated to the Deity Shiva in South India, or the Cennakesava temple in the town of Belur, Karnataka dedicated to the Deity Vishnu, that is one of the most well-known Hoysala temples amongst scholars and laymen alike. You would be struck by the visual impact of an entire program of sculptures welcoming you into a space that is meant to connect you with a Higher Purpose, a Higher Idea. 
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So, what happens when a Deity is taken out of its context, when it was so intentionally crafted for it to begin with? 

To reduce this context of the murti to being just an artwork is to remove the layers of knowledge and understanding that come along with it. More importantly, it implicitly de-recognizes the legitimacy of the knowledge and thought that gave rise to this artistic creativity to begin with. What’s more, the so-called legitimizing of the artwork through the Western canon is representative of the continued enforced hierarchical reality of Western thought and institutions in a purportedly equal global order. In providing the little information that a Western audience might ostensibly be interested in, it implies that is all there is to the context, the culture, and the work.  
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India is by no means the only (even if one of the less acknowledged) countries to be embroiled within the restitution debate. Multiple African countries are similarly afflicted. Malian writer, and director of the Institute of Afro-American Affairs at NYU, Manthia Diawara wrote an open letter published on Hyperallergic to French President Emmanuel Macron entitled, “A Letter to President Macron: Reparations Before Restitution.” In it, Diawara pointed out that many sacred objects that had been stolen had been termed African artworks and had become trophies of conquests and colonization, as it was Europeans who bestowed on them a market value and symbolic capital by deeming them worthy of Western museums.

These museums—especially encyclopedic ones like the Art Institute—cite the (undeniable) educational value of their collections, and are hailed as educational centers. But it is important to question, especially in the context of repatriation and restitution today, what that education even means when the majority of these museums don’t acknowledge the unethical colonial roots, or in some worse cases illegal present-day ones, of their acquisitions.
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I would be remiss here to not acknowledge scholars such as James Cuno, former director of the Art Institute, who have argued for the case and cause of the encyclopedic museum. Cuno argues that a lot of the time the debate surrounding restitution often boils down to nationalistic tendencies. He puts forth that a lot of claims for return and claims of association are based off modern nation states that have little to no connection to the previous civilization save for geographical similarity. 
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Leaving aside for a moment that in the case of this Sarasvati, that is simply untrue considering Sarasvati and the majority of the Hindu pantheon have been worshipped in the South-Asian sub-continent for millennia, the argument leaves us wanting from the implication that US based museums are somehow separate from the nationalist US agenda. Or perhaps, since the US is politically the most powerful country in the world, it is exempt from the rules it enforces on others. 
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In a wonderfully ideal picture, of course, antiquity would belong to us all. But the question of owning antiquity goes against the very nature of many of the cultures that the antiquities originate from. Yet again, the Western perspective is implicitly preferred under the guise of doing what these museums state is best for the art.

This said, collectors are fundamentally people who have a genuine love for art. Although I couldn’t speak with the Alsdorfs themselves—James Alsdorf passed away in 1990, and Marilynn Alsdorf in 2019—I did talk with collectors and long-time supporters of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as the associated School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Anita and Prabhakant Sinha. The Sinhas expressed a genuine love for the pieces in their collection. “We don’t just collect our art; we live with it.” They also raised the valid question of representation; Asian artistic traditions have been exempted and excluded from the Western artistic canon for far too long.  
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Admittedly, the presence of the Alsdorf collection in the Art Institute works to right that exclusion. The historical canon has constantly favored the ones who wrote the most popular version of it. In many systems, the most widely accepted academic categories are based off the ones that European scholars deemed important. The Sinhas’ point is a valid one. The West has controlled the narrative of who and what has been considered important for centuries, and making sure South Asian art is displayed in Western museums is an important part of making sure that encyclopedic museums truly function as such. 
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But necessary to consider here is the less obvious political statement. Art that is dated to the 13^th century and is surrounded by and curated in a space with similarly ancient art becomes historical. It becomes an artistic tradition that is no longer contemporary. And as a representation of the culture, that too becomes one that is no longer contemporary. Collectors like the Sinhas are doing their best to highlight and spread knowledge and awareness of South Asian artistry and craftsmanship and give it its spotlight within the system that is present, but the problem is rarely people trying to make a system work with good intentions, the problem is the system itself.
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That problem lies in its colonial roots, and exploring it within the context of Indian antiquities and culture takes us back to the British Raj. 

1757 | THE BRITISH RAJ, INDIA

Heartbreaking as it is, while the British Raj technically ended on the 14^th and the 15^th of August 1947, its effects are long lasting and still plague the South Asian subcontinent today.
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While accounts state that British rule in India began in 1757, when the Nawab of Bengal surrendered his territory to the British East India Company after the Battle of Plassey, the colonization of India arguably began prior to that after they first set up shop in the 1600s. While the company came for the purpose of trading, what they quickly did was to begin taking control of the land and the people using their well-known divide and conquer strategy. The British marketed themselves as saviors while looting, stealing, and destroying the Indian psyche and civilization from within. They shut down schools, incapacitated industries, and practically orchestrated the poverty that has been, and continues to be, so tragically prevalent across the Indian sub-continent even today. 
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Many British officers would often even congratulate themselves for having not stolen, or acquired through bribes, more money than they had already taken, considering the amount of wealth they saw around them. Truly, one of the biggest frauds that the British have committed was to convince the world that spices were the reason they sought out India, as opposed to the riches her people had earned. 

The colonial mandate was a civilizing one i.e., the plunder and desecration of these cultures hinged on the idea that the colonial power was in fact superior to the colonized one, and thereby the former had the birthright of controlling, owning, and socially puppeteering the local population as it saw fit. Importantly, the British systematically removed and interrupted the continuation of many lineages of knowledge and learning, prioritizing their own educational systems over the developed ones that already existed. 
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To translate: they not only imposed their philosophy, perspective, and labels on a population that was autonomous and self-identified, but they also then went out of their way to remove the context of the self the local population had, replacing it with what they believed to be important, and what would help them control the people effectively. 

The reality of what the British did, to quote the American historian Will Durant from the 1930s, was to knowingly cause destruction. According to Durant, "The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain, over-running with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning their career of illegal and 'legal' plunder which [went] on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy-three years."

"Tysoe Saul Hancock, his wife Philadelphia, their daughter Elizabeth and their Indian maid Clarinda," sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
Artist: Joshua Reynolds

My father grew up in Kolkata, a city that was one of the primary strongholds of the British Raj. Yet, per his account of what life was like 30 years after they left, the supposed technological advancement that the British often lay claim to was severely lacking. 
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“[In the 60s and 70s] things were really hard—we had to stand in line for everything. Achchamma [his mother, my grandmother] used to cook on a kerosene oil stove, and she had to stand in line to get that too. If we ran out, we had to get firewood. In a city. And everything was rationed.” The lack of resources isn’t only what my father remembers. “There was also not good infrastructure—we had to walk to school because there were not enough buses. There were also not enough jobs. Those who were lucky, and who managed to learn English got government jobs, and would live in the old bungalows that the British officers used to live in. They did fine, I suppose.” 
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To complete the picture my father painted, before the British officially took over India (and after the East India Company had been operating as a colonizing power for decades by that point) per economic-historian Angus Madison, the region of the South-Asian/Indian subcontinent was one of the highest contributors to the world’s GDP, rivaled briefly only by China. And it had been so for almost 1700 years. Per Indian economist Professor Utsa Patnaik, the current estimate of how much the British drained from India amounts to USD 45 trillion—a conservative estimate that does not account for the debts that Britain imposed on India. Adding insult to injury, is that per an article published on Countercurrents.org by Dr. Gideon Polya, had India retained 24% of world GDP as she had in 1700 then her cumulative GDP between the years of 1700 and 1950 would have been $44 trillion greater, and between the years of 1700 and 2003 would have been $232 trillion greater.

I come from an upper middle-class South Indian family. My parents speak fluent English, and they raised my brother and I to speak English as our first language. In fact, my family was a part of the socio-economic group that used education as a way to elevate their status, and learning to speak English fluently was an important part of that. When I was a child, knowing English was a sign of being educated, a sign of privilege, of smartness, and of ability, and with never enough due chagrin, I admit that as a child I too fell prey to this idea. Not because it was ever explicitly said, but because it is so imbued in the fabric of the society that I simply picked up on it.
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This system that favored the English language and considered speaking it a skill paramount to most others, taught me and many other Indians like me that our own traditions, our own languages, our own clothes, and our own systems were inherently less good than what the British gave us simply because they were Indian. It taught me that even more important than any self-identification India had, or I could have, was the identity given to us by a Western colonial power. 
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While perhaps not obvious on the surface, this context of colonization and lack of self-identification without validation from the West is precisely why the removal of murtis from temples, and their reduction to art objects, is so dangerous. It reinforces a paradigm set up centuries ago whereby the West decides what knowledge is important, how it needs to be disseminated, and who is allowed access to that information. 

What adds complexity to an already fraught reality, is that museums when first introduced by the British in India — the very first being the Indian Museum in Kolkata (referred to as the Imperial Museum in colonial-era texts) established in 1814—were part of a civilizing effort. In many ways the museum was one, amongst many, of the Brits’ efforts to “teach” the population how to be and how to live. In that context, that we continue to seek out museum-like representation for South-Asian art is complicated in and of itself. To add to this, much of the art that was taken during the colonial period was taken in the name of archaeology, excavation, and preservation, and the British took every chance to ship or gift murtis, weaponry, and other archaeological treasures to the Queen. Case in point? The Kohinoor diamond that still sits in the UK as a part of the British Crown Jewels. 
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The Amaravati marbles (more accurately called the outer wall of the Amaravati Stupa) are another incredible example of this. They were shipped from India to London where they now live in the British Museum. These marbles were excavated by Walter Elliot, a Scottish civil servant, and then shipped to Britain in 1859 based on the suggestion of Edward Belafour—the then curator of the Madras museum—on the pretext of preservation, given their artistic importance. It’s said that many British locals who saw it at the time exclaimed, “You won’t see anything like this in India itself,” on seeing these exquisitely carved walls. Never mind the fact that they were quite literally carved in India. 
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Unpacking the layers that surround the context of the collection of South Asian art only seems to make already muddy waters murkier, because understanding the history of how Western powers have viewed these cultures is paramount to being honest about how they view them — and relatedly work created from them — today.  

2022 | CHICAGO, IL, USA

Back to the Sarasvati at the Art Institute. 
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After setting my father forth on his journey to investigate some of these temples, and beginning my own parallel study of the Art Institute and the Alsdorfs, the search intensified.
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I’d wondered walking into the project if the Sarasvati might be one of the many murtis that were taken during the colonial era. But Marilynn and James Alsdorf visited India for the first time only in 1968, which meant that if the Sarasvati in the Art Institute was purchased in India, it was likely after that year. However, it was also possible that the Alsdorfs purchased this murti from a Western dealer, who could well have obtained the murti prior to 1968. The possibilities seemed to only grow rather than narrow, and the key to finding out which route the Alsdorfs took lay in the object file. 
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Unfortunately, my effort to gain access to the object file was futile when multiple attempts to reach out to the museum were met first with silence, and finally with a simple email that informed me that since the museum worked with a large number of researchers, they did not accept student requests and gave me the email of the person to whom I could reach out to if I had concerns regarding their decision. The reaction reinforced the idea of the museum being an untouchable entity, of it appearing (or perhaps even being) beyond reproach. It is an image that also recalls a little too strongly the institution’s colonial roots. 

The present-day art market is valued at about $66 billion and is arguably made up of many smaller markets. It is also known to be one of the most opaque and unregulated markets of a commodity in the world. The market is also incredibly old. Today’s art market goes back as far as the Emperor Hadrian, an enthusiastic collector of Greek statues. 

In the context of this story, there are two points of note that yet again connect it with the British. The first is that the English elites encouraged the culture of collecting. Often, young British male aristocrats would go on a Grand Tour as a rite of passage—a way for the British nobility to polish their education by going abroad to Paris, Italy, and more, where they would often purchase artworks and begin building or adding to a collection of art during this time. (Often, in restoring what they bought, they would modify and change the art and its form.) The second noteworthy fact is that there was a culture surrounding the collection of South Asian art that became increasingly common after the subcontinent was colonized. The Tower of London, for example, has a large collection of weaponry from the South Asian subcontinent that began during its colonization. 
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The most instrumental change that has influenced collecting culture of antiquities in the last 50 years is the UNESCO Convention that has been instituted regarding the import and export of antiquities. It is this convention that has been used time and time again to help cases of restitution. According to their website, the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property urges States Parties—countries that have ratified or acceded to an international treaty, in this case, the convention—to take measures to prohibit and prevent the illicit trafficking of cultural property. The convention does not make the buying and selling of antiquities illegal. Rather, simply put, it requires that if an antiquity is being sold, it has to have been exported and imported legally.  Unfortunately, this is often not the case, and the opacity of the art market encourages this reality. 
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Importantly, many source countries had already put in place their own local laws protecting their patrimony before the 1970 UNESCO Convention came into being. India’s laws protecting this kind of property go back to 1878 and were instituted by the British themselves. The Indian Treasure Trove Act of 1878 directed the finder of any treasure—defined as “anything of any value hidden in the soil" and worth as little as 10 Indian Rupees—to inform the most senior local official of the "nature and amount or approximate value of such treasure and the place where it was found." The found property, if failed to be procured to an official, (and sometimes even otherwise) belonged then to the Empire, or more precisely, the Queen, and once India gained Independence, the Indian state. 

Since then, India has instituted more recent laws specifically regarding the import and export of cultural property, particularly the Indian Antiquities Act of 1972, officially adopted by the Indian Parliament in 1977 which “regulate[s] the export trade in antiquities and art treasures, to provide for the prevention of smuggling of, and fraudulent dealings in, antiquities, [and] provide for the compulsory acquisition of antiquities and art treasures for preservation in public places.” These acts are always read in addition to the Customs Act of 1967 and the Ancient Monuments Act of 1958. The 1967 Customs Act deals with import and export procedures, and defines what constitutes an offence, defines penalties incurred for them, and more, and the Ancient Monuments Act of 1958 works for “the preservation of ancient and historical monuments and archaeological sites and remains of national importance, for the regulation of archaeological excavations and for the protection of sculptures, carvings and other like objects.” Together, they contextualize the protection, import, and export of antiquities in and out of India further. 
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Ironically enough, while today the British Museum is one of the least cooperative museums in terms of restitution demands (think the 900 Benin Bronzes, human remains of the Maori people) citing the British Museum Act of 1963 that forbids the museum from disposing of its holdings except in special circumstances, it was British law that dates the protection of Indian antiquities back to the late 1800s. 

All of this implied a difficult truth.
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It is incredibly likely that most of the antiquities that are sold in the current art market, were in fact illegally obtained—including many in the collection of the Art Institute. This complicated the matter. While the history of colonization was clearly important to understanding the philosophical approach to how murtis were, and are, viewed, the existence of these Indian acts brought in the question of legality. 
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Are the murtis in the Art Institute legally owned by them? How could I tell? How did institutions like the Art Institute interact with the art market, and how did they approach any issues of restitution? 

This line of questioning found me in conversation with S. Vijay Kumar, the co-founder of the India Pride Project, an all-volunteer organization that has spent the last 17 years cataloguing and working on restitution cases for murtis that were illegally exported from India and sold around the world. The 900-year-old Nataraja—a depiction of the Deity Shiva as the divine cosmic dancer—that was recently returned by the National Gallery of Australia is one of their most famous success stories. 
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During our conversation, Kumar raised the same valid concerns about the art market’s opacity, and questioned the way in which the system was perhaps less than ideal.  He pointed out that in most cases, rather than the possessor of these antiquities—in this case, the Art Institute of Chicago—being asked for proof of legal ownership, the onus of proving the illegality of the transaction, which is a markedly more difficult task, often falls on the organization or peoples fighting for a murti’s return. 
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The process, research, and work needed to prove the lack of provenance and legality is extensive. Yet, on the flip side, in many cases museums don’t seem to require that intensity of due diligence while acquiring an object.

The best example of this is Subhash Kapoor, the now disgraced art dealer who is in jail for smuggling millions worth of Indian antiquities illegally and selling them to museums across the world including the Met, LACMA,  the Peabody Essex museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and even the Art Institute itself, amongst others. Kapoor would often provide provenance of the antiquities he was selling by sourcing fake documents from his then girlfriend, Selina Mohamed. 

Cover of the book, "The Idol Thief" sourced from Amazon.
Author: S. Vijay Kumar

Of course, standards and methods of detecting fake provenance evolve with time, and perhaps it is unfair to hold museums’ past work to the 2022 standard of due diligence. However, if that is the case, once provenance has been proven to be manipulated, the simple and legal thing to do would be to return a stolen murti—something some of the biggest museums continue to struggle with. A good example is the Met, which as of 2019 was still investigating the provenance of the antiquities linked to Kapoor, 8 years after his arrest. By contrast, several other institutions such as the Toledo Museum in Ohio, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and others, returned their Kapoor-linked acquisitions.  
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To better understand what the 2022 standard of provenance with larger institutions is, I spoke with an Assistant Research Curator from the Art Institute of Chicago, Jennifer Cohen. Cohen detailed out an extensive process that included in-depth research of databases of stolen art, travel to source countries—a detailed study of the artworks led by the curators that is supported by provenance specialists. Cohen also stressed how institutions like the Art Institute are changing with the increased demand for transparency to keep up with the current practices of similar institutions regarding provenance. It was apparent speaking with her that the individuals working in the museums that care for these artifacts, are putting in a considerable effort to keep up with rapidly changing frameworks and conversations regarding the acquisition and repatriation of antiquities.  
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Why then, was there such a stark difference between the experience Kumar had detailed in his 17 years of experience, working on restituting illegally obtained antiquities, in comparison to the effort Cohen described? Perhaps the answer lay within the larger question of how institutions like the Art Institute functioned altogether. 

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By this point in my journey, I had also started forming a deeper connection with this Sarasvati. She became the Deity I would turn to when my search would lead to a dead-end, or a bureaucratic rabbit-hole that never seemed to find the light of day. I’d started to think of her as my Sarasvati. Never a Deity I owned, but a Deity I had a responsibility towards, and cared deeply for. 
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The more I connected with her, the more I thought about what would happen if it did turn out she was illegally acquired, and she was returned to India. If traditional rites were to be followed, then this Sarasvati—my Sarasvati—with her broken forearm, would not return to a temple. This murti in particular had been desecrated—the body broken and harmed—and so, after necessary ritual and consultation with a temple priest, she would be immersed in a river, possibly the ocean, where this body would complete its life-cycle, allowing it to move on, and the Deity would be given a new home, a new body that she would live in. The process is reminiscent of Hindu funeral rites. After a person is cremated, their ashes are similarly emptied into rivers or oceans, so that they can complete their own life cycle and move on. 
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In more ways than one, these murtis are alive.
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But that isn’t the world we live in today, and if my Sarasvati were ever to return to India, she would be housed in a museum, similar — although markedly better — to the situation she found herself in right now. 

2022 | SOMNATHAPURA, KA, INDIA

The Hoysala empire extended throughout modern-day Karnataka. The Mysore region, which is where the Sarasvati’s wall label said she came from, lies in the southern half of the state, and is about 2,646 square miles large. While creating the interview guide I gave my father, I found 12 temples that have been attributed to the Hoysala kingdom within the region, all built over the 400 year reign of the rulers. Only one of those dated to the 13th century. And so, in the last weekend of March, early on a Sunday morning, my father made his way to the only 13th century Hoysala temple I could find in the Mysore district—the Somnathapura Cennakesava temple—in the Somnathapura village. 
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In many ways, my father exemplifies the standard Indian man, especially for his generation. Now in his late fifties, he's had a thirty-year long corporate career, starting off as a software engineer, and working his way up to the more managerial position that he holds today. He’s an incredibly introverted person, whose love of learning and thirst for knowledge is, to my mind, rivaled only by my late mother’s. He is meticulous, detail-oriented, and brings a certain care to what he undertakes. 

When I was in middle-school, I came home one day, all but declaring that my chosen career path involved history and archaeology. My twelve-year-old self had a new interest everyday, but my father, wanting to better understand what I was so enamored by, took it upon himself to start reading about Indian history. He bought enough books to fill multiple bookshelves about various dynasties, kingdoms, practices, and read through them all. Through that, my father found a previously unknown love for the subject, and began seeking out more ways to learn about it. For him, it was more than just learning about the Indian story, it was unlearning mental frameworks and biases he’d been taught as a child growing up in a newly independent India. Even today, if I ever want to visit an ancient Indian temple because I am interested in learning more about it, he is the first person I go to. 
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What is a labour of love for me, began as a hard journey of undoing years of mental colonization for him. So, even though his skill set didn’t necessarily lie in the journalistic field, all of this made my decision of asking him to be my investigator back at home an easy one. 

Temples, and particularly the Hoysala ones, are works of art in their own right. But, notable here is that their function was first and foremost to be the home of the Deity. People leave their footwear outside and wash their hands and feet before entering a temple, similar to how one would behave in one’s home. There are even striking parallels between the way in which Indians—and in this case, followers of the Hindu tradition—treat guests in their homes, and how an individual conducts themselves in a temple. 
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The number of temples in India is so vast that no official count has been made, although there are said to be over 2 million temples in total, with the number increasing each year. The culture surrounding them is still alive and well, and thriving. Importantly, many of these temples are sites of continuing tradition, some of them even being more than a 1000 years old. 
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While the 13th century Somnathapura Cennakesava temple hasn’t yet hit the millennium mark, it sits close. 

When talking to my father after his visit, he said, “this temple was the most ornate and the least damaged one compared to the Hoysala temples in Belur and Halibedu [the sites of the two most well-known Hoysala temples], and from an artistic standpoint, it was really awe-inspiring.” 
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He continued, “the way the temple has been constructed, when you get inside and go around, the attention to detail that they show in each of the images is phenomenal. I realized this cannot be done unless the knowledge of aesthetics, beauty, appreciation of beauty, skill in that society was so far advanced, and held in high esteem. But it was not necessarily a mechanism to gather personal wealth. The people who had the skill would create these murtis for the welfare of the society.” 
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What stood out to me in my father’s account was the emphasis on the idea that the temple, these Deities, the work that was put in, was not done solely for individual gain, but to create a lasting legacy for generations to come. Interestingly, many of these temples were built over multiple generations of kings, architects, and artisans. The responsibility of creating a home for the Deity that the community could come together in, passed from one generation to the next. 

There was the constant truth that I couldn’t escape. While the language and framework of the Western system constantly call these murtis art objects, they are more. They were more when they were carved, and they continue to be more to the followers of the philosophy today.
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The Somnathapura temple is an important case study of the strength of these uninterrupted traditions. The temple, when my father visited it, was technically no longer a place of active worship. Fifteenth century inscriptions in the premises detail how the temple had been badly damaged, and the main Deity desecrated, during invasions by the Mughal Sultanate in the 14^th century. However, in the 16^th century, another empire that rose to power in South India, the Vijayanagara empire, provided funds and resources to help restore some parts of the temple, and this work was continued in the 19^th and 20^th centuries by the ruling family of Mysore—the Wodeyars. In the present, the care for this temple passed on to the villagers, and they were doing what their resources allowed them to. They had replaced the desecrated idol with another recently carved one, and were conducting some form of worship there again. They were continuing the traditions that began centuries before they lived in the area. 
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Relatedly, my father also chanced upon another similarly old temple in the village that was in complete shambles. But he smiled when he told me about how the people in the village—old and young—were incredibly proud that the temple had been marked by the government for restoration. “They have started reviving the temple, and it’s beginning to regain its role as an attractor of people and attractor of commerce,” my father mentioned. “I think the belief system will bring people back, and then people will get opportunities and will get some money to grow economically. The society is trying to bring [the temple] back to at least somewhat of the role it once had.”  

That the local population that dedicated their time to reviving worship at these temples did not need a new fancy murti to begin their worship again spoke volumes. Their loyalty was to the Deity first, and even if they could not have the body once lovingly carved, they could and would still express their devotion. In fact, I have even been to smaller temples that were constructed in people's houses, where there was no body for the Deity at all, and a simple stone marked the spot where the energy is said to be concentrated. The Deity goes beyond the body. The faith transcends its physical expression.  And relevant to museums, it demonstrates that what might be considered a representation of a time past is in fact an active characterization of continuing tradition for the home culture. 
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This argument raises another question. If the local population can go on without the original murti, why should it be returned? 

In some ways, this answer is simple: if a murti was taken illegally, then the legal thing to do would be to return it. In others, it lends itself to more debate. Reflecting on the ethics of colonization as if it were a time past is straight-forward enough, however the lasting impact of the history is not acknowledged nearly enough for its reach. If we truly live in a post-colonial world—debatable in and of itself—then surely reckoning with systems and perspectives that have unfortunate origins in the colonial mindset should be a priority for institutions such as museums that have the cultural, narrative, and educational authority they do. 
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All of these reasons notwithstanding, it’s important to remember a murti—a Deity—was never an institution’s to own to begin with. It didn’t even belong to the artisan who carved it. The murti is a sacred being who was cared for by the community. The Deity then in turn cares for the people and provides for them. It’s a symbiotic relationship that continues for generations. It is not uncommon in India for families to have been going to the same temple, worshipping the same Deity, for centuries. 
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Consider the act of ownership. Truly sit with it. Then ask yourself if the notion of owning Divinity is palatable. If the notion of placing monetary value on that Divinity is acceptable. Think about what it would feel like if another culture laid a claim of ownership to the Divinity you believed in and prayed to, and what it would feel like if your Divinity was deemed and constantly referred to as an inanimate object by an outside culture and philosophy. Perhaps the politics are more evident when phrased like so. 

This anecdote also reminded me of how museums are often unwilling to exchange original statues for contemporary works from home cultures. In an environment where restitution is beginning to take center stage, one of the compromises offered by some countries has been a swapping of the previously looted antiquity. For example, contemporary artists from Nigeria—a group known as the Ahiamwen Guild—offered to swap the Benin Bronzes at the British Museum for new ones in 2021. The British Museum did not acquiesce. 
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Local populations often have no such luxury and no such hesitancy. A founding member of the Ahiamwen Guild, Osarobo Zeickner-Okoro, told the news outlet, artnet that “[they] never stopped making the bronzes even after those ones were stolen,” and that “[they] make them even better now.” Credit where it’s due, while the British Museum has yet to take any real action with regard to the Benin Bronzes, other large institutions including the Smithsonian have done so, setting up an exchange program to allow a shared custody of the artifacts. 
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In the case of an Indian murti, as seen in Somnathpura, the local population making the best of what they have could be using a modern stand-in, or using a simple stone. This is important because it makes the holding of these murtis hostage by Western powers more political as a consequence, especially with the proof of how easily provenance is faked, and given how those murtis taken during the colonial era were taken under the pretext that the local population did not know how to care for something they had created themselves. Put plainly, they were taken non-consensually.  
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As a professor of mine once said, it’s incredible what can be done when those in power deem a certain action legal.

2022 | CHICAGO, IL, USA

Back in Chicago, my search continued. My father’s work took precedence, and he didn’t find the time to visit any of the other possible candidates for the home temple of the Sarasvati. As I came upon the final leg of my journey, I began accepting that I would likely not be able to locate the original temple my Sarasvati came from. 
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Every time I went back to the Art Institute, I would go look at her—my Sarasvati. The first few times, the glass casing that she sat behind hurt to look at. Our Deities were never meant to be trapped in that way, and all I could think of every time I saw her was how lonely she must be feeling. How isolated she was.
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Then, one day something changed. 
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It was sometime in March of 2022 that I first noticed it, though I’m not sure when the change actually took place. The glass casing that surrounded Sarasvati had been removed. On first sight I almost didn’t recognize her. The casing had made her seem bigger in a way, occupy more space, and the removal of that glass meant she looked different.
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Had I just imagined the casing? I couldn’t find a single photograph of the murti from when I decided to write about her. The only proof of the alleged glass that I had was a journal entry where I’d described how she sat trapped behind it. I don’t know why I never took a photo. I suppose a part of me assumed she would stay the same, because museums feel so unchanging to me. They feel absolute; like solid structures and representations of systems that don’t change. 
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And yet, here she was. My Sarasvati, encased in glass when I first encountered her, was now open to the air. And I had no idea why. 

I tried to contact the museum multiple times, in particular to speak with its curator of South Asian art, Madhuvanti Ghose, but she never responded. Truly, I can’t blame her. When the museum was asked about people who worked in the South Asian Art department, they responded that Madhuvanti Ghose was the person to talk with. That a collection of over 500 pieces ostensibly fell under one person’s responsibility is telling in and of itself. Ghose’s hectic schedule is evident. It seemed no matter how much I searched, I was only left with more questions, and no real answers.
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It is however interesting that the museum feels it owes no explanation whatsoever for its choices; that it doesn’t feel the need to explain its side of the story. While there are myriad excuses or otherwise that can be given for how the museum is in fact prioritizing the art and artifacts from a certain culture, their behavior continues to imply that they see themselves as beyond reproach. This point is further emphasized by their response (or lack thereof of a proper one) to the returning of the artifacts that they bought from Subhash Kapoor, wherein similar to the Met, all they said publicly was they were looking into it.

These murtis are priceless to the home culture, but even if we were to consider the monetary value bestowed on these antiquities by the art market, Kapoor only sold the best of the best. In 2021, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office returned 248 antiquities to India, which were altogether worth $15 million. Two hundred and thirty five of those were directly linked to Kapoor.

The Four-Armed Sarasvati, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. Image sourced from the Art Institute of Chicago.
Artist: An artisan from the 13th century Hoysala empire

Museums are reckoning with their colonial pasts; in the case of India, other South Asian cultures, and African cultures, colonization and museum culture are inextricably woven together. The continued and unchanging existence of such museums enforces a similar social and political hierarchy of art and culture that was once coerced onto former colonized populations. The unravelling of this can often be uncomfortable and challenge narratives that have been built over the last few hundred years about the larger geopolitical and socio-political structure and hierarchy. But in a world that’s moving forward toward intellectual pluralism, it has never been more important for museums to be transparent in their effort to provide equal and equitable intellectual and cultural spaces. 
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Museums are culturally important institutions. They have an undeniable potential for incredible educational value, and an ability to present different cultures in a cohesive curated space. It is evident that the world we live in is smaller than it ever has been, and an equal exchange of cultures has never been more important in times as politically polarized as the one we find ourselves in today. 
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The issue here is simply that museums are not centers of equal cultural exchange.
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The returning, swapping, or at the very least negotiating of a shared custody, is a much-needed start of a systematic shift in thought to level what has been an unequal playing field for centuries now. These actions acknowledge the value of those traditions today as opposed to subliminally labelling them as dated practices. Alongside this, what is as necessary is the dismantling of the assumed innate superiority of Western ideology and perspective that is prevalent in institutions such as the ones in question.
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Equally notable is that having these conversations allows for a larger platform for these cultures to be celebrated. The Art Institute’s 2008 exhibition, “Benin—Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria” demonstrates this beautifully. The landmark exhibition showcased six centuries of Benin's rich artistic heritage, and brought together more than 220 of the works from collections around the world. It provided a space for the Nigerian diaspora to honor their culture on a global stage. This was before the conversation about repatriation was as widespread as it is now. Think of the possibilities if all cultures had their due respect afforded to them. The opportunity for shared learning and knowledge is astronomical. 

It's important to acknowledge at the time, this exhibition would have been impossible had the Art Institute not had the pieces of the Benin Bronzes it did. However, long-term loans in a new system that values ownership less and values knowledge and learning more could fulfill similar outcomes. The road is long, but well worth traversing.
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When I’d set out on this journey, the sole focus had been to learn more about my Sarasvati, to question century-old frameworks that are only now being called into question on a global scale. Through the process, I also had the opportunity to come across a variety of solutions and collaborative efforts that could result in a more pluralistic museum culture. 

ANYTIME & EVERYTIME  | ANY PLACE & EVERY PLACE

The Hindu concept of time is cyclical, not linear. Time is considered an illusion. Insofar as that might be true, the remainder of this essay exists outside of the structured timeline that has framed it so far. If my search proved anything to me, it was that the strict linearity of Western time didn’t quite fit the framework of an 800-year-old temple still being a place of worship. The argument surrounding restitution always seems to come down to “what is best for the art.” It is important to recognize that this language again frames a murti as an artwork, an object. To have that conversation automatically prefers the Western perspective of it. How does the conversation need to be had for it to be truly equal? If the question were to be flipped and phrased as “what is better for a murti,” the parameters of the dialogue automatically change. 
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Is it in fact better that a murti is kept in a sterile context, not worshipped as it is meant to be, or in the case of the Sarasvati with her broken forearm, not  allowed to move on? Is it better for the murti that museum visitors see her in passing, spend a few minutes looking at her, then go on with their lives? Or is it better that the murti be revered as the sacred entity she is, bowed down to when passed in a temple, and cared for by the rituals designed for her, and others like her? 
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When narratives and categories are constantly defined and controlled by Western powers, it reinforces the historically unequal playing field. It reinforces stereotypes and false realities that were created to uphold a system that allowed one set of people to dictate who the rest of the world was, and what of their culture was globally relevant and valuable, and even socially relevant. If this feels uncomfortable or irrelevant to everyday life, a little bit of research into the real origins of Yoga and a look into how the West has bastardized it wouldn’t be amiss. 
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When what is considered to be art is controlled by one ideology and one intellectual perspective, the artistic traditions that once flourished become relegated to the status of local or tribal art, and “cottage industries”—thereby implying that what the Western art historians or curators call art is contrastingly global and all-inclusive. This is only compounded by many Western museums’ claim to be the protectors of the international historical canon. Who decides that canon? Whose narratives does it privilege? It is also ironic that the self-professed keepers of the historical record erase the traces of the colonial, violent origins of their collections by side-stepping the authority of the communities that birthed the artistic traditions in the first place.
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The unacknowledged hypocrisy feels apparent to those of us who often look at sacred objects, statues of Deities, relics, and artistic traditions that are still very much alive in our culture but sit trapped behind the glass casing of an externally enforced label of being from a past civilization, often separate and distanced from modern and contemporary cultural representations of the human story.
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Museums are unparalleled in the diversity of their reach. People from all over the world, and different walks of life, have the chance to be educated about culturally different practices and traditions when they are on display. However, there is also a comparably large population that sits waiting ready to welcome a murti when it goes back home. India is not only a country of over 1 billion people when the West wants to lecture her about overpopulation. 
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The murti of the Deity Annapurna, that until recently was housed in the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Canada, and was returned and reinstituted in the Kashi Vishwanath temple in India in November of 2021 to cheering crowds, is a great example of this. While there is no record of how many people were there to receive her, on average, the Kashi Vishwanath temple receives 3000 visitors a day. Special occasions have even seen 1,000,000 devotees paying their respects at the temple. That is the magnitude of impact the return of a Deity can have. 

In a world that is only beginning to tackle the real task of decolonization, perhaps it is time that cultural heirlooms and heritage of former colonies are returned to the contexts for which they were carved and created, or at the very least with respect to legal ownership, returned to those who understand the full significance of Who they are looking at. It is also time that the cultural contributions of these former colonies—past, present and upcoming—are held on par to those of our former colonizers, so that we may move toward a true culture of multiplicity of perspectives and knowledge.  
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Museums like the Art Institute spend a lot of time being an encyclopedic force, but can a single institution ever encompass the depth of the knowledge of the hundreds of cultures it purports to? And more importantly, if said institution does not acknowledge the real history of colonization and the impacts it has, what narratives are being constructed, and for whose benefit? To be called encyclopedic is to be considered to have vast and complete knowledge. But what constitutes “complete?” What are you teaching those whom you have a responsibility to?  
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Museums need to function more as cultural experience centers. Think like the vibe of a science museum, where the eye that peruses the collection is less exoticizing and more experiential: one that sincerely considers the context, culture, philosophy and thought process that birthed the artwork. The interactive, and engaging nature of the science museum, responses to challenges of increased accountability, and increased demands for accessibility, are ones that encyclopedic museums would do well to learn from. 
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It is safe to say that museums as institutions are here to stay, but it is important then that we consider the historical origin of these establishments and hold them to the educational purpose they purport. It is no longer enough to issue public apologies and statements that indicate profound thought and consideration. Museums, especially ones like the Art Institute, are accountable to their audience, they are accountable to the cultures they represent, they are accountable to the people. It is 2022. Perhaps it’s time they accept that accountability and begin to create spaces where all cultures and practices are presented on equal standing. 
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Working to dismantle the colonial foundations of the museum, drafting agreements of long-term loans, curating traveling exhibitions, and celebrating the cultural contributions as the uninterrupted traditions they are, rather than as solely historical, are of great import. Picture a traveling exhibition of the Hoysala artistic tradition that would inevitably include my Sarasvati at the Art Institute, but would also feature works by contemporary sculptors giving the art, the artists, and the culture its due. It would establish the Hoysala sculptural tradition as contemporarily relevant and current. 
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The difficult conversations we are having today are sowing the seeds for a new museum culture, and following through on that and cultivating it must be a priority for these institutions. 

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The irony of the situation of Sarasvati, the Deity of Learning, Knowledge, and the Arts being the focus of my investigation is most definitely not lost on me. Fitting that she was whom I was drawn to when I first stepped inside Gallery 141. There are moments in life where people say they didn’t pick a subject, the subject picked them. In the case of my Sarasvati—one year into tracing her journey, understanding how she fits into a country she never consented to being taken to, sitting in a context other than what she was crafted for—that is exactly how I feel. 
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Sarasvati was always the Deity I would mechanically pray to every year during the festival of Vasant Panchami, which marks the preparation for the arrival of spring. It is a festival that is dedicated to Sarasvati. We would place our items of work and study—textbooks, computers, even my electronic keyboard—at her feet to seek her blessing in the shrine we had at my house. My mother would make payasam, a milk-based Indian sweet to celebrate, and I would pray that Sarasvati helped me with my classes, with my work. Truthfully, my relationship to her was fairly transactional. 
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After spending the last year studying, learning, and parsing out what I have about her, and understanding what she means to the population, this changed. In India, we refer to all manifestations of feminine Divinity as “Ma”—Mother. And as I sit here, one year later, I no longer think of Sarasvati as a Deity I considered once a year. To me, She is now Sarasvati Ma. 

My year-long search did not result in my finding out the origin temple of the Sarasvati; in all honesty, it was always a long shot. To then also know that rather than being allowed to move on, were She ever returned to India, She would sit in a museum is equally conflicting. The world we live in today doesn’t lend itself to murtis that have been commodified as She has, following the original cultural traditions. 

I can’t lie, many times over the last year, I wondered how one could put a price on Divinity. How one could provide a valuation for an entity that is priceless. Did that valuation consider the price of colonization? Did it consider the price of labor of the communities that strived for millennia to keep their practices alive? My Sarasvati may well have been purchased by the Asldorfs and gifted to the Art Institute, but the price of Her entry into the museum? I’m not sure that is one that can ever be accounted for. 

I may never find real answers to those questions. And perhaps, in my lifetime, murtis such as my Sarasvati may always be treated as art objects. But I live in hope that one day my Sarasvati can complete Her life cycle and move on, finally ending the centuries-long interruption of Her story.