While there is everything to be said for preserving and protecting the country’s art treasures, it is open to question whether the Art and Antiquities Act will, as it stands, best serve this purpose. The Central government, particularly the Ministry of Education which has been responsible for pushing through and enforcing this piece of legislation, will, therefore, do well to re-examine it even at this late stage.
The single biggest weakness of the new law is that it makes no distinction between a national treasure which deserves to be preserved and an art object which happens to be a hundred years old. The consequences will soon become evident to anyone who is genuinely interested in protecting the country’s artistic heritage and has an open mind.
A couple of examples may be cited to illustrate the point. Thus a collector possessing an old coin, irrespective of whether it is one of copper, silver or gold, has to register it with the designated authority with four photographs of postcard size on each side. While this will cost him around Rs. 15, a copper coin of the late Mughal or even the Sultanate period could until a couple of weeks ago be bought for about one rupee. Indeed not long ago coins of this kind were freely sold in Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta by weight – around Rs. 70 a kilo – and one could pick and choose.
SMALL COINS
These coins are now being melted, it is said. And the same story is being repeated in respect of silver coins for the understandable reason that in this case, too, it is not worth the dealer’s while to expose himself to the cost and harassment of registering them. For, while the metal content of a silver coin is calculated to be around Rs. 15, it was sold for Rs. 20 to Rs. 25. Which means the profit cannot even cover the cost of the photographs. The dealer incidentally has to get ten photographs because he has to file six with the authority concerned and to maintain an album.
Thus one collector’s item which has been in ample supply is likely to become truly scarce as a result of the new law. Surely this cannot be the government’s intention, specially when the museums in the country possess as large a stock of these coins as they can possibly wish to hold.
It will clearly be wrong to suggest that the supply of terracottas has been as plentiful as that of coins of up to the Sultanate period. But it has been sufficiently large to saturate the relatively small market for them, with the result that till recently fairly old terracottas of one-to-two-inch height could be purchased for small sums ranging between Rs. 5 and Rs. 15. This item, too, is likely to become scarce.
In this case, in addition to the price factor, one additional point needs to be made. Small terracottas were evidently made in hundreds of thousands in and around major art centres like Mathura and Banaras and they lie buried in a haphazard manner. Till now they used to be taken out by peasants after the monsoon and sold to dealers who in turn took them to big cities like Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta where they could find customers. Under the new dispensation, the peasants will be committing a crime in digging out the terracottas and the dealers in buying them for the simple reason that a piece which is not registered up to July 6 cannot be sourced afterwards. And the small number of Indians, who collected these pieces because they were attractive for the prices at which they have been available, will shy away from them because they will need to identify the source for registration purposes.
TERRACOTTAS
The authorities can to some extent mitigate the problems by offering to buy terracottas at a reasonable price from anyone who finds them without insisting on his source and auctioning them. But there is no such provision in the Act and it does not appear that they intend to do any such thing.
The coins and terracottas are perhaps matters of peripheral interest to the authorities, who are primarily concerned with the problem of checking the theft and smuggling of major stone and bronze sculptures, paintings and manuscripts. If that is so, the relevant portion of the Act should have been drafted differently. Coins up to the Sultanate period and terracottas of small size should in that case have been exempted from registration.
The story does not end there. For, the authorities cannot be unaware of the fact that bronzes of certain kinds – for example, the small south Indian representations of saints and gods and goddesses of one to two inches from the 15th century onwards, Maharashtrian horses and riders representing village gods and some forms of Shiva – have been available in thousands at modest prices, and that it will serve no useful national purpose to make the dealers and collectors go through the costly business of having them photographed and registered. The nation’s art heritage is not so pitifully small as to require us to preserve such items.
One additional point needs to be noted about bronzes of small and even medium size, that is pieces of up to six inches in height. Most of these were manufactured for worship in private homes and they were and are discarded when the facial features are worn out or they are in some way damaged. As such they have found and continue to find their way to junk shops in small towns. This means that thousands of them were melted in the past, that thousands of others escaped melting because some enterprising individuals began collecting them and that thousands of such pieces are now likely to go into the melting pot because they will not be registered and cannot therefore be offered for sale as antiques. This is equally true of items like temple bells and “raths.” It may be worth recalling in this connection that even small Chola and early Vijayanagar bronzes could be bought for a few rupees in Chawri Bazar, Delhi, Mutton Street, Bombay, and Sealdah Market, Calcutta, until the early ‘fifties.
Fragments of stone pieces, too, lie buried in the beds of rivers and ponds or scattered in jungles in different parts of the country. Apart from being mutilated and broken most of these are by no means masterpieces worthy of being preserved as national treasures. In nine cases out of ten they are the products of second class artisans and they are repetitive. Not only is it beyond the financial and physical resources of the Archaeological Survey of India to collect them and store them but it will not be worth its while to do so. For as it is, the National Museum in Delhi has to keep about 80 per cent of its acquisitions in craters for lack of space for display and the same is perhaps true of most other museums in the country.
It does not follow from this that the government should permit a free for all in this field. It cannot and must not. But the practical alternative for it is to enlist the cooperation of dealers so that pieces of national importance can be separated and preserved by various museums and the rest sold. Also it should remember that the crux of the problem is that there are not enough collectors in the country, that smuggling is at least partly the result of lack of Indian buyers, and that this activity requires to be encouraged through tax rebate, as in the United States, if India’s art heritage is to be protected against both smuggling and neglect. The government cannot possibly find the resources for tackling this task by itself.
VANDALS
Vandals have doubtless been busy during the last two decades. They have despoiled many places of worship and managed to steal masterpieces like the famous Shivapuram Natraj for which the Simon Norton Foundation in the United States paid $1 million. But what amounts virtually to a blanket ban on all purchases and sales of art objects is not necessary to cope with this problem. A stricter vigil at customs and occasional auctions in which foreigners can participate will clearly be a simpler and more effective method of dealing with it.
It appears from the provisions of the Act that its framers have ignored the obvious proposition that the last hundred years have not witnessed the production of worthwhile works in traditional arts. Stone sculptures made after the 12th century, for example, cannot justly be regarded as a national treasure. The line should be drawn at the 14-15th century in respect of bronzes and the 18th century in that of paintings.
Finally, has anyone calculated the cost to the nation of photographing millions of art objects, making copies and filing them in a manner that they can be easily retrieved when they are required?
The Times of India, 2 June 1976