Nobody Seems To Be Bothered About Our Heritage

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

“the ASI was first tipped off about the Durga’s whereabouts in 2011 by Rakesh Kaul, a US-based Kashmiri Pandit industrialist whom Subhash Kapoor had allegedly tried to “cultivate” as a client.”

Dr. “Pal visited the Linden-Museum to deliver a talk and, while he was being given a tour of the museum’s assets in the building’s basement, he saw, “to his horror”, the Tengpora Durga.

“The then curator of the museum’s Indian department, Dr Gerd Kreisel, informed Pal that Kapoor had sold them the piece, along with all necessary paperwork and invoices. He (Pal) immediately got in touch with me, and I flew down to India in 2011 to inform ASI officials about Linden-Museum being in possession of the idol,” Kaul said.

Among the documents submitted to the museum by ASI is the “eyewitness account” of Asian arts scholar John Siudmak, who has claimed to have seen the Durga in the Tengpora temple before it was stolen. Siudmak’s account makes the ASI’s case “extremely strong”, Director (Antiquities) D N Dimri told The Indian Express.

“It was in a small shrine protected by an iron grill. Ironically, the villagers would not allow us to photograph the piece since they thought that this would result in it being stolen. Beigh supplied me with the photograph that was used in my PhD thesis. At the beginning of the militancy, I was informed that it had been stolen, and I sent copies of Beigh’s photograph to Martin Lerner (MET) and Stan Czuma (Cleveland) to alert them. Dr Pal was also informed and certainly knew about it in 1994 since he was one of my examiners,” Siudmak is learnt to have written in an email to Rakesh Kaul”.