July 28, 2013: A FORTNIGHT after a valuable statue owned by the Art Gallery of NSW was found to have been stolen from a temple in southern India, the case has been referred to police investigators there.

The so-called Idol Wing of the police department in Tamil Nadu, southern India, has been furnished with a photograph taken in 1974 of the Ardhanarishvara, which remains on display in the Sydney art museum's upper Asian gallery.

The 1000-year-old stone carving of Shiva, with the bull Nandi, was stolen from the Vriddhachalam temple about 200km south of Tamil Nadu's capital Chennai some time after 1974 when it was photographed at the temple.

The photo was taken by the French Institute Pondicherry, a research unit funded by the French government which from the 1950s has sought to create a database of significant antiquities in southern India.

The database has proven integral to building the case against alleged looting mastermind Subhash Kapoor, who was arrested in Germany on an Interpol warrant in 2011 and extradited to southern India a year ago. Kapoor operated from a Manhattan shop but is alleged to have worked with thieves in southern India and elsewhere.

The 64-year-old's trial is imminent. A reporter for The Hindu newspaper, Srivasthan A, told The Australian: "The charge sheet has been filed, the evidences and papers notified."

Tamil Nadu police now have a copy of the French Institute's photo of the Ardhanarishvara, certifying the statue was in place four years after documentation furnished to the NSWAG by Kapoor claimed it was sold by a Delhi dealer. The gallery paid Kapoor $300,000 for the statue in 2004, when Edmund Capon was the gallery's director and Jackie Menzies was curator of Asian art.

A researcher at the French Institute told The Australian that in 21 years he did not field an inquiry from an Australian art gallery researching Indian artefacts, despite the institute's well-known database intended to serve exactly that purpose.

Last year, after Kapoor was arrested and Canberra's National Gallery of Australia was revealed to have been one its his most enthusiastic clients, a curator from there contacted the IFP for the first time.

Current director of the NSW gallery Michael Brand said he was "feeling a strong sense of deja vu" in relation to the case. Mr Brand oversaw the return of looted artefacts to Greece and Italy in his former role as director of Los Angeles's Getty Museum.

Mr Capon previously told The Australian he could not remember details of this particular acquisition and did not respond to another email yesterday.

Source: The Australian, DT. July 28, 2013.