The pride and poaching of our heritage

Hemang Desai

Jan 26 2015

PRICELESS: Furniture pieces designed by Le Corbusier have fallen prey to the game of the antique vultures and the collectibles industry.

Lost to future

A 17th-century idol of Lord Raghunath, made of pure gold, worth crores of rupees was stolen from Kullu town of Himachal Pradesh in December, 2014. It has been recovered recently.

In April, 2014, the furniture designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, auctioned by Phillips auction house in London, fetched more than Rs 1.62 crore.

The furniture has made many millionaires. They sold the heritage furniture to auction houses abroad since it was thrown out as a piece of junk by an ignorant administration.

UNESCO estimates nearly 50,000 objects have been smuggled out of India between 1979 and 1989 alone, with figures multiplying in the last two decades.

On December 16, 2014, classic modernist furniture pieces, designed by Le Corbusier for the Ahmedabad Textile Mill Owners Association (ATMA) building in Ahmedabad were auctioned at the second floor gallery of the Philips Auction House in New York. The auction was called "The Collector - Icons of Design" and consisted of a conference table, chairs and a wall-cupboard. That title of the auction may have brought a smile on the face of Le Corbusier who reportedly wanted to conquer New York with his urban plans. Whatever the famously irascible, iconoclastic, Calvinistic and caustic Le Corbusier may have thought about the just-concluded auction of furniture made in India by him, the auction was certainly a loss for India for having lost a Modernist legacy made for and in the country.

What is important about the furniture just auctioned off in New York is that it was part of a building designed by Le Corbusier. The design and the installation of furniture was integral to the architecture of Le Corbusier; it brought nuance to his otherwise 'free' and 'open' plans. Hence, the sale of the major furniture items erodes the architectural value and quality of the building. Of course, it also reflects very poorly on the judgment of those who were entrusted to be the caretakers of this architectural legacy.

Corbusier was brought to Ahmedabad by the tradition of patronage of art among the shreshthis and the mahajans of Gujarat – this tradition has a long history going back to the middle ages. The ATMA building in Ahmedabad, constructed in the year 1953-54 where this furniture was located, flaunts Le Corbusier’s affection for “promenade architecture". He makes an architectural gesture by introducing a massive yet graceful ramp through which the visitor is conducted into the building. The building, in a gesture of nobility, leaves a lot of space from the road and the compound boundary as if not to impose itself on the flow of life and traffic of the road. The characteristic fins (sun-breakers) are used by Le Corbusier to reduce the harshness of light and heat of the Indian sun; the plants and flowers grown in them enhance the many charms of the building. If there are stories of the Sabarmati River in each frame of the building, then all curving walls, use of bold colours to suggest the direction of movement, seats, staircases, windows and doors reveal the touch of the master architect who came from a family of goldsmiths. Here concrete pillars shed their usual drabness and dance with squares, triangles and rectangles. The ATMA building is a waltzing summation of Le Corbusier’s architectural vision; the auctioned furniture pieces were a part and parcel of this building before being extracted from it.

Modern to classic 

The furniture designed by Le Corbusier for his buildings in India is a study in what happens to the Modernistic western design when it gets tipsy with a mildly intoxicating colonial touch. The just-auctioned off furniture carries the very signature of the “conscience keeper of Modernism” and, therefore, it is iconic and classic in the second decade of the 21st century. Exuberance surrounds its very surfaces and wooden volumes; its mood is that of the first glorious years of India’s nationhood when in the 1950s it was designed. But that very mood of exuberance was unleashed by the liberation of the nation under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. The liberation stood atop the twin pillars of freedom and democracy around which the sheer genius of Gandhi had mobilised 200 hundred million mostly illiterate people. In doing this, Gandhi was invoking ancient Indian tradition of truth-seeking and non-violence, the intangible heritage of the Vedas, Jainism, Buddhism and many other strands. The edifice of the freedom struggle is part of India’s spiritual heritage. So are the tangible heritage of cultural objects like the furniture pieces designed by Le Corbusier which have fallen prey to the game of the antique vultures and the collectibles industry. It is more than perplexing and poses the question that begs and answer: Why does a nation that prides itself on its sanskriti allow its cultural identity elements to be plundered so often?

Tradition and influence 

It is a part of the received wisdom among the western scholarship to describe Indian furniture making, presumably to have started with the arrival of Europeans in India as traders in the 16th century. Yet one of them, Frederick Litchfield, noted in 1902 in his Illustrated History of Furniture: “The copy in shishem wood of a carved window at Amritzar, in the Punjaub, with its overhanging cornice, ornamental arches, supported by pillars, and the whole surface covered with small details of ornament, is a good example of the sixteenth and seventeenth century work. The various façades of dwelling-houses in teak wood, carved, and still bearing the remains of paint with which part of the carving was picked out represent the work of the contemporary carvers of Ahmedabad, famous for its woodwork.” It may be noted here that only a high tradition can indulge in and contribute to the western design and making it distinctly ‘colonial Indian design’ and that tradition existed in many towns and trade centres across India. It was this tradition in India that had created the “Bombay Furniture’ among other styles during the colonial period.

The recent auction of Le Corbusier furniture is only the latest occurrence; there have been other auctions in the past too! The US-based auction house Wright, in 2011, went ahead with the auction of 24 lots of furniture attributed to Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, despite protests by the UT administration, Chandigarh. The auction house claimed, the Indian Government had organised the sale of this furniture. The director of the auction house declared all the items for auction had been sourced from various government departments in Chandigarh, including Punjab and Haryana High Court, administrative buildings, Chandigarh College of Architecture and the PGI. Astonishingly, there was no procedure in place in the UT for declaring these articles as heritage property. Hence, it never notified any article belonging to Le Corbusier or Jeanneret as “heritage”. Many auctioned articles, like models, plans, moulds, tapestries, furniture were auctioned by the government departments about six times in the past. In 2010, a bidder had set a record by paying $ 24,000 for a cast-iron manhole cover from the city at French auction house in Paris!

A familiar tale 

The story of the plunder of artifacts from India is a familiar one and is a part of the world-wide story. The journey of the priceless bronze Buddha weighing 500 kg and being the tallest in the world began in 1861, from Sultangunj, Bihar to Birmingham, UK. Apparently while laying down railway tracks at Sultangunj, an English engineer, E B Harris, chanced upon giant legs of the Buddha protruding out of the excavated land. He took only £200 to sell the priceless Buddha to a Midlands industrialist. Similar tales are those of the Koh-i-noor and the Amaravati sculptures, as also of the twenty seven17th-century bronzes of a government museum in Tamil Nadu in 2009.

While the 'Birmingham Buddha' gave birth to the famous Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in 1864, countless statues of the Buddha continue to be vandalised and smuggled across borders to eager antique dealers and collectors. The November 1978 General Conference of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), meeting in Paris, at its twentieth session adopted a revised Act for the Protection of Moveable Cultural Property in conjunction with the existing International Exchange of Cultural Property in 1976. 

Statues of gods and goddesses, antiquities, works of art and heritage fixtures are regularly smuggled abroad as replicas from villages in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and other states. The scale of plunder is staggering and baffles imagination. UNESCO estimates nearly 50,000 objects have been smuggled out of India between 1979 and 1989 alone, with figures multiplying in the last two decades. Unfortunately, UNESCO Conventions have no enforcement capability though signed by 120 countries. Estimated upwards of a $6 billion annually, the illegal trafficking in Cultural Properties is third only to the narcotics and the arms trade.

Where the law fails 

A way out of this quagmire may be a stringent re-enactment of the antiquated Indian Treasure Trove Act of 1949. But the real culprits of the plunder are the wealthy users and “connoisseurs” of Europe and America for indulging their lust based on money power. Stylish aesthetics and indulgences of consumption can find a happy hunting ground in the capitalist art market place, the world is indeed as it is! While the world carries on its raw ethos, a better way out for a civilisation like India would be to spread awareness about the historic and other art of the country among its own citizens and to instill in them the culture to value and cherish it. Continuous education in the matters of heritage among the citizens can bring its intrinsic value in a sharper focus than it currently is. One way to start this may be for the officialdom of the departments of Culture and Education to take advantage of the breath of fresh air surrounding the new political dispensation in New Delhi and start a brisk awareness programme that reaches all levels of society, especially in the education process. The art and heritage of the country in all its forms make the identity elements of the country and this pulsating beauty from the past gives a major meaning to the civilisation.