Art is creativity. It is perhaps the most free and conscious effort of human beings to express their creative urges. As such, it cannot but be in stark opposition to plunder. Plunder not just destroys artifacts, but by tearing them out of their social and historical content, destroys a large part of their creative meaning. Worse, plunderers like the East India Company or the US invaders in Iraq recently, destroy the productive base of the areas they plunder. They reduce creative expression to mere survival. So those who love art must learn to detest plunder. And investors too must consciously reject buying plundered objects as plunder is a direct threat to any form of investment.
This is all the more important today as the global superpower, the US, has embarked on building a culture of plunder as never before. This is evident from the recent sales of Christie?s and Sotheby?s at New York, in which half the lots up for sale constituted plundered artifacts. And now, on May 25, Sotheby?s will auction objects plundered from the palace of Tipu Sultan at Srirangapatnam some two centuries ago.
All the reports of the auction fail to mention that Tipu Sultan was among the most modern men of his time. He was conversant with the ideas of the French Jacobins and a member of the Jacobin club, writing letters to the Jacobins as ?citizen Tipu.? He saluted the American declaration of independence with a 101-gun salute. He welcomed the fall of the Bastille and planted a tree of liberty in Srirangapatnam.
Simply watching the auction of artifacts plundered from the palace of one of India?s most modern thinkers is not in keeping with modern concepts of justice. His belongings must be returned. His family still lives in Kolkata, so the objects belong to them. The government of India ought to protest against this sale of objects robbed from our country just as the European Jews who demanded and got back the art works plundered from their collections by the Nazis. So, if European Jews can get back objects plundered from them, there is no reason why objects plundered from Tipu?s palace should not be returned to his family.
The Government of India should come forward and demand the sale be stopped until the owners of Tipu?s property, his heirs, get their due. This is the only way to ensure plunder does not become popularised as a way of amassing wealth as it would make all efforts at evolving proper strategies of investment futile. So the investor as much as the artist has a stake in ensuring plunder does not pay.
If the artist does so to protect creativity, the investor does it to ensure its proper protection from criminal appropriation in the long run. One of the ways of doing it is to ensure that plundered artifacts are not sold. The best way for this is to make sure that the governments concerned act efficiently and in time. Failing that, I am not very hopeful that governments of countries whose wealth was built on plunder will do anything just and proper, buyers must come out and refuse to buy plundered objects. To an extent, they are doing it. That is why if we look at sales of modern art and sculpture, we find that their value appreciates far faster than that of plundered wealth. This is the response of the investor to try and discredit crime in the process of investment.
Indeed, in many ways I think this is the best way to protect investment. Investors ought to behave more like farmers than hunters as they tend to do today. They should develop an environment in which investment flourishes as part of a process of evaluating creativity correctly and encouraging it by investing in it.
One of the best ways of preventing crime is to make it unprofitable. And the investor?s consciousness is the best way to do so as criminals flourish only because people are prepared to pay for stolen goods. If they did not, crime would not pay and criminals would be forced to find other ways of making profits.
So, even in a period when plunder is once more being patronised in the West, the presence of non-resident Indians and Chinese in the US and Western Europe is a civilising influence on cultures built on plunder and piracy that refuse to go forward with time. It is to their presence in the US that we owe the sale of a work of MF Husain, from his ?Shatranj Ke Khilari? (chess players) series inspired by Satyajit Ray?s film of Munshi Prem Chand?s anti-feudal and anti-colonial story set at the time of the British conquest of Avadh, at no less than $144,000 or Rs 63,08,640, at the Sotheby?s auction of April 1 in New York.
This is a good example of how investors are investing not only in outstanding works, but also in good ideas embodied in them to assure their value for the future.
