If, at any moment, I thought that was a real antique Indian sculpture, I would never, ever have bought it. I grew up in India. I saw temples being sabotaged… It’s sacrilege.
on a statue she bought that was seized by Canadian authorities,
This year, in a gesture of goodwill, then- prime minister Stephen Harper presented his Indian counterpart with a sandstone sculpture — the voluptuous “Parrot Lady,” purportedly a 900- year- old artifact stolen from a world heritage site in southern India.
But a question remained: How did Canada get its hands on this supposed antique?
Using court documents, federal records and interviews, the National Post has unravelled the story behind the statue’s journey to Canada — along with questions about its authenticity and an allegation it briefly left the government’s hands.
An Alberta woman imported the sculpture in early 2010 after buying it from an American on eBay for just under $4,000.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Patricia Burns, 60, of Sherwood Park, said she was — and still is — convinced the sculpture is a “nice knock-off.”
The seller had dozens of sculptures in his inventory, she said. So did a few other sellers on eBay.
“There were so many and they were so reasonably priced. I thought, well, they must’ve come from a factory where these all got knocked off,” she said.
Burns said she would never have bought the sculpture if she thought it had been looted from a temple in Khajuraho, a UNESCO world heritage site.
“If, at any moment, I thought that was a real antique Indian sculpture, I would never, ever have bought it. I grew up in India. I saw temples being sabotaged. … It’s sacrilege,” she said.
A South Asian art expert told the Department of Canadian Heritage the sculpture appeared from photographs to be genuine, likely 10th to 12th century, but could also be a fake.
“The patina of the stone, the style of carving, and hack marks on the back of the stone are consistent with other works of the period in museum collections,” Deepali Dewan, a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, wrote in an email. “There is a slight possibility that it is a good modern copy (there are plenty of stone workshops in India producing this style of sculpture as modern reproductions).”
Burns said the sculpture — which depicts a dancing woman, with a parrot on her shoulder — was billed on eBay as being centuries- old. But she was skeptical.
“I mean you don’t expect something that old to go that cheap,” she said — she paid $3,818.59.
Still, she figured it would be a nice addition to her home, which is filled with art. It would also connect her to her childhood. She was born in Kolkata, while her father was working as an accountant with Imperial Tobacco of India.
“I wanted something to remind me of my dad.”
The sculpture arrived at Edmonton airport in January 2010.
Burns went to pick it up, but customs officials refused to release it. Court records show border authorities were concerned it might be a “foreign cultural property.”
They contacted Jennifer Mueller, a senior official with the Canadian Heritage department, who, in turn, consulted experts about the statue’s possible origins.
Besides Dewan, she sought an opinion from Katherine Hacker, an art history professor at the University of British Columbia. Her response: “Even though the face is surprisingly intact, the more I looked at the sculpture the less convinced I was of it as a recent copy.”
She suggested the sculpture was probably not from Khajuraho itself, but from the area.
Meanwhile, Burns became worried. What if the sculpture was real? She didn’t want to have anything to do with it and got most of her money back through PayPal.
This is where things get weird — the statue was delivered to her home without warning.
“It was some kind of UPS truck that brought it to the house. It was a fairly old gentleman,” she said.
“I said to him I should help him get it out because it was a lot heavier than it looked … He said, no, not at all, he could manage it perfectly himself. Of course … he proceeded to drop it.”
When they opened the package, part of the statue’s hand had broken off. Burns said she told the driver to take it back to the airport.
This week, Heritage officials insisted the statue never left the custody of the Canada Border Services Agency, nor did it undergo any repairs while in the government’s hands.
Burns thought that was the end of it. But in July 2014, she was served with a statement of claim from the Attorney General of Canada. “I freaked out,” she said. To explain what happened, it is necessary to backtrack to August 2011. That’s when Mueller wrote to the Indian High Commission, telling officials the statue was in Edmonton. She relayed what the two Canadian experts had told her and asked if India wanted it back.
The next month, an official replied, attaching a letter from Gautam Sengupta, director-general of the Archeological Survey of India.
“There is hardly any scope of doubt that the sculpture in question … is of Indian origin. It is a definite piece of superb Indian craftsmanship of early medieval period,” Sengupta wrote.
After several more exchanges, India formally requested the sculpture’s return in April, 2014.
But before Canada could hand it over, the government needed to file a claim in Federal Court to recover the property.
Burns, who thought she had relinquished ownership years earlier, did not put up a fuss. In October, 2014, a judge authorized the return of the statue to India.
In April, Harper formally handed the statue Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister.
But Burns still has doubts whether the sculpture is a true antiquity.
“It could be that somebody in a knock-off shop is laughing,” she said.