Events Archives
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Illustrated Talk – The Role of Photo Archives in Restitution of Cultural Property by S. Vijay Kumar
Date: 28th March 2025
Venue: INTACH Multipurpose Hall, 71, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi
Time: 4.30 pm IST
Live streaming
YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/live/j7QAu71dVuQDear Friends,
We are delighted to invite you to the Illustrated Talk on 28th March in the Multipurpose Hall,
INTACH, New Delhi.The global art market’s increasing shift toward private sales and the removal of past auction records present significant challenges for tracking and reclaiming looted cultural heritage. However, historical photo archives, combined with modern digital tools like Google 360 Street View, have emerged as crucial instruments in restitution efforts.
This presentation will explore how photographic documentation—from colonial-era surveys to institutional archives—has been instrumental in identifying and recovering stolen artifacts. The India Pride Project (IPP), co-founded by Vijay Kumar, has been at the forefront of this movement, leveraging extensive image archives and open-source intelligence to trace
looted Indian antiquities. IPP has played a pivotal role in several high-profile restitutions, including the 12th-Century Nalanda Buddha (London): Stolen from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) site museum in Nalanda in 1961; The 8th-Century Nalanda Buddha (LACMA); A bronze Buddha Shakyamuni, stolen from the Nalanda Museum in 1961 and several others which will be covered in the talk.S. Vijay Kumar is a heritage activist, researcher, and co-founder of the India Pride Project (IPP), a globally recognized initiative dedicated to tracking and facilitating the restitution of looted Indian antiquities. After spending 15 years in Singapore, where he played a crucial role in uncovering international smuggling networks, he is now based in India, continuing his efforts to combat cultural heritage crimes and advocate for stronger provenance research.
Vijay has been instrumental in the identification and recovery of several high-profile stolen artifacts, including the Vriddachalam Ardhanari, Sripuranthan Nataraja, Toledo Ganesha, the Nalanda Buddhas (London & LACMA), and the Punnainallur Nataraja (Asia Society, USA).
A regular speaker and columnist, Vijay has worked closely with global law enforcement agencies such as Interpol, Europol, the CBI, and Indian Customs (DRI). His contributions have been acknowledged in United Nations reports and at the Unite for Heritage Conference (Yale, UNESCO). He is also the author of The Idol Thief, which chronicles the dark underworld of antiquities trafficking.
Join us for tea after the event.
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The Fifteenth Pupul Jayakar Memorial Lecture – Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire by Anirudh Kanisetti
Date: 17th April 2025
Venue: Alliance Francaise, 72, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi
Time: 6.30 pm IST
Live streaming
YouTube link: https://youtube.com/live/cY8Ft2o9SMADear Friends,
It gives us great pleasure to invite you to the Fifteenth Pupul Jayakar Memorial Lecture on 17th April, 2025 at Alliance Francaise, New Delhi.
The lecture will be streamed live. The link for it is given below.
https://youtube.com/live/cY8Ft2o9SMAAll are welcome.
The Chola Empire (850–1279 CE) was one of the most remarkable polities in medieval Asia, as creative and imaginative as they were expansive and warlike. They built stupendous temples – the tallest freestanding structures on earth after the pyramids of Egypt. Chola queens popularized new forms of gods and worship, such as the iconic Nataraja and the singing of Tamil poems to deities: both integral to Hinduism today. And they were spectacularly daring, raiding not just the powerful Deccan and North India but also Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. All of these had lasting impacts on not just on South India but on the world.
In this boldly conceptualised lecture, award-winning historian Anirudh Kanisetti brings to life the world of the Cholas. Not just the world of kings and queens attended by retinues of generals and attendants – but the stories of the ‘little people’, whose lives were buffeted by big events. Based on thousands of inscriptions and hundreds of secondary sources, Lords of Earth and Sea is not just a procession of dazzling kings and queens but transports us from palaces to peasant settlements of over a thousand years ago.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian specialising in ancient and early medieval India. He is the author of Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire, and Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas. He hosts two podcasts: Echoes of India and YUDDHA: The Indian Military History podcast. Anirudh has won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman, and Tata Literature Live’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award. He was an Open Mind of 2022, and on the New Indian Express’ 40 Under 40. Anirudh was formerly Editor at the MAP Academy, where he worked on the Encyclopaedia of Indian Art. Prior to this, he was Associate Fellow at the Takshashila Institution. His work has received grants from Princeton University, the India Foundation for the Arts, and MAP Academy.
Join us for Tea at 6:00 pm before the event.
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Lecture Series: Maritime Heritage of India by the field experts
Date: 13 – 16 May 2025
Venue: INTACH Multipurpose Hall, 71, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi
Time: 4.00 – 5.00 pmDear Friends,
It gives us great pleasure to invite you to a series of lectures on Maritime Heritage of India from 13th May to 16th May at INTACH.
India’s Maritime History can be traced back to the ancient times. The evidence from archaeological finds at Lothal, marine archaeology and several other sources indicate that India enjoyed a robust seafaring history and unique boat building traditions.
The curated lecture series on the subject will unfold fascinating and diverse aspects of our people’s seafaring history by some of the best domain experts in the field.
Please find below the schedule for the series.
Join us for tea after the lecture.
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Lecture Series on ‘Maritime Heritage of India’: First lecture by Shri Sanjeev Sanyal
Date: 13 May 2025
Venue: INTACH Multipurpose Hall, 71, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi
Time: 4.00 pmYouTube link: https://youtu.be/id5xkItoWh4
Dear Friends,
We are delighted to invite you to an illustrated Talk – The Stitched Ship Project: Recreating India’s Ancient Shipbuilding Tradition by Shri Sanjeev Sanyal at INTACH.
The talk will focus on a 5th century Indian Merchant vessel being built in Goa using the original materials and design. The idea is to then sail it along ancient routes in the ‘Indian Ocean region’.
Sanjeev Sanyal is an economist and writer. He is currently a member of the Economic Advisory Council of the Prime Minister. He served as the Principal Economic Adviser to the Finance Minister for five years, till February 2022. He has represented India at many international forums such as OECD and G7, and was the Co-Chair of the G20’s Framework Working Group. Prior to joining the Government, he spent over two decades in financial markets and was the Global Strategist and Managing Director at Deutsche Bank.
He is a history aficionado and has done extensive primary research on the subject, enabling him to write several bestselling books, including Land of the Seven Rivers, The Ocean of Churn, India in the Age of Ideas, and The Indian Renaissance. He has also published over two hundred articles and columns in leading nationals apart from co-authoring and editing six Economic Surveys of the Government of India between 2017 and 2022.
Join us for tea after the lecture.
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Lecture Series on ‘Maritime Heritage of India’: The second lecture by Dr Swarup Bhattacharyya
Date: 14 May 2025
Venue: INTACH Multipurpose Hall, 71, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi
Time: 4.00 pmYouTube link: https://youtu.be/Z6GruSWaKs4
Dear Friends,
We are delighted to invite you to an illustrated Talk – The Boat Building Traditions of India with focus on Eastern India by Dr Swarup Bhattacharyya at INTACH.
Bengal is a land shaped by water. It is crisscrossed by rivers, streams, and countless water bodies. Long ago, the people who lived here learned to live with water—not just survive it, but travel on it, work with it, and even build their lives around it. They created many kinds of boats, each suited to a different need, overcoming the power of rivers—and even the ocean. This deep connection with water gave rise to what is called boat culture.
To understand this rich heritage, documenting the boat-making traditions of Bengal is essential. Therein, Dr Bhattacharyya, Professor John Cooper and Dr Zeeshan Ali Sheikh, recorded and digitized a special and rare boat-building tradition from Bengal. The boat they focused on is called a chhot, a unique type with a smooth skin, rabbeted and stapled joints, a strong keel, and a V-shaped bottom.
The chhot they recorded was built by a master craftsman, Panchanan Mandal, and his four sons. They built the full-size boat, 35 feet long and 9.5 feet wide. Though this type of boat is no longer used in daily life, documenting has helped preserve it forever.
This is the first boat digitization project of its kind in India. All the materials collected are now kept in the British Museum Archive, and the boat itself will be preserved at the National Maritime Museum in Lothal, Gujarat.
Dr Bhattacharyya has been researching on Bengal BOAT since 1997. Man-Boat Relationship became the focus of research which was looked from an anthropological perspective through intensive field-based investigation. He researched at Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde, Denmark as the Guest Research Scholar and also at Centre for Maritime Archaeology, Southampton University, UK.
Presently he is working as Curator of National Maritime Museum of the National Maritime Heritage Complex at Lothal, Gujarat. Actively took part in the process of development of Heritage Boats of Bengal Gallery in Kolkata, Water Transport Gallery of IIT-Kharagpur and Odisha State Maritime Museum, Cuttack.
Join us for tea after the lecture.
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Lecture Series on ‘Maritime Heritage of India’: The third lecture by Dr Rajiv Nigam
Date: 15 May 2025
Venue: INTACH Multipurpose Hall, 71, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi
Time: 4.00 pmYouTube link: https://youtu.be/iggQbmEksNE
Dear Friends,
We are delighted to invite you to an illustrated Talk – Revelations from Marine Archaeology by Dr Rajiv Nigam at INTACH.
Do sea level fluctuations explain the existence of the world’s oldest dockyard at Lothal? Is there any scientific evidence for the submergence of Krishna’s legendary city of Dwarka? Was it possible to connect India and Sri Lanka through Ramsetu? How does evidence indicate that the world’s oldest tsunami protection measures were adopted at Dholavira? Whether there is a possibility of 9.5 thousand years old submerged city at 30-40 m water depth off Surat. Many such interesting discoveries will be discussed by Dr Rajiv Nigam.
Dr Nigam is a former Chief Scientist and head of Marine Geology and Archaeology at the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa. He has significantly advanced the field of marine archaeology in India. His pioneering research has unveiled how ancient Indian civilisations adapted to and were influenced by sea-level changes.
Join us for tea after the lecture.
