Know your Act

National Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972

Why the Act:

To regulate the export trade in antiquities and art treasures, to provide for the prevention of smuggling of, and fraudulent dealings in, antiquities, to provide for the compulsory acquisition of antiquities and art treasures for preservation in public places and to provide for certain other matters connected therewith or incidental or ancillary thereto.

Antiquity includes:

Article, object or thing declared by the Central Government, by notification in the Official Gazette, to be an antiquity for the purposes of this Act which has been in existence for not less than one hundred years;

Any coin, sculpture, painting, epigraph or other work.

Any article, object or thing detached from a building cave
Any article, object or thing illustrative of science, art, crafts, literature, religion, customs, morals or politics in bygone ages;

Any article, object or thing of historical interest;

Any manuscript, record or other document which is of scientific, historical, literary or aesthetic value and which has been in existence for not less than seventy-five years;

National Art Treasure:

'Art treasure' means any human work of art, not being an antiquity, declared by the Central Government by notification in the Official Gazette, to be an art treasure for the purposes of its artistic or aesthetic value.

The nine artists that come under the purview of the National Art Treasure Act are:

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941), Raja Ravi Verma (1848-1906), Jamini Roy (1887-1972), Nandalal Bose (1883-1966), Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938), Abanindranath Tagore(1871-1951), Sailoz Mukherjee (1908-1960), Nicolas Roerich (1874-1947)

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