Accident Ended Life of a Scholar

The man killed by a hit-and-run driver in Laguna Beach this week was identified Thursday as a distinguished former university professor and art dealer in town to complete a TV script on the art and philosophy of his native India.

Satish Chander Kapoor, 73, “was a visionary,” said Angus Burr, a longtime friend and collaborator with whom Kapoor was staying in South Laguna. “He was a man in time, a renowned expert on the philosophy of science who was going to move the world forward through the synthesis of two cultures: the mystic East and the rational West.”

Kapoor was born in the age of the British Raj, when India was ruled by Great Britain. In 1945 he won a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris and at age 29 became a full professor there. That began a long academic career during which he taught the philosophy of science at Oxford and Cambridge universities in England, Columbia and UC Berkeley in the United States and, most recently, the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, where he created the university’s first department in that discipline.

While Kapoor was teaching in Canada, he developed a keen interest in Eskimo sculpture. He made frequent trips to Alaska, where he would parachute from small airplanes into remote villages to collect local works of art, Burr said. About 1973, he said, Kapoor resigned from academia and returned to London, where he opened the Anthropos Gallery with his substantial collection. It eventually became a noted center of Eskimo, Native American, East Indian and African art. Kapoor was one of the first art dealers in the world to sell Shona art, a now-popular form developed in Zimbabwe.

In 1980, Burr said, Kapoor closed the gallery and moved back to India, from where for the past 21 years he has promoted Indian art and philosophy. The script he was in Laguna Beach to complete, Burr said, was for a TV documentary based on a 10,000-mile tour of India the two men had taken in 1998.

“We were just getting to the point of selling it,” Burr said. “He would have been here for two or three months.”

Instead, Kapoor was fatally injured about 6 p.m. Tuesday while crossing Coast Highway after apparently walking to a local fast-food outlet. He was hit by as many as seven vehicles, but investigators are focusing on the second, which they believe struck the fatal blow. Its driver stopped briefly, then fled, witnesses said. Late Thursday, police said they were still seeking the driver of the vehicle, described as a late-model mid-size white or silver SUV, possibly a Toyota 4Runner or Isuzu Rodeo.

Kapoor was carrying no identification at the time, police said.

Because Burr’s house was being remodeled, he said, he assumed his friend had gone to a motel. Burr did not report him missing until the next day.

Friends and neighbors who gathered at Burr’s home Thursday afternoon said they were deeply angered by the death. “I am completely distraught and upset,” said Thomas Kelly, 51, who lives nearby and was close enough to the accident to be caught in its ensuing traffic jam. “A traffic light would have saved him. On many of these streets going down to Coast Highway, it’s a very dangerous situation.”

They were distressed, too, that investigators first presumed that Kapoor was a vagrant. “I guess in Laguna Beach,” said Kelly, “anyone with fast food is a transient.”

A private memorial service is set for Sunday at a Laguna Beach home where friends had planned a dinner with Kapoor as guest of honor. He is survived by his wife, Briony Kapoor, and two grown children, all of whom live in England.