Key Points
- Over 1,400 stolen antiquities worth $10 million returned to India.
- Sculptures looted from Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in the 1960s and 1980s.
- Items were seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
- Investigations continue into trafficking networks, including those of Subhash Kapoor and Nancy Wiener.
- Another 600 stolen antiquities from India will be returned soon.
Looma News
The United States has returned more than 1,400 stolen antiquities, worth $10 million, to India. These include important sculptures taken from Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. One of the items, a sandstone sculpture of a celestial dancer, was stolen from a temple in Madhya Pradesh in the 1980s. The sculpture was split into two pieces to make it easier to smuggle and was later reassembled. It was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York in the early 1990s and stayed on display until it was seized by the Antiquities Traffic Unit (ATU) in 2023.
Another item returned was the Tanesar Mother Goddess, a carving made of green-grey schist. It was stolen from the village of Tanesara-Mahadeva in Rajasthan in the 1960s. An Indian archaeologist had documented the sculpture in the late 1950s, but it was stolen a few years later. By 1968, it had made its way to a gallery in Manhattan, passing through two other collectors before being acquired by the Met in 1993. The ATU seized it in 2022. These antiquities are part of a wider effort to recover stolen cultural heritage linked to criminal trafficking networks, including those of infamous traffickers Subhash Kapoor and Nancy Wiener.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. highlighted that investigations into criminal trafficking networks exploiting India’s cultural heritage are ongoing. Under Bragg’s leadership, the Antiquities Trafficking Unit has recovered more than 2,100 stolen items, worth nearly $230 million, from over 30 countries. The statement also mentioned that around 1,000 more antiquities, including over 600 stolen from India, are expected to be returned in the coming months.
