The trafficked goods recovered include items that, until recently, were on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among them is a sandstone sculpture of a celestial dancer that was smuggled from central India to London, before being illegally sold to one of the Met’s patrons and donated to the museum.
The repatriations resulted from “several ongoing investigations” into looting networks, including those operated by convicted art traffickers Nancy Wiener and Subhash Kapoor, an American antiquities dealer who was sentenced to 10 years in jail for running a multimillion-dollar looting network through his New York gallery, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said in press release.
The Tanesar Mother Goddess statue was looted from a village in Rajasthan, India in the 1960s before eventually ending up on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Tanesar Mother Goddess statue was looted from a village in Rajasthan, India in the 1960s before eventually ending up on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Alamy
Kapoor was sent to face charges in India’s Tamil Nadu state following his arrest in Germany in 2011. The DA’s office obtained an arrest warrant for him in 2012though he remains in custody in India, pending his extradition to the US.
Museum staff members prepare an artifact returned from U.S to Cambodia, before an official ceremony at the Cambodian National Museum in Phnom Penh Cambodia, Thursday, July 4, 2024. Cambodia on Thursday officially organized a welcome ceremony for the arrival of more than a dozen rare Angkor era sculptures from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art that were tied to an art dealer and collector accused of running a huge antiquities trafficking network out of Southeast Asia. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)
Cambodia welcomes the Met’s repatriation of centuries-old statues looted during past turmoil
“Today’s repatriation marks another victory in what has been a multiyear international investigation into antiquities trafficked by one of history’s most prolific offenders,” William Walker, the federal Homeland Security Investigation’s New York special agent in charge, said in a press statement.
The items were formally returned at a ceremony at the Indian consulate in New York Wednesday.
Since its creation over a decade ago, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit –– a task force of lawyers, investigators and art experts –– has recovered 5,800 antiquities valued at almost $460 million. The unit has also convicted 16 people of trafficking offenses and filed for the extradition of six others linked to stolen cultural property.
In July, the US and India signed an agreement to protect cultural property by preventing illegal trades and streamlining the process of returning stolen antiquities back to India.
A sandstone sculpture looted from Madhya Pradesh in 1980s and another in green-grey schist, looted from Rajasthan in 1960s are among the over 1,400 antiquities collectively valued at USD 10 million that the US returned to India.
More than 600 more antiquities looted from India are scheduled to be repatriated in coming months.
The pieces were returned at a ceremony with Manish Kulhary from the Consulate General of India here and Alexandra deArmas, Group Supervisor from the Homeland Security Investigation of New York Cultural Property, Art, and Antiquities Group, according to a statement from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L Bragg, Jr.
At least 1,440 antiquities collectively valued at USD 10 million were returned to India at the event, Bragg said in a statement.
The sandstone sculpture depicting a celestial dancer was looted from a temple in Madhya Pradesh in the early 1980s. The looters had cleaved the sculpture into two halves to facilitate smuggling and illicit sale and by February 1992, the two halves were illegally imported from London into New York, professionally reassembled, and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met).
It remained on display at the Met, until it was seized by the Antiquities Traffic Unit (ATU) in 2023.
The second sculpture, Tanesar Mother Goddess, carved from green-gray schist, was looted from a village of Tanesara-Mahadeva in Rajasthan.
First documented in the late 1950s by an Indian archaeologist along with 11 other sculptures of mother goddesses, the Tanesar Mother Goddess and her fellow mother goddesses were stolen one evening in the early 1960s, the statement said on Wednesday.
By 1968, the Tanesar Mother Goddess was in a Manhattan gallery and after passing through two other collectors in New York, the Met accessioned the Tanesar Mother Goddess in 1993, where it remained on display until it was seized by ATU in 2022, it added.
These antiquities were recovered under several ongoing investigations into criminal trafficking networks, including those of alleged antiquities trafficker Subhash Kapoor and convicted trafficker Nancy Wiener, the statement added.
“We will continue to investigate the many trafficking networks that have targeted Indian cultural heritage,” Bragg said.
The statement said that during Bragg’s tenure, the District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit recovered just over 2,100 antiquities stolen from more than 30 countries and valued at almost USD 230 million.
It said about 1,000 antiquities, including more than 600 antiquities looted from India and recovered earlier this year, were scheduled to be repatriated in the coming months.
