The sculpture of Tanesar Mother Goddess, carved from green-gray schist, and looted from the village of Tanesara-Mahadeva in Rajasthan, and a sandstone sculpture looted from Madhya Pradesh in the 1980s, were among the 1,400 antiquities valued at $10 million returned to India by the US authorities this week. First documented in the late 1950s, along with 11 other similar sculptures of goddesses, the Tanesar piece was stolen in the early 1960s. 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 the US’ Antiquities Traffic Unit (ATU) in 2022. The pieces were returned at a ceremony with the Consulate General of India in New York 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 on November 13. More than 600 more antiquities looted from India are scheduled to be repatriated in coming months, officials said. Looted from MP, the sandstone sculpture depicted a celestial dancer. It was cleaved 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 and was seized by ATU in 2023. 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 said. According to an investigation in March 2023 by The Indian Express, in association with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and the UK-based Finance Uncovered, a treasure trove at the Met was traced to antique dealer Kapoor, who is serving a prison term in Tamil Nadu. On March 30, 2023, the Met issued a statement saying it would “transfer 15 sculptures for return to the government of India, after having learned that the works were illegally removed from India. Of the 15 items listed in the search warrant, 10 were flagged in The Indian Express report. “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 $230 million. In October 2023, The Indian Express had reported that the US had offered 1,414 objects to India for repatriation. As per the procedure, a team from Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) is dispatched to the host country, the US in this case, to verify the objects, following which the repatriation process is initiated. Officials in the ASI say besides antiquities, the batch is likely to include non-antiquities as well, and will be ranked accordingly, keeping in mind the definition of ‘antiquity’.
