Among the more than 1,400 antiques returned to India by the United States are sandstone sculptures looted from Madhya Pradesh in the 1980s and green-gray schist sculptures looted from Rajasthan in the 1960s. It is.
More than 600 more antiquities looted from India are expected to be repatriated in the coming months.
According to a statement from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L., the works were collected by Manish Kulhari, Consulate General of India, and Alexandra Kulhari, Group Superintendent of the Department of Homeland Security’s New York Heritage, Art, and Antiquities Research Group. It was reportedly returned at a ceremony attended by De Armas. Bragg Jr.
At least 1,440 antiquities worth a total of $10 million were returned to India during the event, Bragg said in a statement.
A sandstone carving depicting a celestial dancer was looted from a temple in Madhya Pradesh in the early 1980s. Looters cut the sculpture in half to facilitate smuggling and illegal sale, and by February 1992 the two halves had been illegally imported from London to New York, where they were reassembled by experts and housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Metropolitan Museum of Art).
The work remained on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until 2023, when it was seized by the Antiquities and Transport Authority (ATU).
The second sculpture, Mother Goddess Thanesar, is carved from green-gray schist and was looted from the village of Thanesara Mahadeva in Rajasthan.
First recorded by Indian archaeologists in the late 1950s, the Tanesar Mother Goddess and her fellow mother goddesses, along with 11 other mother goddess sculptures, were stolen one night in the early 1960s. , announced in a statement Wednesday.
By 1968, Tanesar’s Mother Goddess was acquired by a Manhattan gallery, and after passing through two other collectors in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art registered Tanesar’s Mother Goddess in 1993, and it was confiscated by ATU in 2022. It remained on display until the end of the year, he added. .
It added that these antiquities were recovered in multiple ongoing investigations into criminal trafficking networks, including suspected antiquities trafficker Subhash Kapoor and convicted trafficker Nancy Wiener.
“We continue to investigate a number of human trafficking networks that target India’s cultural heritage sites,” Bragg said.
During Mr. Bragg’s tenure, the district attorney’s antiquities trafficking unit recovered more than 2,100 stolen antiquities from more than 30 countries, valued at approximately $230 million, the statement said.
About 1,000 antiquities, including more than 600 looted and recovered from India earlier this year, will be repatriated in the coming months, the report said.
