Two bronze statues of deities from Tamil Nadu temples that were smuggled out of the country have been repatriated to India by the National Museum of Asian Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., which has also agreed to return another such idol after exhibiting it for three years.
The statues that arrived in India on May 12 were on display at the National Museum in New Delhi the next day, along with 11 artefacts repatriated from Australia in March. These include terracotta objects dating back to the second-century BC Shunga Empire in present-day Bihar.
Union culture minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat said India had to make a strong case to prove that these statues were taken from the country. The threshold is high for documentation of claims to objects smuggled out of the country before the 1970 Unesco Convention came into force.
“We had also signed a cultural property exchange agreement (CPA) with the United States (in 2024)…. The US is the largest market for these antiquities. These antiquities and artefacts were exported illegally. Even after being seized there, we had to undergo a long process and coordinate with many agencies to get them back. But after the cultural property agreement, we were able to move forward faster,” Shekhawat told reporters here.
“We found photographs of these statues clicked in temples of Tamil Nadu by private individuals in the 1950s. After verifying their provenance, we spoke to the museums and institutions of the US through the Indian ambassador,”
he added.
In a reply to The Telegraph, Shekhawat said: “The French Institute in Puducherry provided us with these photographs.”
Culture secretary Vivek Aggarwal told this paper: “The Smithsonian Institution began to view these artefacts with suspicion due to the awareness created about such objects. They got in touch with us and we worked with them to ascertain where these are from, and then repatriate them.”
The bronze statues are miniatures of the main statues of deities. Traditionally, the miniatures were brought out of the temples for processions during festivals. For now, they will be moved to the gallery of repatriated artefacts at the Red Fort before being restored to the temples of their origin.
The 12th-century Chola bronze sculpture of Somaskanda (Shiva and Uma) from the Viswanatha temple at Alathur in Thiruvarur district and the 16th-century Vijayanagara-period sculpture of Saint Sundarar with Paravai from the Shiva temple at Veerasolapuram in Kallakurichi district have been returned.
In 2017 and 2022, the Tamil Nadu police had traced five idols stolen from the Viswanatha temple around 50 years ago to museums in the US.
The ninth-century Chola-period Shiva Nataraja statue from the Sri Bavaoushadeeswarar temple near Thanjavur is expected to be returned after its display at “The Art of Knowing in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas” exhibition at The Smithsonian. India has loaned the statue as a goodwill gesture, and the exhibition will also describe India’s efforts to retrieve the artefacts.