Some 1,440 looted artifacts collectively worth an estimated $10 million have been returned to India by the United States amid investigations into the alleged antiquities trafficker Subhash Kapoor and convicted trafficker Nancy Wiener.
The return of the artifacts was announced on November 13 by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office works closely with the federal Homeland Security Investigations agency on such matters. HSI New York Special Agent in Charge William S. Walker called the repatriation a “victory” amid the criminal investigations and said the teams have “worked tirelessly” with their partners in India to fight against alleged smuggling networks.
“While our work continues, we remain resolute in our commitment to safeguard against the plundering of antiquities and guarantee that those who seek to gain from these heinous acts are held fully accountable,” Walker said.
The artifacts returned to India include a sandstone sculpture that has been referred to as Celestial Dancer, which was looted from a temple in Madhya Pradesh in the early 1980s.
The Tanesar Mother Goddess statue looted from India and tied to convicted antiquities trafficker Nancy Wiener has been returned to India. Photo courtesy of Manhattan District Attorney’s Office
“While prying the delicately carved statue from the temple pillar it once adorned, looters cleaved the Celestial Dancer into two halves to facilitate its smuggling and illicit sale,” Bragg’s office said in the news release announcing the return.
The two halves of the sculpture were then illegally imported into New York from London in 1992 under the direction of Kapoor, prosecutors alleged. In the United States, the pieces were reassembled and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where it remained on view until it was seized by authorities in 2023.
Prosecutors have alleged that Kapoor, a once-respected antiquities dealer, smuggled a massive amount of looted artifacts through his former New York gallery, Art of the Past. Many looted works tied to him have already been returned to their nations of origin, including 192 objects to Pakistan in 2022.
For more than a decade, Kapoor, an American national, has been under investigation by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office for alleged illegal looting, exportation, and sale of artifacts from countries across Asia.
Prosecutors in the United States first obtained an arrest warrant for Kapoor in 2012, shortly after he was detained at an airport in Cologne by German police in late 2011 upon an international arrest alert issued by the agency Interpol.
Kapoor was extradited to India where he was held at the Central Prison in Trichy while awaiting trial. In 2022, he was ultimately convicted of burglary and the export of 19 antique idols in a trial in the town of Kumbakonam in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
American authorities are currently seeking his extradition from India to face further charges in the United States.
Bragg noted that other artifacts, like a carving of the Tanesar Mother Goddess, have ties to Wiener, who was arrested in 2016 and pleaded guilty in 2021 after she paid $1.2 million in forfeitures and fines.
The Tanesar Mother Goddess, carved from green-gray schist, was looted from the village of Tanesara-Mahadeva in Rajasthan, India, in the early 1960s. It was in the possession of Wiener’s mother, Doris, at her Manhattan gallery by 1968 and acquired by the Met in 1993, where it remained on display until it was seized by authorities in 2022.