The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has returned 1,440 stolen artifacts to India, with a total value of $10 million. These items were recovered as part of an ongoing investigation into criminal trafficking networks, including those linked to convicted art trafficker Subhash Kapoor and Nancy Wiener.
Two of the artifacts in question were obtained by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993 before being seized by the office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU). Among these is a sandstone sculpture of a Celestial Dancer, which was looted from a temple in the early 1980s, and a sculpture of the Tanesar Mother Goddess, made from green-gray metamorphic rock and taken from a village in northwestern India in the early 1960s.
The Celestial Dancer, originally part of a temple pillar, was cut into two pieces to facilitate its illegal sale. According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the halves were illegally transported from London to New York in February 1992 under Kapoor’s direction. After being professionally reassembled, the sculpture was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by one of Kapoor’s clients, where it was displayed until its seizure by the ATU in 2023.
The Tanesar Mother Goddess passed through several collectors, including Doris Wiener’s gallery in Manhattan by 1968, before being acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1993. The sculpture was on display at the museum until its seizure by the ATU in 2022.
Kapoor, who was arrested in 2012, was convicted in India in 2022 for trafficking antiquities, with his extradition still pending.
A ceremony marking the return of the 1,440 artifacts to India was held recently, with Manish Kulhary, Commercial Representative from the Consulate General of India in New York, and Alexandra deArmas, Group Supervisor from Homeland Security Investigations’ New York Cultural Property, Art, and Antiquities Group, in attendance.
“Today’s repatriation marks another victory in what has been a multi-year, international investigation into antiquities trafficked by one of history’s most prolific offenders,” said William S. Walker, Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security Investigations New York, in a press statement.
