The workplace of Manhattan District Legal professional (DA) Alvin Bragg introduced late final month that it had returned 657 antiquities, collectively valued at almost $14m, to Indian authorities. The items have been recovered via a number of ongoing investigations into prison trafficking networks and handed over at a ceremony at India’s consulate in New York Metropolis. A number of the objects recovered have been linked to the smuggling networks of the convicted traffickers Subhash Kapoor and Nancy Wiener.
Among the many returned items is a bronze determine of Avalokiteshvara, valued at $2m. The determine was half of a giant group of bronzes found close to the Lakshamana Temple in 1939 and had entered the Mahant Ghasidas Memorial Museum’s assortment in Raipur by 1952. Nonetheless, it was subsequently stolen and, by 1982, had been smuggled into the US. It was situated and seized from a non-public New York assortment in 2025.
Additionally being repatriated to India is a purple sandstone Buddha, its toes damaged off beneath the knees, which is valued at $7.5m. It had been smuggled to New York by Kapoor and was retrieved from considered one of his storage items by the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit.
Moreover, a sandstone dancing Ganesha, looted from a temple in Madhya Pradesh in 2000 by considered one of Kapoor’s indicted co-conspirators, was relocated after passing via a number of arms. It had been bought to Nancy Wiener’s mom, the vendor Doris Wiener; after her mom’s dying, Nancy Wiener created a false provenance for the artifact and efficiently consigned it to Christie’s. It went up for public sale in New York in 2012, the place it was bought by a non-public collector who later surrendered it to the District Legal professional’s workplace.
“The dimensions of the trafficking networks that focused cultural heritage in India is very large, as demonstrated by the return of greater than 600 items in the present day,” Bragg mentioned in an announcement.
Kapoor and 7 co-defendants have been indicted in November 2019 for conspiring to visitors stolen antiquities from South and Southeast Asia. He was convicted in India in 2022, and his extradition to the US stays pending. 5 co-defendants have already been convicted.
