The Manhattan District Attorney’s (DA) Office announced that 248 Indian antiquities estimated at $15 million were repatriated at a ceremony at the Indian Consulate in New York City in the largest single transfer of this kind. Of the artifacts, 235 (~95%) were seized from the disgraced antiquities dealer Subhash Kapoor, who has been charged with trafficking over $143 million worth of artifacts since 1974. The remaining 13 were recovered from other parties during related investigations, each tied up with the web of South Asian antiquities trafficking in the US.
One of the items restituted at the event was a 12th-century bronze Shiva Nataraja, a sculpture of the Hindu god Shiva in the center of a flaming halo. The artifact, which is valued at $4 million, was illegally lifted from an Indian temple in the 1960s and acquired by Doris Wiener. Wiener, another New York-based dealer of South Asian antiquities of dubious provenance, regularly purchased items from Kapoor as well as Douglas Latchford, a dealer-scholar who trafficked in looted Khmer artifacts (and was indicted in 2019.) The Asia Society, whom the DA’s office described as the “unwitting recipient” of the Shiva Nataraja, cooperated with the investigation.
Along with his counterparts, Kapoor solidified his place in the art world ecosystem by gifting or selling valuable antiquities to leading museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Since information about the dealer has come to light, these institutions have expressed commitments to reviewing the provenance of the artifacts and, in some cases, restituted them.
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