Displaying items by tag: india

Four rare artworks believed to have been stolen are being returned to India by an Ohio art museum.

Director Brian Kennedy recently announced that the Toledo Museum of Art made arrangements with the Embassy of India to return the objects, including an 11th-century bronze sculpture depicting the deity Ganesh and a carved stone.

The Toledo Museum of Art announced that it will return a nearly 1,000-year-old bronze sculpture of the Hindu god Ganesha to the Government of India.

The Ganesha was purchased in 2006 from art dealer Subhash Kapoor, who is currently awaiting trial in India on charges of illegal exportation, criminal conspiracy and forgery.

Research conducted by the Museum, with the assistance and cooperation of the Indian Consulate General, Dnyaneshwar M. Mulay, and the Ambassador of India, Dr. S. Jaishankar, and their respective representatives, led Museum Director Brian Kennedy to recommend the return to the Museum’s Art Committee. That committee voted on Aug. 21 to deaccession the Ganesha from the collection and facilitate its return.

In the early summer of 1819, a British hunting party was heading through thick jungle near Aurangabad, in Maharashtra, western India, when the tiger they were tracking disappeared into a deep ravine. Leading the hunters was Captain John Smith, a young cavalry officer from Madras. Beckoning his friends to follow, he tracked the animal down a semi-circular scarp of steep basalt, and hopped across the rocky bed of the Wagora river, then made his way up through the bushes at the far side of the amphitheatre of cliffs. Halfway up, Smith stopped in his tracks. The footprints led straight past an opening in the rock face. But the cavity was clearly not a natural cave or a river-cut grotto. Instead, despite the long grass, the all-encroaching creepers and thorny undergrowth, Smith was looking at a manmade facade cut straight into the rockface. The jagged slope had been painstakingly carved away into a perfect portico. It was clearly a work of great sophistication. Equally clearly, it had been abandoned for centuries.

Federal officials have returned three stolen antiquities estimated to be worth around $1.5 million to the Indian Consulate in New York. The United States Department of Homeland Security Investigations has been working with India to recover dozens of stolen artifacts in recent years.

All three of the works date from the 11th or 12th century and include a sandstone sculpture that had been stolen from an Indian temple in 2009. The 350-pound work, which depicts the deities Vishnu and Lakshmi, had been listed as one of the Interpol’s top 10 stolen artworks. The other recovered artifacts include a 400-pound figurative sculpture and a black sandstone sculpture depicting the male deity Bodhisattva.

A ceremony was held on Tuesday, January 14 at the Consulate.