The museum will return a statue of Durga, an ancient Hindu goddess, a stele of Uma Mahesvara and a Standing Buddha.
Source: Kai Pilger/Wikipedia
Both restitutions are separate processes that coincided accidentally. The Metropolitan Museum explains the story of Durga, which was brought in the US in an unknown way, in a statement on artnet.com:
“The Durga was once enshrined in the Chakravarteswara temple at Baijnath, a medieval capital in Northen India. It was donated to the Museum in 2015. Museum staff recognized it from the cover of K. P. Nautiyal’s The Arcaheology of Kumann (including Dehradum), a 1969 publication, and contacted the Archaeological Service in 2017. It is expected the sculpture will be returned to Delhi this summer.”
The second story is about the return of two stone sculptures to Nepal – a 12-th-century stele of Uma Mahesvara (Shiva and Parvati) and a 10th-century Standing Buddha.
“The stele of Uma Mahesvara comes from the Tangalhiti water fountain in Patan, and was donated to the Museum in 1983. The Standing Buddha, from a memorial stupa in Yatkhatol, Kathmandu, was donated in 2015, and it was in the course of the Museum’s acquisition process that it was brought to light that both objects were listed as stolen in the 1989 publication Stolen Image of Nepal. … The sculptures will be returned to Kathmandu in April 2018,” the Metropolitan Museum says.
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