The stolen statues of Kathmandu valley

LalitpurIn 1982, a 12th-century stone sculpture of Uma Maheshwor went miss­ing from Dhulikhel’s Wotol, Patan. The sculpture was found in Germany’s capital Berlin after three years after an art dealer had sold it to a Berlin museum for around Rs 10 million. The statue has since been repatriated and is now in Patan Museum (see photo, top). This recovered stone sculp­ture, with the portrayal of Shiva and Parvati shown sit­ting closely on Mount Kailash, is highly attractive.

Sandeep Khanal, chief of the monument conserva­tion and palace maintenance section of the Patan Durbar Square, says that the sculpture of Uma Maheshwor was the first to be formally returned to Nepal after its disappear­ance. “This sculpture was offi­cially returned in 2001. But other lost sculptures are still missing,” says Khanal. The process of return of the sculp­ture was initiated after Lain Singh Bangdel, an artist who served as the chancellor of Nepal Academy, published his book Stolen Images of Nepal in 1989.

Some other stolen statues mentioned in Bangdel’s book, and which were taken to var­ious places in Europe and the US, have also been returned since.

In the book, Bangdel cites many stolen sculptures of historical and archeological importance. For instance a 16th-century sculpture of Sit­ting Buddha was stolen from Patan’s Kumbeshwar Kunti­bahi Chaitya in April 1985. Another sculpture of the Sun God that was sculpted in 1083 was stolen in 1985 from Sau­gal in Patan. Bangdel also mentions yet another Uma Maheshwor’s statue from the 10th century going missing sometime in 1960s from Gahiti in Patan. None of these have been recovered.

In 2015, one of the stolen statues Bangdel mentions in his book, that of Lax­mi-Narayan, stolen from Kath­mandu Durbar Square in 1984, had surfaced in New York, and was later exhibited in various places in the US (see the photo collage above).