In January 2020, in a remote, arid corner of southwestern Rajasthan, I was squeezed in the back seat of a Toyota SUV with my five-year-old son and Prachi and Prince Ranawat, a sister and brother, ages 23 and 18, from a dot of a town called Parsad. On a motorcycle, their father, Gajeraj Ranawat, followed. The driver propelled us along a parched roadway overgrown with candelabra cactus and bougainvillea, its pink and white flowers covered with dust. Sprays of yellow oleander spilled onto our path, and the screeches of langur monkeys echoed in the distance.
The family was leading me to a temple complex that once sheltered the so-called Tanesar sculptures, a set of 12 or more stone figures dating to the sixth century. Naturalistic, slender, luminously jadelike, and around two feet high, most of the sculptures depict mother goddesses (matrikas), with some holding a small child. Attendant male deities were also part of the set. According to art historians, the Tanesar figures were sculpted by an itinerant artisan guild as a form of patronage to local rulers. The sculptures were associated with fertility, but they were also linked with terrifying aspects of the all-encompassing mother goddess Devi in her manifestations as Kali and others—dangerous, destructive yoginis whose power eclipsed that of all the male Hindu gods combined. Over time, fearful villagers buried the sculptures in a field, hoping to contain their energy. But later, when the sculptures were feared no more, they were dug up and dragged to a small shrine to Shiva. There they were given pride of place in an enclosure to the side of the structure. At some point in their history, the figures became focal points for tantric prayer, with worshippers seeking a disintegration of the physical self to meld into universal consciousness.
ELIZABETH KADETSKY is a three-time Fulbright scholar in India and an editor at New England Review. Her most recent book, The Memory Eaters, won the Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She is associate professor of creative writing at Penn State.
For many years, the Tanesar sculptures remained an integral part of local religious life—unknown to anyone else. But around 1957, a prominent archaeologist in Rajasthan discovered the figures and then published an article about them in an Indian art history journal, making an inner circle of Indian and Western art historians aware of their existence. What followed was a story all too familiar in the world of art and antiquities: sometime around 1961, most of the Tanesar sculptures were stolen. From what I've been able to piece together, they were smuggled across the countryside, down to what was then Bombay, across the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic—to Liverpool and then New York. The American art dealer Doris Wiener, who ran a gallery on Madison Avenue, had a hand in the export of several of them. Another landed at the British Museum through a separate channel.
Very soon, the mid-century art world became enchanted with the sculptures. Art dealers, collectors, and museum directors eyed their potential worth. In 1967 and after, Wiener sold six or more sculptures from the set, for the equivalent of $80,000 each in today's dollars, to curators and collectors who had more than an inkling of the dubious circumstances of the objects’ traffic. She sold one to Blanchette and John D. Rockefeller III and another to the Cleveland Museum of Art. The others passed from hand to hand before arriving at the world's most revered collections of South Asian art, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
On August 30, 2022, the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, issued a search warrant for one of the sculptures, called . At the time, it stood on a pedestal in the coolly lit gallery 236 of the Florence and Herbert Irving Asian Wing at the Met. The sculpture was seized, part of a sweeping sting targeting works acquired by Wiener as long as 60 years ago. Over the past decade, more than 4,500 allegedly trafficked antiquities have been confiscated by the office of the Manhattan DA. Instrumental in this work has been Assistant DA Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine colonel who led a government investigation into the looting of the Iraq
