Looted Shiva statue sent home to India

A fifth religious sculpture in an Australian public collection has been returned to India.

The Dancing Shiva was identified from a 1958 photograph.

A fifth religious sculpture in an Australian public collection has been returned to India, with the Art Gallery of South Australia sending to its “rightful” home a 16th-century Dancing Shiva that had been looted from a temple in Tamil Nadu.

The 75cm bronze Shiva Nataraja idol was returned to India on Wednesday after an AGSA curat­or identified it as stolen, and following­ a request for its repat­riation by the Indian high ­commission.

A single 1958 photograph of the statue in its original place in the Sri Kulasekaramudayan temple was enough for AGSA curator James Bennett to suspect­ a ­positive match with the Shiva in Adelaide.

Reportedly stolen in 1982, the Shiva was purchased in 2001 for $US225,000 from London-based antiquities dealers Oliver Forge and Brendan Lynch.

The handback follows the return­ to India in 2014 of a large bronze Shiva Nataraja from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. It was sold to the Canberra institution by disgrace­d New York dealer Subhas­h Kap­oor, who is charged with trafficking millions of dollars’ worth of Asian antiquities.

Both statues were acquired under the direction of Ron Radford, who was head of the AGSA in 2001, and of the NGA when its Shiva was bought in 2008.

Two stone sculptures from the NGA and one from the Art ­Gallery of NSW also have been returned to India.

Adelaide’s former Shiva was accompanied on its homeward journey by AGSA registrar Jan Robison and Bennett, the ­curator of Asian art, who identified the statue as having been stolen.

It was handed back at a small ceremony in New Delhi, hosted by the Archaeological ­Survey of India.

AGSA director Rhana Devenport said the Shiva was a wonderful piece, “but it’s not ours and never should have been”.

“We are very pleased to see the safe return of the work to the ­correct authorities, and through the correct avenues,” Devenport said. While questions have been raised about other antiquities in the AGSA, she said she did not believe there were outstanding provenance problems.

“We do not believe there is anything else we should be ­concerned about, however … we would ­always maintain a rigorous approach­ to collection research,” she said.

The Indian government asked for the statue’s return in January. In April, the AGSA board agreed. It had been purchased­ with funds from benefactor Diana Ramsay.

Its return ends a five-year process that began in 2014 when the AGSA revised its “due diligence” policy in the wake of the Kapoor scandal that had caught the NGA and other museums worldwide.

In 2016, Bennett visited the French Institute of Pondicherry, which holds archives of Indian antiquitie­s. He checked about 6000 photographs and eventually found a small image that matched the Shiva statue in Adelaide.