In Focus: Why Bringing India’s Artefacts Back is Only Half the Battle
On the sidelines of the 3rd India–Australia Annual Summit in Melbourne on July 9, three sacred images from Tamil Nadu were finally promised their way home. A ceremonial trident bearing the Goddess Bhadrakali. A stone Nandi, the bull who has sat facing the sanctum of Shiva temples for centuries. And a six-faced Kartikeya, carved during the Chola period, that once presided over a temple near Kumbakonam before it was lifted from its pedestal, smuggled out of the country, and re-catalogued as “art” in the National Gallery of Australia.
What lifted the moment above the usual summit choreography was the exchange running the other way. In the same gesture, India agreed to return the remains of an Australian First Nations ancestor that remained in the Government Museum in Chennai for close to a century. Two nations, each handing back something that was never theirs to keep.
It is a genuinely good moment. It is also, almost always, where the telling stops, one step short of the critical question that should follow.
A Homecoming that Photographs Well
At some point in the previous decade, the return of stolen antiquities went beyond a quiet legal process and became the centrepiece of cultural diplomacy. According to the culture ministry’s own count, over 660 antiquities have come back since 2014.
For context: in the decade prior, just one antique was officially returned to India. The subsequent achievements are precisely how the government seeks to measure success in cultural diplomacy, to drive both political and foreign policy narratives.
The bigger returns now tend to arrive on the calendar of a Prime Ministerial visit: Washington, London, The Hague, and now Melbourne. Heritage is inexpensive, potent goodwill, easier to offer than a trade concession and far better to be seen giving. This indicates that a country that hands back your antiques is invested in shaping perceptions and how it wants to be seen by you. Given the evidence from recent years, India seems to have learnt from its experience, while asking for the return of its artefacts.
The Australia arrangement carried a grace note that most of the coverage hurried past: the reciprocity. For years India has argued this case as the aggrieved party, the old civilisation emptied by imperialists and unassuming art collectors. Agreeing to return a First Nations ancestor shifts that posture. It places India in the more mature position of a country that also holds what it should not, and is willing to say so. Even for diplomatic posturing, this is arguably a suitable position to adopt, given the intricacies of cultural and civilisational narratives of our times.
The Part that Wins no Photographs
Behind each handover is a stretch of grinding work that rarely makes the frame. The gesture in Melbourne was genuine, but the goodwill on the podium rested on years of patient groundwork back home. For instance, such artefacts were traced over years by the Tamil Nadu Idol Wing, a specialised police unit that reads temple inventories, follows objects through auction records, and matches a deity in a foreign gallery to the bare pedestal it was taken from.
The return process itself navigated a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, the formal channel through which government-to-government engagements focus on gathering evidence and securing the objects in question for a formal handover. Some of these actions usually miss the headlines, as only a few outside the courts and the culture ministry could even define them. Yet, it is the machinery that quietly turns a traced idol into a recovered one.
It is worth remembering how these artefacts left their traditional home in the first place. Many of the idols India has recovered passed through the same handful of trafficking networks, several traced to the dealer Subhash Kapoor, now jailed in India, who supplied temple bronzes to collectors and museums across the West for decades. The laundering was patient and professional: a forged ownership history, a respectable gallery, a museum content not to look too closely.
That chain is precisely what a preventive framework is meant to break, and it is where the more durable policy work has begun to move. India’s 2024 Cultural Property Agreement with the United States works on exactly that logic. It makes it harder to bring smuggled Indian antiquities into the US to begin with, and requires US customs to hand back whatever it seizes. The idea is to block the trade at the border, rather than track down each stolen idol years after it is reported to be missing. The lesson from a career like Kapoor’s is that recovery will always lag the trade, and that the surer gains lie in making provenance harder to fabricate and buyers harder to find.
For the moment, much of the momentum still draws on the goodwill of partner governments and the reported state visits, which is a considerable start even if the process may be inconclusive in the short term. The next phase is to turn a decade of case-by-case wins into standing arrangements that keep working in the quieter years between summits, and that can eventually reach objects held in private hands, where no treaty yet runs.
Home to What, Exactly?
The numbers present a sobering reality. Of the hundreds of antiquities recovered since 2014, only about a dozen have been returned to their places of origin. The rest remain in Delhi, many inside the Archaeological Survey’s high-security Central Antiquity Collection at Purana Qila, some on public display and a good number in storage.
A consecrated bronze is not a painting. It was cast for sacred ritualistic practices, evidenced by centuries-long legacy of reverence, devotion, and personalised care. Placed in a display case, it is preserved as an object while the beliefs of communities on the life that made it a deity rather than a sculpture are quietly set aside. It is fair, then, to ask whether a sacred statue behind glass in a national gallery is meaningfully more at home than it was in foreign lands.
The government has often addressed this question with the right intent, suggesting that these recovered items should be transported to their rightful homes. In line with this, the government cites the Chola copper plates being routed to Tamil Nadu as evidence of their righteous intent. Unfortunately, following through with the final few steps of the process is genuinely hard to administer. Moreover, the challenges are unforeseen, given how the processes and strategies are still evolving in the absence of a formal structure. For instance, many of the temples these idols came from are either non-functional or no longer stand. Some others are situated in sensitive districts, raising critical questions around internal security. In addition, archaeology departments of the states are either underfunded or understaffed. While these are solvable challenges, they have yet to receive the level of attention usually provided for the recovery of antiquities.
That is the gap worth acknowledging. The campaign to reclaim India’s stolen heritage is one of the more quietly effective things the state has done in years, and it has earned its appreciation.
It remains to be seen whether such efforts will extend to ensuring their return to the places of origin. Recovery is the visible half. The harder half is deciding what a returned deity is; the unglamorous work of returning them and creating conducive administrative structures around it.
The stolen antiques are on their way back to Indian soil, and it is time we settle how we define that home.
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