A day after 29 stolen Indian artefacts were repatriated from Australia, government officials said three more idols have been repatriated and are on their way to India.
These include a Yogini idol with a goat head from London, a Buddha statue from Italy, and a Hanuman idol from Australia. All the idols have been brought to the Indian missions in the respective countries and will be in India in a month, culture ministry officials said.
One of the idols, the 12th-century Avalokiteshwara Padamapani idol, went missing from the Devisthan Kundalpur Temple in Bihar, the prominent Buddhist pilgrimage site, more than two decades ago, officials said.
Sculpted sometime between the 8th and 12th centuries, the statue depicts Buddha holding the stem of a blossoming lotus in his left hand, with two female attendants below his feet. The idol was repatriated from Italy.
The millennia-old Yogini idol, sculpted in the 10th century, originally belonged to a group of sandstone idols worshipped in the Lokhari temple in Uttar Pradesh. It was repatriated this year on Makar Sankranti. The sculpture had briefly surfaced in the art market in London in 1988, and in October 2021, the Indian High Commission in the UK got a tip-off about the artefact in the garden of a private residence on the outskirts of London.
The officials said a sculpture of Vrishanana Yogini, stolen from the same temple, was repatriated to the Indian Embassy in Paris in 2013 and is now part of the antiquity collection at the National Museum.
A 500-year-old Lord Hanuman bronze idol, stolen from the Tamil Nadu temple in 2012, was repatriated in February this year. The stolen idol, retrieved by US Homeland Security, was handed over to Indian High Commissioner Manpreet Vohra in Canberra by Australian Chargé d'Affaires Michael Goldman.
The statue, built sometime between the 14th and 15th centuries during the Vijayanagara period, was recently found in the possession of a private buyer in Australia. The idol was stolen from the Varadharaja Perumal temple in Vellur village in Ariyalur district on April 9, 2012.
The officials said on the same day, two more idols—one of Sri Devi and another of Boodevi—were also stolen from the temple. They have not been found yet.
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