The Nepal Museum of Stolen Art: Reclaiming Heritage, Homage to Culture. He is Rabindra Puri, a conservationist now leading the cultural reclamation movement in the ancient Bhaktapur city in Nepal through this innovative and unique concept-the Nepal Museum of Stolen Art.
This institution will operate in permanent premises, already proposed and scheduled for by 2026 in Panauti and will host replica items representing Nepal’s religious relics seized over a long time-span from temples distributed within different provinces of Nepal. To name, it presently lists on 45 replicas among those sacred Hindu goddess Saraswati idols.
This artifact is painful for the citizens of Nepal and activists who think that these artifacts have importance beyond their monetary value. The case is displayed in the Museum of Stolen Art, Nepal. Due to the failure in its ability to retrieve the heritage items, there is one example – the Necklace Taleju.
The necklace was made of pure gold in the 17th century and placed within the Temple of Taleju, which is sacred in its own right. This ornament disappeared from the temple back in 1970. It came back into this world in 2012 when it re-emerged within the Art Institute of Chicago.
More than thousands of statues and religious idols have been stolen since Nepal opened its doors to the world in the 1960s. Many of those stolen statues had already sold their ways into various art collections and museums around the globe.
Until then, there is little said about them, or rather until the finding of the National Heritage Recovery Campaign last 2021. Activists, coordinating with the Department of Archaeology, started last year cooperation with international institutions in terms of getting back their pieces. But the process is often delayed by the Western museums because of provenance issues that require detailed documentation.
Despite this, Nepal has managed to recover about 200 items since 1986, most of which have happened in the last decade. For example, idols at the Dallas Museum of Art were returned to their original temple. Security concerns today have some idols housed in iron cages and away from faces.
The man’s vision now becomes grander with his mission receiving momentum, envisioning someday when his museum’s empty shelves are testimony to fully repatriated sacred articles of Nepal. He will take his plea directly to those global institutions to return them, these objects of worship, to their people: far more significant than those pieces of art.
