Heritage expert Rabindra Puri gestures during an interview in June at his house, in Bhaktapur some 12km east of Kathmandu. Her Kathmandu temple is only open to the public one day a year, but officials removed the work for safekeeping in the 1970s — after which it disappeared. “Our art for us is not just art, they are gods to us,” said heritage expert Rabindra Puri, who campaigns to repatriate stolen Nepali heritage and has assembled a collection of replicas for a planned museum on the issue. In March, the Dallas Art Museum and the FBI returned to Nepal a stolen 12th to 15th-century androgynous stone sculpture of Hindu deities Laxmi-Narayan. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art handed over a 10th-century stone sculpture of the Hindu god Shiva in September, the third item it has repatriated to Nepal since 2018.

Source: Taipei Times December 01, 2021 22:08 UTC