Why so many museums are full of stolen artefacts from Nepal and the people fighting to bring them back home

Name: ‘They are gods to us’: Nepal seeks to bring home stolen artefacts from the West
Uploaded: 2021-12-02T01:45:12.000Z
Duration: 1 min 58 s
Description: ‘They are gods to us’: Nepal seeks to bring home stolen artefacts from the West

Nepalese heritage activists are campaigning to bring home some of the thousands of items stolen from temples and monasteries in the country to feed art markets

When a Nepali academic in the US saw a 17th century gold necklace from Nepal in a museum there, she wept and began to pray. ‘I had so many questions,’ she says

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Rabindra Puri at his house in Bhaktapur, east of Kathmandu. He is one of the heritage activists campaigning to bring back from overseas museums Nepalese artefacts stolen from the country. Photo: AFP

Agence France-Presse

Published: 9:45am, 2 Dec 2021Updated: 8:16pm, 2 Dec 2021

When Virginia Tech professor Sweta Gyanu Baniya saw an ornate 17th century Nepali necklace in the Art Institute of Chicago in the United States, she burst into tears, bowed down and began to pray.

Now a video she posted on social media has made the artefact one of the latest targets for heritage activists sleuthing online to bring home some of the thousands of items whisked out over decades from the Himalayan country.

Only a handful of relics have been returned so far, but they have come from some of the world’s top cultural institutions and pressure for more is mounting.

Nepal’s then king offered the gilt copper necklace, adorned with semi-precious stones, to Taleju Bhawani, his Malla dynasty’s patron goddess, in around 1650.

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‘They are gods to us’: Nepal seeks to bring home stolen artefacts from the West

Her temple in Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, is only open to the public one day a year, but officials removed the work for safekeeping in the 1970s – after which it disappeared.