Two of a group of statues looted from a temple in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in the 1970s have been found in a shed in an English garden. The statues, representing the Hindu goddesses Yogini Chamunda and Yogini Gomukhi, were sold to a salvage company by the woman who owned the property where they were found. That company them contacted Chris Marinello the founder of Art Recovery International, an organisation which specialises in finding stolen artworks, as part of a due diligence process before selling the statues. Marinello then contacted S Vijay Kapoor of the India Pride Project, which seeks the return to India of looted cultural objects. Kapoor was able to identify the statues of two of a group stolen from the Lokhari Temple, in the Banda District of Uttar Pradesh in the 1970s.
The term 'yogini' refers to female masters of the yogic arts, with sixty four divine yoginis worshipped as goddesses at yogini temples such as Lokhari; the term is slightly ambivalent as it applies both to the goddesses and adept worshippers, who were believed to be able to take on some of the goddesses powers by performing secret rituals before the statues. The goddesses were worshiped in circular enclosures, open to the sky because the yoginis were believed to commune with the stars at night. The Lokhari temple is thought to have been built in the tenth century AD, and to have contained twenty yogini statues, depicted as beautiful women with the heads of animals. In the 1970s the temple was targeted by a group of looters, who are believed to have operated out of Rajasthan and Mumbai, smuggling goods into the Europe via Switzerland. An unknown number of statues were stolen, with others being broken and the remaining unharmed statues subsequently removed and hidden by local villagers. The temple is now abandoned.
The statues of Yogini Chamunda and Yogini Gomukhi are now in the possession of the Indian High Commission in London, with plans for a formal hand-over ceremony on 15 August 2023 (Indian Independence Day). They will then be taken to the National Museum in New Delhi, where they will be displayed alongside two previously recovered Lokhari yoginis, one of which was recovered in Paris in 2013 and the other in England in December 2021.
S Vijay Kapoor has suggested that, rather than being held in the National Museum in New Delhi, which is over 750 km from Lokhari, that the statues should be returned to the village itself, where the temple could be restored, and potentially become a source of tourism revenue for the local population, although this seems a long way from happening at the current time.
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