Last week, a stolen 11th century bronze statue of Kannappa Nayanar arrived back to its country of origin having been repatriated from the Netherlands to the Government of India.  The idol was delivered home along with a group of previously relinquished royal charter plates issued by the Chola-era Kings during the 11th century CE which had earlier been voluntarily relinquished by Leiden University Library.  

For more than a decade, this sacred statue of living worship, lay far from the land and community that revered it.  Its absence felt long before its whereabouts were determined.  

The idol’s silence was broken when two experts  from ARCA, Stefano Alessandrini and Ibrahim Bulut, attended The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in March 2025.  There, they each photographed the Kannappa on a large display pedestal at the booth of Marcel Nies Oriental Art and forwarded the images to me. 

Recognising that the statue was not merely a unique lost-wax sculpture of beauty, but an idol whose sole purpose would have been for daily worship, I shared the concerning images with Vijay Kumar, the cofounder of India Pride Project, a civil society and provenance research organisation with access to archival material and tools to advocate for the return of stolen cultural property from India.  

IPP in turn sent ARCA's photo taken at the European fair to ADSP Shri. Balamurugan of the Idol Wing CID of the Tamil Nadu police.  Balamurugan in turn shared photos from the statue's discovery, and identified the original FIR denouncing the idol's theft from the Arulmigu Agneeswarar Temple in Tiruppugazhur, Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu state in southern India.

2002 Excavation photos

While the European fair was still under way, Kumar used IPP's sophisticated proprietary AI tool, named after India's historic archer Ekalavya, to digitally removed the encrustations from the idol's discovery photos.  He then matched strategic points between the India's hoard photos with the one taken by ARCA of the now-cleaned bronze being offered for sale, noting that the bronze at TEFAF retained the same physical proportions as the one photographed on Nies stand at the fair.

The case was then taken up by Pravesh Kumar, Inspector General of Police, Idol Wing CID, and the Archaeological Survey of India in Delhi, who formally initiated proceedings with the Dutch authorities and their respective ministries.   On 23 March 2025, following up on the request by the Indian authorities, the Dutch police seized the bronze and placed it in the custody.  

Their ensuing investigation ultimately led the Belgian dealer to relinquish the statue voluntarily, which cleared the way for last week's voluntary return, done without fanfare or formal announcement by the Dutch authorities.  ARCA only learned of the object's return after its quietly arrival back in India. 

While the return of the Kannappa Nayanar is a welcome culmination of a year and a half of hopeful waiting, the silence surrounding its return does raise a broader concern about the diplomatic politics of discretionary restitutions: arrangements in which objects are voluntarily returned on the condition that the resolution remains outside official press statements, thus insulating a dealer or collector from deeper public scrutiny.  Such arrangements may offer an expedient route to repatriation, but they can also carry serious consequences for investigations and provenance due diligence.  

When legally binding restitution agreements restrict disclosure of how a stolen idol entered Europe, from whom it was acquired, and who facilitated its movement through the art market, researchers such as those working at ARCA and India Pride Project may lose access to evidence that could help reconstruct trafficking routes, establish timelines, and identify individuals connected to other cases.  The Netherlands' discreet and diplomatic silence in this case does not establish that such conditions applied to this particular return, or that information was withheld from investigators, but the concern is what provenance information can be lost to forensic researchers when National agencies are bound and beholding to confidentiality agreements negotiated as part of a voluntary relinquishment.

Confidentiality can deny collectors, institutions, and art market peers information that might prompt them to question their own acquisitions. The public receives a perfunctory account of resolution, while art crime researchers lose access to evidence that could connect objects, transactions, and the actors who repeatedly circulate suspect material. What disappears behind that silence is the opportunity to recognise a pattern, trace other displaced objects, and prevent the next acquisition from repeating the same failures.

As a result, accountability within the collector and dealer communities isn't triggered.  

At ARCA, we understand that when a Shaivite idol is stolen, its community experiences the abduction of a divine presence.  Its return last week will begin to heal a rupture, allowing worship to resume and restoring the sacred to its rightful place within the living rhythm of ritual life.  But restitution should also open the way to accountability.  

Given the concerns raised about other objects circulated by Marcel Nies’s Antwerp gallery over the past decade, forensic researchers focused on Asian art will continue to explore how many suspect pieces may have passed through his hands, from whom they were acquired, and where they are now.  One problematic acquisition might be explained as an oversight.  But repeated dealings in suspect material by an experienced and founding dealer presenting artefacts annually at TEFAF requires a fuller scrutiny which isn't diminished simply by discreetly offering to return an  object when the National authorities come knocking. 

The voluntary return of this idol is welcome, but it doesn't purchase silence about its acquisition nor close the door on further scrutiny.  Returning the object answers the question of where it belongs.  It does not answer for how it came to be offered for sale in the first place.

By:  Lynda Albertson