The Guardian
Sat 4 Dec 2021 13.00 EST
For more than 20 years, those who lived in and around the village of Lokhari in Uttar Pradesh, India, have prayed for the return of an important statue of a goddess that was stolen from a local temple. Now those prayers have been answered. The 8th-century goat-headed deity has been discovered thousands of miles away – in an English country garden, covered in moss.
The sculpture will be formally given to the High Commission of India in London. It is a case that shames Sotheby’s, which offered the statue for sale in 1988, a few years before the auctioneer was to face serious allegations of having encouraged looting of ancient Indian religious sites.