IntroductionFootnote ¹

Alisha Sijapati and Erin Thompson’s “Making a market for ‘The Art of Nepal’: Tracing the flow of Nepali cultural property into the United States” centers on the 1964 “The Art of Nepal” exhibition at New York’s Asia Society. The exhibit, curated by Stella Kramrisch and made possible by extensive sponsorship and promotion by the Nepali monarchy and national government, sparked a generation of American interest in Nepali antiquities.Footnote ² This article presents a narrow slice of the Nepali antiquities trade in the United States, relying primarily on this single exhibition as its case study. From this limited perspective, the authors extrapolate broad and unsubstantiated conclusions about the entire trade in Nepali antiquities.

After outlining the emergence of a market for Nepali antiquities in the United States beginning in the 1960s, Sijapati and Thompson conclude that, with regard to Nepali antiquities, “all available evidence points to the probability of illicit transfers in the ownership history of items appearing on the American market after 1964.”Footnote ³ This is a bold assertion that lacks the evidentiary foundation to support it. Notably, the authors are not merely alleging violations of Nepal’s export restrictions or international cultural property law, specifically the UNESCO 1970 Convention, but that these objects are the products of illicit transfers of ownership—that they were systematically stolen or looted.

However, this assertion is built on a fundamentally flawed premise. The article offers no substantive insight into the domestic antiquities trade within Nepal during the period under study (1950s to early 1970s), leaving a critical gap in context. Moreover, the inference of theft appears to rest largely on evidence from the late 1970s onward—material that is both temporally and thematically outside the article’s declared scope. Even the later dated evidence does not amount to conclusive proof of the market being characterized only by illicit transfers. As such, the authors’ conclusion is not only speculative but also methodologically unsound, relying on assumptions rather than demonstrating a coherent chain of evidence.

A more charitable reading of Sijapati and Thompson’s sweeping statement, given their lack of research to support the broader claim regarding illicit transfers, is to define an unethical “illicit transfer” as when an antiquity left Nepal after the enactment of the 1970 Convention. As they argue: “[I]f such an artifact now in America has no ownership history before 1970, there is little reason to think that it left Nepal before 1970. Thus, these artifacts should be scrutinized by current holders who wish to meet the ethical and legal standards represented by the 1970 UNESCO Convention.”Footnote ⁴ This alternative argument is based on the assumption that the authors’ research regarding the Nepali antiquities market is comprehensive—that the “small” number of Nepali antiquities in the United States before 1970 reflect all that were present outside of Nepal. In effect, for the authors’ purposes, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If there is no evidence of a pre-1970 export history, they assume it could possibly not have one. This conclusion is similarly unmoored from their research and, as shall be shown, erroneous.

The disjunction between the authors’ research, the assumptions they make from that research, and their erroneous conclusions can be best understood in the context of Nepal’s current repatriation campaign and associated scholarship, with which both Sijapati and Thompson are involved.Footnote ⁵ Nepal has no national patrimony law that would automatically vest large categories of antiquities automatically under state ownership, only export regulations established in the 1956 Ancient Monument Protection Act.Footnote ⁶ Despite this legal limitation, Nepali activists have made great progress in the last decade in repatriating certain antiquities from Western collectors and institutions.Footnote ⁷ This success is largely due to the work of Lain S. Bangdel and his Reference Bangdel1989 book Stolen Images of Nepal, and Jürgen Schick in The Gods Are Leaving the Country: Art Theft from Nepal, published in 1998, which provided photographs of antiquities in specific shrines, monasteries, and temples in situ before their theft.Footnote ⁸ The Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign (NHRC) and Lost Arts of Nepal and their allies in the United States have connected these and other photographs of antiquities before theft to their present locations in Western, particularly American, museums and collections.Footnote ⁹ This provenance research provides the proof of theft from an antiquity’s legal owner and is then used to compel voluntary repatriation of the antiquity to its rightful owner in Nepal, or else have it seized and repatriated by legal authorities through due process of law.

The success of this campaign is remarkable, but it will eventually end. The repatriated antiquities are primarily wood and stone sculptures that were structural components from shrines, temples, and monasteries and clearly documented as stolen, or already well-documented thefts of other types of antiquities that a claim can be made from. There are only so many antiquities that can be definitively proven as stolen. Researching the provenance and history of each antiquity outside of Nepal would take a great deal of time, and even with that research, most antiquities outside of Nepal cannot be legally proven to be the products of illicit transfers, nor is it likely activists can show that any specific antiquity was removed in an ethically wrong context.

It is in these instances that cultural heritage scholarship has developed frameworks to consider voluntary repatriation not required by law. In this article the authors have sought to expand on Victoria Reed’s scholarship for such a purpose, specifically her idea that “[w]hen faced with a restitution claim, museums should not necessarily expect a ‘smoking gun’ showing precisely when and how a work of art was taken in order to assess the claim fairly. … Decisions about restitution must be based on a solid foundation of research, but they also call for small leaps of faith. We must be comfortable taking those leaps if we are to act ethically rather than strictly legally.”Footnote ¹⁰ The stated purpose of Sijapati and Thompson’s article is to build a framework to encourage “small leaps” with regard to Nepali antiquities by arguing their article’s assumptions are sufficiently grounded and comprehensively evidenced to make such leaps and to model its application through their examination of the Heeramaneck collection.Footnote ¹¹ Yet instead of offering a solid foundation of research to make Reed’s leaps, the authors make a series of compounding assumptions that lead to factually erroneous conclusions.

This short response will show that these assumptions the authors erroneously extrapolate from their research are ungrounded, note the significant factual and interpretative errors made in the authors’ review of the Heeramaneck collection, and conclude by arguing that if there is to be an ethical turn in voluntary repatriation, scholars and institutions must examine greater contexts beyond the West; reconsider assumptions about antiquities markets grounded in Western histories, norms, and contexts; and give non-Western actors the agency that they are due.

The Nepali antiquities trade in context

The assumption that Nepali antiquities appearing on the American market after 1964 are more likely than not the products of theft or looting does not comport with the antiquities trade inside Nepal itself. Within Nepal, there was widespread private ownership of antiquities in which title could and did pass between private individuals in fair dealings. Nepalis did consent to their cultural heritage—sacred and profane—entering commercial markets and making its way out of Nepal, and engaged in the trade of antiquities, both among their compatriots and foreign buyers.Footnote ¹² Even members of Nepal’s government, and particularly the royal family, were openly involved in the trade; one of the major mid-century Nepali art dealers in Nepal was Prince Basundhara Bir Bikram Shah, who dealt in antiquities on his royal estate.Footnote ¹³ It is true that numerous antiquities thefts occurred in Nepal, particularly from the late 1970s onward, but one cannot extrapolate from those thefts that all antiquities entering the United States after 1964 are the results of improper transfers of ownership.Footnote ¹⁴

If one takes, for example, the most popular category of Nepali antiquities among Western collectors, metal sculptures (often referred to as ‘bronzes’), one would find the authors’ assumption is not sustainable without further evidence than is found in the article.Footnote ¹⁵ Such sculptures were just as frequently part of house shrines as they were part of religious institutions, and though sacred in form, such sculptures were the entirely private possessions of individuals that were bought, sold, and even collateralized in a secular fashion.Footnote ¹⁶ In Nepal, metal sculptures were family heirlooms, but, like any other type of heirloom in any part of the world, families would frequently sell them or use them as collateral when in need of a loan.Footnote ¹⁷ This was common practice in Nepal, as it is in the rest of South Asia, and their value was originally not derived from their historical or artistic value but from their weight value in metal.Footnote ¹⁸ This trade was not only common but consensual, the product of fair dealings rather than theft.

The commercial trade in this single antiquity type was just one part of the broader, consensual trade in Nepali art among Nepalis in Nepal that in turn flowed into the Indian art market for many decades before 1956 (let alone 1970), and that would develop into a trade that reached first Europe and later the United States. The existence of this long-standing international trade challenges the authors’ second, related assertion that antiquities not on the American market before 1964 must be post–1970 Convention exports from Nepal, and the assertion completely fails when one examines that Indian art market and its centrality in the Himalayan art market, a subject with which the authors are apparently unfamiliar.

Much Western commentary on the Nepali antiquities trade highlights the fact that the country opened to Western foreigners in 1951 after the end of the Rana dynasty; and, as Nepal enacted its antiquities export law in 1956, this commentary then assumes that the vast majority of antiquities must have therefore come out of Nepal after 1956.Footnote ¹⁹ This argument is founded on the premise that the market was driven by Western buyers and the fact that there were only a small number of Westerners visiting Nepal between 1951 and 1956. Sijapati and Thompson in effect stretch this argument to 1970, implying that because American collections of Nepali antiquities were not particularly robust by the 1964 exhibition, those Nepali antiquities that later appeared in America must have left Nepal after that date. Those commentors, and this article, perpetuate an Orientalist image of Nepal as a Himalayan hermit kingdom closed to outsiders and make Westerners the only relevant agents who can ‘discover’ a ‘new’ antiquities market in a ‘pristine’ and ‘pure’ land.Footnote ²⁰ This ignores the fact that Nepal was not closed to other South Asians before 1951 and obscures the history of the earlier Nepali antiquities trade by Indian dealers and collectors.

This community of Indians, particularly Parsi art dealers and collectors who could freely travel to Nepal well before the 1951, were already collecting vast quantities of Nepali and Tibetan art in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote ²¹ In this period, Nepali antiquities were categorized and collected with Indian antiquities generally. Famous Indian collectors who built sizable Nepali antiquities collections included Abanindranath Tagore, who died in 1951 and collected Tibetan and Nepali paintings; O.C. Gangoly, who would be introduced to Nepali art by Abanindranath and would amass an extensive collection of Nepali lamps and other antiquities; Radha Krishna Bharany and his son Chhotelal Bharany, who dealt extensively to Ananda Coomaraswamy; and the Tata brothers, Sir Dorab and Sir Ratan, who died in 1932 and 1918, respectively.Footnote ²² The authors do cite one of these Indian collectors of Nepali antiquities, Karl Jamshed Khandalavala, in a 1950 Marg article that discusses Nepali antiquities in a separate Indian collection, yet they are unaware of how that citation undercuts their claims that Nepali antiquities did not leave Nepal in any volume before the country opened to Westerners.Footnote ²³

Nor were Western foreigners in South Asia hindered in collecting Nepali antiquities before 1951. Though the authors make much of the development of American interest in Nepali art after the 1964 exhibition, British and European interest in Nepal’s art began over a century earlier, arising out of the scholarship of Brian Houghton Hodgson, based on his two decades in Nepal from 1820 to 1843.Footnote ²⁴ Cecil Bendall was already writing on Cambridge University’s collection of Nepali manuscripts in 1883 and would subsequently make repeated trips to Nepal to acquire further manuscripts and art for both Cambridge and the British Museum.Footnote ²⁵ Percy Brown wrote that the purpose of his 1912 study of Nepali art, Picturesque Nepal, was to put into context the existing collection of Nepali antiquities he managed, and added to, in the Calcutta Museum.Footnote ²⁶ Sir John Woodroffe, who died in 1936, built an extensive collection of Nepali and Tibetan art, and he drove the acquisition of Nepali art by the Government Art Gallery.Footnote ²⁷ Giuseppe Tucci visited Nepal repeatedly from the 1920s through the 1950s and in the process built a collection of Nepali antiquities, later acquired by the Heeramanecks.Footnote ²⁸ Kramrisch herself, from her arrival in India in 1921 onward, primarily built her collection through Indian dealers and collectors and spent decades studying and collecting Himalayan art in India before her first trip to Nepal in 1959.Footnote ²⁹

The authors’ unfamiliarity with this market is revealing, since it was this Indian collecting milieu in which Nasli Heeramaneck, also a Parsi, built his vast collection. Such is the importance of the Heeramaneck collection that the article ends with a desire for the collection to be the first test of the authors’ framework for “repatriation considerations.”Footnote ³⁰ Yet the authors erroneously conclude the Heeramanecks only began collecting most of their Nepali antiquities in response to the 1964 exhibition, specifically that “we found no evidence that Nepali cultural heritage was a focus of their purchases or sales until they saw an opportunity to meet growing demand following ‘The Art of Nepal.’”Footnote ³¹ They find no evidence because the authors only write in reference to the American collection and exhibition of Nepali antiquities.Footnote ³² The Heeramanecks were already selling Nepali antiquities to Indian collectors in the 1940s, and would in turn acquire some of the finest Nepali antiquities in their collection from the Patna-based collector R.K. Jalan, who died in 1954.Footnote ³³ Indeed, the Heeramanecks were able to build their entire collection of Nepali antiquities without once visiting Nepal, such was the fecundity of the Nepali antiquities market in India in the first half of the twentieth century. Contrary to the assumptions of the authors, the market for Nepali antiquities thrived well before it developed a branch in the United States, and it was in this market that the Heeramanecks had been buying and selling Nepali antiquities for decades.

This misunderstanding of the art market for Nepali antiquities is then further compounded by the erroneous assumptions the authors derive from their cited evidence, and it leads them to make numerous errors regarding the Heeramaneck collection. They imply that the Heeramanecks’ Nepali antiquities collection amounted to a few, incidentally acquired pieces prior to 1964, that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) acquisition of the Heeramaneck Collection was of antiquities that were improper post-1970 exported material, and that Alice Heeramaneck’s sale of the rest of the collection in the 1970s came primarily from post-1970 purchases.Footnote ³⁴

The authors’ claims about the Heeramaneck collection depends on the assumption that the Heeramanecks were “canny dealers who would not invest their funds in stockpiling artifacts they did not intend to sell.”Footnote ³⁵ Yet the authors themselves cite Nancy Thomas’s Reference Thomas and Pal1986 write-up on Nasli Heeramaneck, despite that source specifically stating that the Heeramanecks’ passion as collectors frequently overrode their good business sense as dealers when making acquisition decisions.Footnote ³⁶ Thomas goes on to quote the Heeramanecks’ longtime friend Perry T. Rathbone characterizing Nasli thus: “[a]s a buyer he is not only helpless but heedless: helpless to resist if the object appeals, heedless to cost. His state of mind alternates between exhilaration over a new acquisition and anxiety over the payments.”Footnote ³⁷ The authors do not clarify in the article how their assumption can survive such contrary evidence; they do not engage with it at all.

Additionally, the authors’ analysis of the Heeramaneck collection depends almost exclusively on my 2019 recounting of my relationship with Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck.Footnote ³⁸ On the one hand they use my account as primary source evidence for their claims, but on the other they treat it as a scholarly historical analysis removed entirely from the events at issue, despite the article being a recounting of my own lived experiences. As the authors cannot escape the fact that Nasli died in March 1971, to sustain their claim that the Heeramaneck collection contains a vast number of post-1970 acquired Nepali antiquities, they imply I wrote that account to give the Heeramaneck collection pre-1970 ‘cover.’Footnote ³⁹ I did not. Nor do I “propose a theory,” as the authors put it, that Nasli acquired the bulk of the collection before his death in 1971; this was a retelling of my extensive firsthand experiences with the Heeramanecks and, more relevantly, their collection.Footnote ⁴⁰ After exclusively using my article as the factual basis for their understanding of the collection, the authors then claim that my knowledge regarding the Heeramaneck collection “is contradicted by the available evidence.”Footnote ⁴¹ This evidence consists of two citations, one to a quote from an oral history by Gordon Bailey Washburn and the other to evidence of a single antiquity purchase by Alice within a year of Nasli’s death.Footnote ⁴²

Regarding LACMA’s 1969 acquisition, nearly all the Nepali antiquities were documented in the 1966 exhibition of the Heeramaneck collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and none of those were acquired after the 1964 exhibition.Footnote ⁴³ Every relevant antiquity in LACMA’s Heeramaneck Collection acquired in 1969 was outside of Nepal before 1970, and many, if not most, were outside of Nepal before 1956. Furthermore, I can attest that the significant majority of Nepali antiquities in the portion of the collection acquired by Christian Humann in 1974 were acquired by the Heeramanecks before Nasli’s death in 1971.Footnote ⁴⁴ As for the Nepali antiquities in the collection that went to the National Gallery of Canada, I confirmed in my review of the collection before that sale that most of it was similarly acquired before Nasli’s death.

Finally, on the explosive growth of the Nepali antiquities market in the United States, the article’s argument depends on the reader not noticing that there were six years between the 1964 exhibition and 1970. Indeed, the article defeats its own argument, as it cites a letter I wrote in 1969 describing how New York had already become a center of the Nepali antiquities trade.Footnote ⁴⁵ Between the Indian market for Nepali antiquities in operation for over a half-century before Nepal opened to foreigners in 1951 and the US market even just between the years 1964 and 1969, there is enough reason to believe that a Nepali antiquity without ownership history before 1970 left Nepal before that date unless context and evidence provided by item-specific provenance research indicates otherwise.