‘Our god was locked in a US museum’: the heritage hunters bringing home Nepal’s lost treasures

News Snapshot:

Flicking through a newspaper in 2020, Sanjay Adhikari read a story that changed the direction of his life – a Nepalese statue of gods Laxmi and Narayan, was on display at the Dallas Museum of Art. “I could not sleep. Our god was locked inside a museum in the US,” he says. Adhikari, from Kathmandu, spoke to conservationists, activists, journalists and museum curators, and launched a campaign to see the 10th-century statue returned to Nepal. “I wrote dozens of emails to the foreign ministry, archaeology department and the US embassy,” he says. The 28-year-old got the mayor of Lalitpur town,...