The Hunt for India’s Stolen Tantric Goddesses
A secret cult once worshipped yoginis with wine and corpses. Then, they were looted and scattered around the world.
For 15 years, a woman in the English countryside lived with a goddess in her garden. The stone figure was there when she bought the house: a seated woman with the head of a goat, her stone edges softened by moss. But when the woman decided to sell the house, she made a surprising discovery. The figure was a 10th-century yogini, a tantric goddess stolen in the early 1980s from a hilltop temple near Lokhari, Uttar Pradesh. For over 20 years, villagers had prayed for her return.
Getting her back was a scramble. The statue first arrived at the London office of Christopher Marinello, the lawyer whose firm arranged her return. She was too big to fit through the door. S. Vijay Kumar, who tracks stolen Indian idols, called him. “Chris, relax and do not worry,” Marinello, who spoke to The Juggernaut, recalled Kumar saying. “She is a goddess and will find her way home.”
The yoginis are some of the most mysterious figures in Indian spirituality. In tantric texts, they are nocturnal beings who fly, shapeshift, and gather in cremation grounds, devouring the unwary and bestowing powers to the brave. Today, yoginis are scattered across private gardens, auction catalogs, and museums from San Francisco to Paris. But the yoginis raise a question that repatriation rarely answers: how do you bring a goddess home? The Juggernaut spoke to the lawyers, art historians, and scholars at the forefront of that effort.