UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. —When Penn State Associate Professor of Creative Writing Elizabeth Kadetsky traveled to India in 2019 to conduct research for what she thought was going to be her next book — a novel — she instead found a story as unique and compelling as the best fiction — only it was completely true.

A portion of that tale is now the cover story for The American Scholar magazine's Spring 2023 issue. “The Goddess Complex" is a piece of narrative nonfiction in which Kadetsky takes readers on her wide-ranging journey to trace the whereabouts of the Tanesar sculptures, a set of a dozen or more sixth-century stone figures, most of them mother goddesses (also called matrikas), that were housed in a temple in southwestern Rajasthan, India. Two Fulbright grants provided her with the funding to conduct her research, which is part of a larger book project on the subject. 

In the late 1950s, a prominent archaeologist discovered the sculptures and published his findings in an Indian art history journal. Once the Western art world was made aware of the goddesses, they were stolen sometime during the early 1960s, eventually ending up in the collections of high-profile art collectors and several prominent museums. 

Among the questions Kadetsky said she seeks to answer in her reporting is: What compelled otherwise cultured people to commit the unscrupulous act of looting and collecting sacred cultural objects?

“The story I’m trying to tell is incredibly rich, and gets to what was going on in the U.S. and in India during the mid-20th century — capricious historical events came together in one moment of time,” Kadetsky said. “It’s connected to the mass commercialization of high culture that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. These were people who loved art and thought they had an almost mystical ability to determine what made an object beautiful. They thought that they could understand the sublime, and that these sculptures should be in a gallery.”

Originally — coming off the publication of her 2020 memoir, “The Memory Eaters" —  Kadetsky said she decided she wanted to next write a novel that explored three modern scourges that had long fascinated her — illegal adoption, kidnapping of international travelers, and antiquities theft.

A grant from Penn State’s Humanities Institute got her started on her research, and was followed by a Fulbright research grant that allowed her to travel to India with her son in late 2019 and early 2020.

There, she said, with the help of an intrepid driver/guide, she found her way to the Tanesar temple, where she interviewed worshippers about the significance of the sculptures. She learned that the 2-foot high, naturalistic, jadelike sculptures were associated with fertility, but were also a source of fear for villagers.

“They’re beautiful sculptures — every time I see them, I become more enamored of them,” Kadetsky said. “They look human, and their faces are nurturing. And then you read the history and see that actually they’re considered bad figures who will hurt your children if you don’t do things for them. They’re demons in disguise.”

With more research, Kadetsky said, she realized there was much more to the story — so much, in fact, that she decided to scrap the idea for the novel and instead write a nonfiction book about the sculptures.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic intervened, forcing Kadetsky to cut her trip short and return to State College in March 2020, she said. During those lockdown months, she found numerous sources through Penn State University Libraries and its interlibrary loan service, from old issues of Architectural Digest to arcane art history journals that mentioned the goddess sculptures — including a 1959 article that made their existence known to the Western art world.

She also tracked down a woman whose doctoral dissertation from 1977 included a chapter on the sculptures, and interviewed the head of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. 

Kadetsky’s search continued last summer, when a grant from Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy and the Center for Democratic Deliberation allowed her to travel to see the goddess sculptures housed at museums in the U.S. and Great Britain. She also received another Fulbright grant, which she used to return to India late last year.

“Eventually, the story started to take shape for me,” Kadetsky said. “It was a fun process finding out how many sculptures there were, and how many ended up in the U.S. It was a maze that I found fascinating — many little mysteries that eventually came together.”

As she continues to work on the project, Kadetsky said she finds herself thinking a lot about what ultimately will become of the sculptures, and while the Manhattan DA’s office and other entities working to repatriate stolen antiquities are doing noble work, it comes with its own set of problems with no easy answers.

“The Manhattan DA’s office has been dropping off the artifacts at the Indian Consulate, but the Indian government simply can’t process all of them,” Kadetsky said. “Sculptures are not always going back to the temples where they were. So, the question is, ‘Does this really fix the problem?’ You can’t turn the clock back by saying, ‘Oh, we’ll just send it back 60 years later,’ because the world has changed.

“It’s an important story to tell right now, and many people are not looking at the larger issues with a lot of reflection, depth or insight," she continued. "We need to be creative and think about the idea of ownership. Maybe we shouldn’t be thinking of these objects as things that are owned — maybe it’s also an issue of stewardship and stability. Ownership is not a privilege, but a responsibility — thinking of it that way could make for a paradigm shift.

"The museums acted badly when they acquired these sculptures in the 1960s and 1970s," added Kadetsky. "Removing them from the museums is a satisfying corrective, but it doesn't address reparations to the harmed communities, the long-term effects of the crimes, how to care for the sculptures once they depart, and where and with whom the sculptures belong today. … A more nuanced exploration surrounding the return of cultural artifacts is needed.”