CHENNAI: Five ancient stolen idols from Tamil Nadu that are presently with the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) are under the scanner now for repatriation back to India.While the TN police have registered cases showing they were stolen, the NGA has said that the provenance of only one, a child Sambandar, has art thief Subhash Kapoor's Art of the Past gallery in New York. This would indicate that the trade in stolen antiques from Tamil Nadu may have involved multiple routes with many different actors, not just Kapoor.Last week, the Canberra-based gallery gave away three arifacts to culture minister Mahesh Sharma including the 900-year-old Pratiyangira statue that went missing from a Shiva temple in Cuddalore district. This was preceded by then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott handing over two Tamil Nadu statues namely Nataraja and Ardhanariswarar in 2014.Dating back to the Chola dynasty , the five antiques that are currently under investigation belong to different periods ranging from the 11th to 13th century AD. The statues have been identified as child-saint Sambandar, dancing child-saint Sambandar, auspicious Kali, six-headed Skanda (Kartikeyya) and sacred bull Nandi.An NGA spokesperson said that the gallery is methodically working through the necessary provenance research of its Asian collection, which includes these five works. “We have committed to act ethically and work with Indian authorities on this matter,“ the spokesperson told TOI in an email reply to a query on whether the NGA was approached by ASI seeking return of the idols. To another question, the NGA responded that there are nine pre-20th century sculptures in the NGA collection that originate from Tamil Nadu, whose provenances are being examined. “Of these, three were purchased from Subhash Kapoor's dealership Art of the Past,“ the NGA spokesperson said. The idols have various provenances. For instance, the 11th-century-old Auspicious Kali (Bhadrakali) idol made of bronze was owned by a London-based art dealer named Maharukh Desai, who sold it to Willard Clark based in USA in 1993. Later, the statue was passed on to Carlton Rochell Ltd in New York and sold out to NGA in 2006.The idol wing of the Tamil Nadu police has registered first information reports (FIR) against these five missing idols. Official sources say that the child Sambandar stat ue has been traced to a temple near Poompuhar in the coastal Nagapattinam district. “We sent the details about the five statues to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) for retrieving from Australia, ahead of the visit by its official this month. But, it is disappointing that they could manage to bring back only the Pritiyangira idol,“ a police officer said.A team of two ASI officers left for Canberra from New Delhi on September 11 to verify the idols that were to be handed over to visiting culture minister Mahesh Sharma on September 19. An ASI officer clarified that they received the information from the police about these five idols just a day before they departed for Australia. The details have been shared with the NGA for further action.The officials point out that it took nearly a year of negotiation before the NGA agreed to return the Pratyangira.