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Mary Slusser’s secret loot of Nepal’s sacred art and heritage

A US scholar made her name as an expert on Nepal’s cultural heritage – while illicitly buying sacred artefacts and smuggling them out to the United States

By Erin L Thompson
Mary Slusser’s secret loot of Nepal’s sacred art and heritage
Mary Slusser in the Kathmandu Valley in 1971. Slusser illicitly collected roughly 500 artefacts, many of them sacred objects, that she later sold on or donated to museums in the United States – in the process doing inestimable harm to Nepal’s heritage and traditions. Photo: Courtesy of the Mary Slusser Collection, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
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MARY SHEPHERD SLUSSER landed in Kathmandu on 13 November 1965. She was carrying a typewriter, a pair of cats named Latsa and Bratsa, and two Persian rugs she had purchased in Tehran during a layover on her flight from Washington DC. Her husband, Harry Robert (“Bob”) Slusser, had been appointed the local deputy director of the Investment Generation Division at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He would help Nepal manage its timber, electrify its cities and solicit foreign investment for tourism projects.

Slusser was astounded at the beauty of her new home. She “almost screamed, yelled, and fell out of the car” as the couple drove through the centre of Kathmandu on the way to their new apartment, passing “temples and stupas and shrines and houses jumbled together and sprinkled with hill peoples, holy men, sacred cattle, scrawny dogs, scavenger pigs and heaven knows what.” In her first letter home, Slusser described Nepal as being “beyond our wildest dreams.”

Slusser bought her first stolen gods just a few weeks after she arrived. Taking a Sunday sight-seeing drive, the Slussers stopped at the Gokarneshwor Mahadev temple, dedicated to the Hindu deity Shiva, on the northeastern edge of the Kathmandu Valley. On the wide steps leading down from the temple to the Bagmati River, Slusser recorded in her diary, families were picnicking, little girls were washing brass pots and “some sort of esoteric ceremony” was in progress, “with much mutual blessings.”

This is a Himal Investigation. To see more of our investigative work, click here. To watch a behind-the-scenes conversation on the making of this story between Erin L Thompson and Himal’s Editor, Roman Gautam, click here.

As the Slussers lingered in the temple complex’s courtyard, some boys showed them a tiny bronze sculpture of Shiva and his consort, Parvati. Slusser was “sure they had just stolen” this idol, since grains of rice, offered to the gods by their worshippers, were still clinging to its surface.

Thanks to Slusser’s intensive Nepali lessons, she understood that the boys were asking for NPR 22 for the sculpture. She bargained them down to NPR 14 – then the equivalent of USD 1.82, as she noted with customary exactitude in her diary. “It is really a very sweet piece,” she added, “and I don’t think the temple will miss it at all.”