When the priceless Chola bronzes from Sivapuram and Pathur villages in Tamil Nadu were returned to India in 1986 and 1991 after protracted legal battles in the U.S. and U.K., it created a sensation. A formidable team of experts from diverse fields helped repatriate the bronzes after they were smuggled abroad. On February 17, 1988, Justice Ian Kennedy of a London court, awarding the idol to Tamil Nadu, praised R. Nagaswamy, who testified in the case, as “an acknowledged expert in the field of Chola bronzes.” Then Director of the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology, Nagaswamy was an epigraphist, iconographer, archaeologist, and scholar of Tamil and Sanskrit.

It was celebration time again for epigraphists and scholars of Chola history when Leiden University in the Netherlands handed over the Anaimangalam copper-plate charter, popularly known as the Leiden plates, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi at The Hague on May 16, 2026.