A HISTORY OF INDIA THROUGH 75

OBJECTS

SUDESHNA GUHA
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 [H]uman action in the external world materializes only
through thinking about the order of things, since things are
based upon each other.

– IBN KHALDUN, The Muqaddimah

The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History/Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) [Chapter VI, Section 2].
Translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal; abridged and edited by N.J. Dawood. Princeton
University Press, 1969.
CONTENTS
List of Abbreviations
Objects and Histories

1. The Pallavaram Spear Head

2. The Prehistoric Art Gallery of Bhimbetka
3. The Sarai Khola Jar at Burzahom
4. The Dancing Girl
5. An Indus Scale
6. A Daimabad Bronze
7. Copper Anthropomorph
8. The Allahabad Pillar
9. The Yakshi of Didarganj
10. The Eastern Torana
11. A Portrait of Kanishka I
12. An Ayagapata
13. The Pompeii Yakshi
14. Fortuna Intaglio
15. The Chandraketugarh Plaque of Harvesting
16. Kharoshthi Tablet
17. Samudragupta’s Gold Coin
18. Copies of Ajanta
19. The Sarnath Buddha
20. The ‘Gupta’ Plaque of a Mahabharata Scene
21. Yogini Vrishanana
22. A Copy of the Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita
23. The Nataraja of Tiruvalangadu
24. A ‘Temple Sari’
25. Kalhana’s Rajatarangini
26. Ellenborough’s ‘Somanatha Gates’
27. The Iron Pillar
28. Jagannatha’s Ratha
29. A Hero Stone
30. Pabuji’s Phad
31. Garuda Chariot
32. The Jaali of ‘Palm and Parasite’
33. A Yasna Sadeh
34. The Baburnama
35. Bhugola: The Earth Ball
36. Akbar’s Razmnama
37. Linschoten’s Map of India and Arabia
38. Jahangir’s Meteorite Knife
39. Jahangir and a Portrait of the Madonna
40. A Mughal Wine Cup
41. Portrait of Shivaji
42. Picture of Raga Megha
43. Timur Ruby
44. The Samrat Yantra
45. Nader Shah’s Tabar
46. Chintz Rumaal
47. Tipu’s Tiger
48. Painting of Serfoji II in Court
49. The Gentil Album
50. Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match
51. Game Board and ‘Snakes and Ladders’
52. An 1857 Bed
53. Handheld Prayer Wheel
54. A Deen Dayal Photograph
55. The Godrej Lock
56. A Field Photograph of Toda Anthropology
57. Jatashur, the Millstone of Caste
58. Monkey Skull Trophy
59. A Chenchu Flute
60. Bharatuddhar: A Proscribed Print
61. Quit India Pamphlet
62. Refugee Map
63. The Westland Wapiti
64. India’s Jadeite Necklace
65. A Model Village
66. LIC Logo
67. Mother India, the Film Poster
68. The Ambassador
69. INS Vikrant
70. Amul Girl Billboards
71. A Modern Kaavad
72. Electronic Voting Machine
73. Bhimayana: Ambedkar’s Heroic Epic
74. A Kashmir Novel, Munnu
75. Moveable Chalit Solar Pump

Histories with Objects

Acknowledgements
Image Credits
Index
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ACP: Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi BDLM: Dr. Bhau Daji Lad City Museum,
Mumbai BM: The British Museum, London
CSAS: Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge CSMVS: Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu
Sangrahalaya, Mumbai MAA: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge NM:
National Museum, New Delhi
RAS: Royal Asiatic Society, London
RC: Royal Collection Trust, Windsor
RGS: The Royal Geographical Society, London SOAS: School of Oriental and African Studies,
London V&A: Victoria and Albert Museum, London
OBJECTS AND HISTORIES

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT THE STUFF OF HISTORY. THROUGH A selection of things

from prehistoric to modern-day India, it brings out the inordinate power of
the material world to demonstrate the limitlessness of the historical enquiry.
It reminds us that we engage with the world through objects, and that even
the immaterial is fashioned as many visible forms. The histories in the book
encourage the nurture of a complex and rigorous scholarship of the past,
highlight many unexplored historical domains, and present the need for
critically evaluating our creations of material realities.
Such object-driven history books have become commonplace since the
publication, just over a decade ago, of A History of the World in 100
Objects by the British Museum (2011). The aim of that project was to
exhibit the institution’s universalism as ‘The Museum of the World, for the
World’. Carefully planned, high-profile advertising for the book, including
through radio broadcasts each devoted to one object, contributed to the
rapid expansion of the market for history books told through lists of things.
This book was first proposed then, but the aims have emerged as somewhat
different, conveying the need to map the changing meanings and valuations
of things over time with the shifting directions of historical enquiries. Each
of its essays builds upon the many stories which the object conveys, and
exhibits the logic of expecting multiple histories of a particular
phenomenon. The essays, therefore, also illustrate the many ways in which
objects and their assemblages allow us to imagine the world and explore its
connected histories. They present the need for thinking through the
historical linkages we construct, and for engaging with the polyvalence of
History.
The collection here follows the core publication brief to convey the
historical chronology of the Indian subcontinent. Thus, the Pallavaram
Spear Head, Fortuna Intaglio, Mehrauli Iron Pillar, Jahangir’s Meteorite
Knife, Tipu’s Tiger, a Quit India Flyer, INS Vikrant, Bhimayana and
Moving Solar Pump – to provide a glimpse – map the temporal sequence
from prehistory. Although placed sequentially, largely according to the
dates of their creation, the objects nevertheless refuse easy absorption in a
chronological narrative. For, as their biographical essays illustrate, they
move in and out of time and space and, therefore, through many histories.
They implore us to see the bigger world they inhabit and caution us against
conceptualizing the past in a linear form and seeking only the aspects of
their uniqueness. They create a regard of the infinite ways in which we are
able to historicize.
Although the terms Ancient, Medieval and Modern appear as time frames
through the essays, they do not constitute historiographic markers of a
periodization. They have been used as convenient reference points, and
have no bearing, whatsoever, to equivalence with a Hindu, Muslim or
British historical period for India. Additionally, the essays categorically
eschew the understanding that foreign invasions brought unfortunate
changes to the, supposedly, innate and ancient Hindu civilization. They
reveal, instead, how wrong it is to treat either as utterly foreign or as
completely indigenous a past without nation states and a region as vast and
diverse as the Indian subcontinent. They highlight the inaccuracies of
historicizing essentialisms, including an essence of the Indian culture and
tradition.
The life histories of objects illustrate the problems of ascribing and fixing
meanings and identities. Thus, the Allahabad Pillar provokes the question
of the best way to describe it at all, as its identification simply as Ashokan
or Mauryan erases all its other uses and patterns of memory. Objects, as the
book reminds us, live many lives.
 They, therefore, invite us to attend to the complexity of representation
through which different meanings often coexist simultaneously around
them. They encourage us to see the merit of viewing the past as a
palimpsest, as they make us very aware of the seepage of older forms into
the new. They, thereby, show us that the material world demands careful
histories of encounters.
The collection here highlights the stringent demands of the scholarship of
the material. Many objects raise questions about classifications, and some
remind us of the complicated, and often out of date, antiquity laws that
establish their economic and heritage valuations and condition their access.
The essays of the photographs illustrate the importance of informed, critical
engagements with the materiality of vision within the historical and
archaeological scholarship. With the lithographs, posters, and graphic
novels, photographs too bring us to note the inordinate power of visual
histories for resisting moves of authoritarianism.
Objects demand reflection upon our dismissals of the copy for the real
thing; acts that have long guided the scholarship of art and archaeology.
For, as we note through the histories of the consumption of the Eastern
Torana of Sanchi and Ajanta paintings, material authenticity often has little
bearing upon the valuation of things as objects of heritage. Replicas and
souvenirs often create the tangibility of a certain past.
Many objects allow us to recall histories that have been side-lined. Thus,
the Akluj Hero Stone, Monkey Skull, Pabuji’s phad and Sidi Sayyid’s jaali
highlight the histories of pastoralist and tribal societies, oral traditions and
slave trade, and the importance of situating them within the mainstream and
popular histories of India. Others illustrate the heuristic value of thinking
through histories of collections, collecting practices and curation in
exploring past and contemporary times.
Considering that museums are being built at an increasing rate in India at
present, and some are also being wilfully destroyed in the process, the
scholarship of objects and histories creates a regard of the intensification of
the political acts of heritage-making. The well-known Didarganj Yakshi, for
example, guides us to interrogate the increasing heritagization of new
regional cultures, and the Model Village and Sarnath Buddha allow us to
note the rich histories that we can source through little-known regional
collections.
In thinking through objects and histories we also begin to see the logic of
engaging intellectually with the emerging scholarship of museum
archaeology and museum anthropology that represent the constraints and
difficulties of undertaking field work in a milieu of increasing war zones,
conflicts and deprivation. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic shows us quite
starkly the constraints we shall encounter in field research.
The photograph of Toda Testing forefronts the historical role of museums
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in nurturing field
sciences, in this case social anthropology, and the Terracotta Plaque of
Harvesting displays the contributions of many university museums in South
Asia in pioneering regional archaeologies.
The award of a Tagore Scholarship in 2015 allowed a period of work at
the National Museum in New Delhi during which the composition of this
book started. Selections from the National Museum’s collections highlight
several salient themes. For instance, the Museum’s display of the Jadeite
Necklace of Mohenjodaro conveys the erasure of histories in nation-
making. The Necklace therefore appears in the book as a historic object of
the partition of 1947. The Chintz rumaal exhibits the transnational nature of
things often used for crafting national histories, and the looted and rescued
sculpture of the Yogini Vrishanana commands critical enquiries into
collecting practices, as they entail removing things from situated places and
complicate the issues of securing provenance.
Of the objects that have accrued value as particularly Indian, the Temple
Sari documents the invention of old traditions in modern times, and the
Ambassador Car highlights the anomaly of heritage-making that overlooks
the manpower that creates the heritage objects. Things non-Indian also
appear in the book as they relate to histories of India, and an example is the
handheld Tibetan Prayer Wheel which recalls the efficacy of Indians as
human instruments in the British imperialist projects of ruling the East.
Lesser-known things which feature include an 1857 Bed with an image of
the Relief of Lucknow, and native histories of antiquarianism, especially of
the Mughal emperor Jahangir. Notably, the life histories of most antiquities
appear extraordinarily topical in that they allow us to reflect upon the
tribulations of our world today.
Objects, as this book demonstrates, arouse heated debates about their
valuations, lend themselves to new interpretations, and provoke questions
about well-known things. They create experiential and social effects. But
even when they appear as cultural artefacts of the political world, they are
able to negate such claims upon them by awakening curiosity and wonder
among their viewers. By drawing attention to acts of historicizing and
endowments of historicity, this book presents their tremendous power to
resist our meaning making of them. It demonstrates the many ways in
which they construct multiple and changing meanings, and thereby
illustrates the historic flaw of ascribing immutability to a nation’s history by
fixing such a valuation as an innate object of cultural heritage.
1
THE PALLAVARAM SPEAR HEAD
Chennai, Tamil Nadu
c. Late Acheulean, 150,000–75,000 BP

THE CHANCE DISCOVERY OF THIS SEEMINGLY UNREMARKABLE piece of stone

was momentous in proving the long prehistory of South Asia and
ascertaining the Palaeolithic Age of the Indian subcontinent. On 30 May
1863, a young Englishman, Robert Bruce Foote (1834–1912) of the
Geological Survey of India, spotted a ‘moderately fine-grained cinnamon
coloured quartzite’ in a gravel pit, ‘a few hundred yards north of the
Cantonment at Palaveram (10 miles S.W. of Madras)’, as he recorded in his
first report of the find, published three years later (1866). Foote, however,
was not sure whether the object had been made by human hands and could
be regarded as a ‘genuine Stone Implement’ because he had only seen such
things as drawings in the pages of the journal The Geologist. He knew little
about ‘the peculiarities of fracture of quartzite pebbles’, but was shortly
assured that the Pallavaram find was indeed a stone tool, in fact a palaeolith
made by early humans, when in September with his friend and colleague
from the Geological Survey, William King, he found several ‘finely shaped
quartzite implements in situ’ in the laterite bed of the ‘Atrampakkam
nullah’, around 60 kilometres away from Madras. Thereafter, on revisiting
Pallavaram in January 1864, Foote was able to identify two more
palaeoliths from the gravel pit. The excitement of the finds had a significant
impact upon him, as he became, by his own admission, a ‘confirmed
collector of prehistoric remains, thoroughly bitten with the desire to find
more of these interesting artifacts’.

Sketch ‘front and right-edge of the actual size’ of the Spear Head. Possibly by Elizabeth Ann
Percival, wife of Robert Bruce Foote in Foote 1866, Plate I a and I b. Quartzite tool, Lower
Palaeolithic, Government Museum, Chennai.

The above account clearly shows us that dramatic archaeological

discoveries are not about the revelation of ‘facts on the ground’. They often
entail the ‘sighting of evidence’ through searches for things for unravelling
the unknown. Foote’s narrative of making sense of his find at Pallavaram
presents a glimpse of this feature of archaeological discoveries, and his
pioneering scholarship of Indian Prehistory draws our attention to the
myriad connections, intellectual and methodological, which objects
facilitate. Foote shows us the importance of placing collections and
collecting practices at the heart of understanding the archaeological
scholarship.

Sketch by Robert Bruce Foote of a possible ‘Method of Hafting the Spear Head’, in Foote 1914.

Foote’s drawing is as near an exact replica of the Spear Head as was

possible through sketching. He found the object with a broken tip, and
worked upon its functional possibilities before he pronounced it to be a
spear head. One of his sketches of the object, conceptualized as unbroken
and inserted into a bamboo pole, illustrates the experimentations which
informed the naming, and the attendant note of the hafting of the ‘spear-
head type’ shows us the careful ways in which he drew into the nascent
scholarship of prehistory in Britain and Europe for devising methods of
studying the stone tools of India. He recalled the spear head finds at St.
Acheul, France, and Hoxne, England, for making the case that people who
were so skilful in preparing such capital shapes ‘could not have found it
very difficult to invent suitable handles’, and sourced the writings of
prominent British antiquaries, notably John Evans, John Prestwich and
Charles Lyell, for ascertaining that ‘no weapons in olden times were more
valued than the spear and javelin […] for they prevented the necessity of
coming to such extremely close quarters with the foe’. Notably, the
discoveries of stone tools which Foote, King and others made in India from
the late 1860s happened around the same time as the official recognition of
prehistory in western Europe.
Like the recognition of many sciences in the West, those towards
prehistory too, was staunchly opposed by the dogma of religion, and the
histories of the affirmation of a prehistoric past impress upon us the
powerful agency of intellectual networks of support through which ground-
breaking views have often acquired public endorsement.
 Antiquarian scholarship gathered momentum from the seventeenth
century, and developed through the collections of antiquities from field
surveys. Notably, one collection of flint tools, made by Jacques Boucher de
Perthes (1788–1868), a French antiquary and director of customs at
Abbeville, in Picardie, France, played a major role in constituting the
formal evidence of human prehistory. Boucher de Perthes collected flints
from the gravel beds of the nearby river Somme, and found many
implement-looking objects next to bones of large extinct animals within the
same geological layers. In 1836, he decided to make his observations public
and announced to local antiquaries that his collections comprised tools
made by man before the Deluge (or the Great Flood in the Bible). The
declaration shocked his god-fearing Christian audience who believed in the
Mosaic Chronology that decreed God’s creation of the world after the
Deluge, in the year 4004 BCE. The exact year of the supposed origins of
mankind had been calculated in 1650 CE by an archbishop of Armagh,
Ussher, Ireland, and the date was largely held sacrosanct in western Europe
well until the mid-1850s.
Having failed to garner support locally for evidence he considered
momentous, Boucher de Perthes published his views in two volumes, as
Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes (1847 and 1859). The second
brought him to the attention of British antiquaries because by then
excavations at the Brixham Cave in Devon, England, had yielded similar
evidence of flint artefacts with fossils of extinct animals. Therefore, when
the Scottish antiquary and geologist Hugh Falconer passed through
Abbeville in 1858, he made a point of examining the flint collection.
Falconer agreed with Boucher de Perthes that the flints were artefacts of a
pre-Diluvial (pre-flood) age, and urged his esteemed friends in Britain, the
geologist John Prestwich and archaeologist John Evans, to examine them.
Evans visited Abbeville in 1859 and upheld the validity of Falconer’s
assessment and this verification led to the announcement, in the same year,
of the prehistoric antiquity of Man by the Royal Society. The declaration of
the premier academy of science invalidated the Mosaic Chronology and
made way for publicizing the evidence of Prehistory.
 Foote’s recollection of Hoxne reminds us of the antiquity of this ‘tale of
prehistory’. The flint tools which the excavator John Frere (1740–1807), or
rather his workmen, spotted here in 1797 with giant animal bones deep in a
brick clay pit were indeed palaeolithic. Yet, Frere’s claim at the time that
they were tools made by people who lived in remote times ‘even beyond
that of the present world’ was fully ignored. Discoveries, as we note from
the tale, require a right time for being considered and deliberated upon, and
Foote seems to have made his discovery at an opportune time. He soon
declared that the quartzite object of Pallavaram was

the first palaeolith found in India […] of the spear-head type […] in
shape it is very different from the great majority of South Indian
palaeoliths, being long and narrow and quite fitted to be used as a
spear-head, if suitably hafted.

Foote’s statement probably lends to the growing sensationalization of his

first find in India today, often wrongly recalled as a hand axe, as the
discovery that ‘at one stroke […] changed the antiquity of humankind who
lived in India’, to quote a news report commemorating its 150th year. Yet,
Foote was certainly not the first to stumble upon India’s prehistoric past.
From the 1840s, many officers of the East India Company reported flint
flakes, agate splinters and celts, etc. during their surveys, although they
failed to regard them as prehistoric artefacts. Therefore, when first reporting
his discovery at Pallavaram Foote had known only of a ‘doubtful Stone
Implement found by Mr. Theobold of the Geological Survey in the
Gangetic Alluvium near the mouth of the Soane’. Stray reports of neoliths
were, however, available by then, such as by a French railway engineer,
H.P. Le Mesurier, who saw these in 1861 in the Vindhyas, and a Captain
Newbold who reported such implements in 1862 in the Tonse river valley in
Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. Foote subsequently found out about Mesurier’s
find, and duly acknowledged it as an ‘interesting and important discovery’
that preceded his.
 Irrespective of who may have first recognized prehistoric tools within the
Indian subcontinent, Foote was the first to document and map India’s
prehistory, and the vast collection of prehistoric artefacts which he created
quite single-handedly illustrates his herculean accomplishments. He
mapped more than 459 sites, mainly in south and central India and Gujarat,
ranging across the three Stone Ages – Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic
– along with more recent Iron Age sites. Additionally, he made seminal
palaeontological discoveries in the Billa Surgam Caves in Kurnool District,
Andhra Pradesh, where he excavated with his son Henry in 1883–85, and
found fossil bones of the extinct Rhinoceros decanensis, and of porcupine,
pig, civet and other species of mammals. He made detailed reports of all his
finds, with lavish drawings of the objects he collected, and deployed his
vast collection – of stone implements, pottery, potsherds, beads, shell
ornaments, and various other types of antiquities – for developing and
disseminating knowledge. He sought opportunities for their exhibitions,
including at international venues such as the Vienna Exhibition of 1873,
swapped what he considered were the duplicates in the collection with
colleagues and other antiquaries for filling in the chronological gaps among
the collected objects, and gathered information about many in his collection
from other collections. Yet, despite his assiduous collecting practices Foote
occasionally regretted that he had not collected enough. He understood the
importance of collecting for gauging the past, not just temporally but also
spatially, and emphasized that ‘the greatest value of the collection is the
great light it throws upon the geographical distribution of the people of
several ages’. In fact, the meticulous manner in which he catalogued his
collection informs us of the care with which he recorded the artefact
assemblage of every site he saw. He also wisely secured the fate of his
collection by donating it to the Government Museum, Madras, when he
realized that it had become too large for a private home. And there it
remains, the single most valuable reference collection of Indian prehistory.
The Pallavaram Spear Head is tentatively dated to the Late Acheulean
archaeological cultural phase, when the manufacturing techniques of stone
tools became more evolved. The find site, namely, the parade ground in
Pallavaram, has never been excavated, and India’s premier prehistorian K.
Paddayya emphasizes that therefore the historical context of the presence of
the Spear Head in this area remains unknown. Similar tools – bifacial with
sharp cutting edge – first appeared 1.5–1.2 million years ago, in the Early
Acheulean phase, and they inform us of the careful selection of stones,
which when hit upon repeatedly with considerable force would fracture in a
predictable manner into regular patterns and forms. Such tools were often
made of distinctive-looking, brightly coloured stones, and they embody the
high aesthetic sensibilities and technical skills of our earliest ancestors.
Since the care and precision with which they were produced goes far
beyond that which was needed in their use, archaeologists now enquire into
aspects of cognitive skills of their creators and the social contexts of their
production. Tool-making also demanded deep knowledge of the terrain, and
archaeologists of South Asian prehistory such as Robin Dennell remind us
that ‘areas that lacked stone but were rich in food sources, such as the large
flood plains of India’ were not inhabited, or ‘colonized and exploited’ by
hominins prior to developments in long-distance exchange networks, which
facilitated the procurement of raw material.
Palaeolithic sites occupy vast swathes of South Asia, and problem-
oriented field research now focuses upon studying them within the context
of their particular ecologies. Notably, Paddayya advocates disengaging with
the Palaeolithic, and also the Mesolithic, as ‘pan-subcontinental identities’,
or as a cultural phenomenon that was similar and developed in a linear
manner. Instead, he highlights the ‘tremendous scope for identifying many
different regional settlement systems in one and the same cultural phase’ of
the Palaeolithic. He also implores us to regard the inhabitants of these
various sites in different regions as social actors who skilfully mastered the
challenges of the particular ecologies they lived in, and not see them as
‘ecological creatures’, who were prisoners of habitats they could not
fashion.
Well until the end of the twentieth century, the Lower Palaeolithic in
South Asia, to which the Late Acheulean Pallavaram Spear Head belongs,
was considered approximately 0.5 million years old, and as ‘derived’ from
East Africa, possibly through homonin movements via coastal or inland
routes. However, this ‘old topic of cultural origins’ as Paddayya
summarizes the historiography, is challenged by recent studies of a few
prehistoric sites, such as at Riwat (Pakistan), Isampur (Karnataka) and
Attirampakkam (Tamil Nadu), which suggest their deeper antiquity, to at
least c. 1.5 million years ago. This new scholarship provides a cue to search
for the origins of the Lower Palaeolithic ‘within the peninsular India itself ’,
and together with the find of a hominid fossil at Hathnora, Madhya Pradesh,
the artefact assemblage of the above sites now inspires theories regarding
‘the dispersals of early cultures to and from South Asian landmass’. The
new theories open up new research enquiries into the Palaeolithic of South
Asia.
The Pallavaram Spear Head therefore reminds us that the ‘out of Africa’
model which once explained the spread of the Acheulean Culture nearly all
over the world is outdated. But more importantly, the increasing valuation
of its historic discovery as the palaeolith that illuminated the deep antiquity
of Man in India occasions a reminder of Foote’s curiosity to look for more
of its kind. In this the Spear Head directs us to regard and explore the
powerful hold of objects in making us see new things.

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Monograph 6.
PADDAYYA, K. (2017). ‘Further Investigations into the Stone Age Cultures of the Hunsgi and
Baichbal Valleys, North Karnataka’. In K. Paddayya and B. Basak (Eds), Prehistoric Research
in Indian Subcontinent: A Reappraisal and New Directions. (pp. 117–43). Primus Books.
PAPPU, S. (2008). ‘Prehistoric Antiquities and Personal Lives: The Untold Story of Robert Bruce
Foote’. Man and Environment, 33 (1), 30–50.
SACKETT, J. (2014). ‘Boucher de Perthes and the Discovery of Human Antiquity’. Bulletin of the
History of Archaeology, 24 (2), 1–11. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bha.242
SONAKIA, A. and H. de Lumley. (2006). ‘Narmada Homo erectus – A Possible Ancestor of the
Modern Indian’. Comptes Rendus Palevol, 5 (1–2), 353–57.
SUBRAMANIAN, T.S. (2013, May 27). ‘A Discovery that Changed the Antiquity of Humankind
Who Lived in Indian Subcontinent’. The Hindu.
2
THE PREHISTORIC ART GALLERY
OF BHIMBETKA
Raisen District, Madhya Pradesh
c. 35,000–10,000 BP and c. 6000–500 BCE [Upper Palaeolithic and
Mesolithic]

NESTLED IN AND AROUND THE DENSELY FORESTED HILLS OF THE Vindhyas, and
approximately 45 kilometres northeast of Bhopal, the rock shelters at
Bhimbetka (the ‘seat of Bhima’) are home to some of the oldest-known
paintings in the world. The craggy sandstone cliffs hold more than 700
caves spread over seven low hills, of which around 400 contain upon their
surfaces incredibly vibrant and beautiful paintings which were painted for
over 15,000 years, from the Palaeolithic Age to Medieval times. They were
chanced upon in 1957 by the archaeologist Vishnu Shridhar Wakanker, who
walked into one of the caves while exploring the area on foot. They would
have appealed to his senses, as they do to ours today, as a vast canvas of
human record of encounters with the natural world.
The hills are naturally sculpted through wind erosions and while they
remain covered with the reserved forests and waterways of the Ratapani
Wildlife Sanctuary, their strange and massive shapes are easily visible from
great distances. Archaeological excavations at the largest cave shelter,
named IIIF-23 or the Auditorium Cave, shows proof of it having been
continuously occupied from the Late Acheulean to medieval times, c.
100,000 BP to c. 1000 CE. The long duration of occupational history makes
Bhimbetka an exceptional archaeological site, and one of its early
excavators, V.N. Misra stated that that ‘while the contents of the shelters
have revealed a continuity, elements of these are also observed in the
continuing traditional expressions in the lifestyles of the surrounding
adivasi settlements of the Gonds, Pradhans and Korkus’. In addition, the
stone tools and burials found inside the rock shelters are all from primary
deposits, which makes Bhimbetka a rare primary site with rock art.

A forest of animals with paintings showing body interiors. Surface area 8 m × 5 m, Mesolithic, The
Zoo Rock, Shelter No. 3, Bhimbetka.

The sheer abundance of rock art at Bhimbetka astounds the senses.

Paintings of different time periods exist side by side, and are also found
superimposed, the later ones painted over those made earlier. The layers of
superimpositions have helped archaeologists build a relative chronology
based upon styles and themes and classify the art into two broad ages:
Prehistoric and Historic.
The prehistoric art is astonishing in its vivacity and variety and
establishes the Bhimbetka hills as one of the oldest natural art galleries of
the world. Many archaeologists date the large paintings of wild animals –
such as boars, buffaloes, nilgai, rhinoceros and leopards – and stick-like
human figures to the Upper Palaeolithic period (c. 35,000 to 10,000 BP),
which is significant all over the world for evidence of human creativity. The
period heralded tremendous innovations in tool-making technologies,
including the thin, long and very sharp parallel-sided blades and burins of
fine stones which refined the activities of hunting and gathering food and
aided crafts production. In Europe, we note extensive examples of human
expressions of art at this time, such as paintings on rocks and engravings on
bones, including antlers, as well as figurines of clay and bead-making. The
natural-looking wild animals at Bhimbetka imprint upon our minds the
beauty of early rock art and its high expressive qualities. The animals are
brightly coloured in dark red and green, and drawn with simple
brushstrokes with a view towards showing details. They appear to the eye
as lurking around their hunters.
Much of the early rock art of Bhimbetka belongs to the Mesolithic period
(c. 6000–500 BCE) and in comparison with the paintings suggested as being
of the Upper Palaeolithic, and considered the oldest, those assuredly dated
to the Mesolithic period comprise smaller animals, although their bodies
appear more natural and powerful. We see sketches of animals running,
jumping, and leaping, or looking cornered and frightened as the stick-like
figures of hunters aim at them with sharp spears and barbed arrows. Many
are shown in an X-ray style, with depictions of the insides of the bodies,
often carrying babies. The hunting scenes show lone animals as well as
groups being hunted. Of the latter, some may be ceremonial hunts, such as
those compositions with unusually large numbers of animals and men.
Significantly, there is an increase in the repertoire of animals. Many new
species now appear, including tortoises, frogs, lizards, antelopes, monkeys,
crabs, dogs, and even a scorpion. In addition, we note scenes with
composite creatures with features of different animals. For example, a
fierce-looking animal with the face of a boar and horns of a bull chasing a
small human figure that seems to run behind a crab. This painting is
repeated in three different rock shelters, and so it possibly illustrates a
mythical creature from a contemporary local legend. Such scenes remind us
that the creators of these paintings would not only hunt, but also fear and
revere the animals with whom they shared their habitat.
The Mesolithic paintings also illustrate a variety of food-gathering
activities with people climbing trees, collecting honey, drinking from
vessels, carrying baskets upon their backs, using traps and snares, and
carrying dead animals. There are even vivid scenes of communality: people
dancing in a line to the beat of drummers, standing in groups, walking with
dogs, and also women and children. In addition, the painted rock surfaces
bear abundant imprints of human palms and fingers.

An animal chasing a crab. Mesolithic, The Boar Rock, Shelter No. 15, Bhimbetka.

The paintings lend to the views of archaeologists that the Mesolithic Age
epitomizes the flowering of prehistoric art. They show the use of new
colours, such as black and yellow. In recent times, archaeologists have
gathered detailed information regarding the composition of the pigments
through sophisticated technologies of investigation, such as the Raman
Spectroscope. The pigments were composed of minerals such as calcite,
haematite, gypsum, whewellite and goethite, and were locally sourced.
They have also yielded evidence of organic binders which were used to mix
them. The paintings of the Mesolithic, however, remind us to regard the
instructions of Erwin Neumayer, the well-known scholar of prehistoric rock
art, that ‘the implications of a culturally relevant shift from a presumed
Palaeolithic to the Mesolithic period cannot be discerned in the pictures’.
The floors of the rock shelters at Bhimbetka were found littered with
microliths, or tiny stone tools, which are a part of the Mesolithic toolkit.
The very small blades, burins, scrapers and borers were hafted in large
numbers into bone or wood and used as arrowheads and spears, and also as
sickles for harvesting. Their symmetrical geometry and sharp edges allowed
great precision, and the toolkit facilitated the extension of subsistence
activities. The Mesolithic heralded incipient farming activities and as Misra
stated, the communities ‘extended colonization into virgin areas’ and settled
in environments which were different from those inhabited during the
Upper Palaeolithic, namely, ‘in the densely wooded and hilly country of
central India’.
Misra excavated at Bhimbetka in 1973 and noted that the inhabitants of
the Auditorium Cave had raised a stone wall to portion off an area. He was
of the opinion that this wall is the earliest evidence of human attempts at
‘settling in’ India and substantiated his inference with the evidence of
human burials within a few rock shelters.
The next phase of paintings date to the Chalcolithic Period (which saw
the use of copper and stone), when the inhabitants mined local deposits with
metal ores to produce tools and other goods of copper. Geometric motifs
appear within the sketches of animal and human figures, and they resemble
those on the pottery classified as Malwa Ware, of the Deccan Chalcolithic,
c. 1800–1600 BCE. These paintings present the uses of many new colours,
including different shades of red and ochre, chocolate and purple. However,
the painted scenes, such as those of bulls with decorated horns being ridden
by men, have been appraised by scholars as static when compared to the
vibrant, moving figures of paintings of earlier times. The domesticated
animals and fully settled lifestyle appear tame to the eye in comparison to
the paintings of wild beasts and hunting and gathering.
The paintings of men in turbans, riding heavily caparisoned horses and
elephants, men holding spears, swords and shields, and royal processions
with men standing under canopies, are dated to the Early Historical (c. 600–
300 BCE) and Medieval (c. eleventh century CE) periods. Some have
inscriptions near them on the rock surfaces in scripts such as the Sunga
Brahmi (second century BCE) and post-Gupta Brahmi (fourth to seventh
centuries). Scholars, such as Misra, consider the imagery to be ‘inspired by
scenes the cave-dwellers saw in the villages and cities of the plains’.
Archaeologists have tried to solve the problem of relating the rock art to
the stone tools that have been found on the floors of the caves and rock
shelters. They have developed technologies of physical dating of which an
example is their research of micro-erosion through which they have
unearthed buried petroglyphs, or rock carvings, in the exfoliations of the
rock surfaces within the Auditorium Cave. The petroglyphs bearing
cupules, or cup marks, are now suggested as possibly belonging to the
Middle Palaeolithic, and the inference leads to claims that the earliest
paintings at Bhimbetka may belong to this period. If this is true, Bhimbetka
would be the oldest-known rock art site in the world. However, since the
paintings cannot be assuredly related to the cup marks, the evidence for the
assertion of deeper antiquity remains questionable.
Although the scholarship of prehistoric rock art in India began with the
finds at Bhimbetka, many nineteenth-century British explorers of India
noticed prehistoric rock paintings during their surveys. A pertinent example
is the chance discoveries in 1867 by Archibald Carlleyle (1831–97) of rock
paintings of Stone Ages in caves and rock shelters at Sohagighat, near
Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. Eleven years later, the finds of the painted figures
of bisons in the caves of Altamira, Spain, created a sensation in Europe, and
to this day the discovery is regarded as the first view of prehistoric art in the
modern world. It is a pity that Carlleyle, who subsequently worked for the
Archaeological Survey of India from 1871 to 1885, did not publish his
finds. His field notes were published posthumously in 1906 in The Indian
Antiquary, and his sighting of the prehistoric paintings cautions us to be
critical of the public notices of ‘first’ discoveries, which overlook similar
finds made before.
The magnificent paintings at Bhimbetka have inspired archaeologists in
India to search for more such examples, and since the 1970s they have
located many painted shelters from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods in
states such as Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat.
The new discoveries add to the wealth of Bhimbetka, although the site
surpasses all of them in hosting an extraordinarily long tradition of art.
Bhimbetka acquired the status of a World Heritage Site in 2003, and its
uniqueness as ‘a living site’ is lodged in the fact that it ‘has not remained
frozen in time and space’, as the Nomination Endowment Report
emphasizes. Its archaeologists have established this uniqueness by situating
the history of rock art at the site within the long tradition of painting among
the adivasi communities who live in and around the area. In fact, the
archaeological scholarship of the site fosters the belief, as expressed by
Misra, that ‘elements of continuity manifest in the creative expressions that
show affinity to great antiquity in the traditional lifestyles of the adivasis of
the area integral to Bhimbetka and the surrounding region’.
On stylistic grounds, the prehistoric rock art resembles the paintings of
the Warli, Kathodi, Dodhi, Kokana and Malhar Koli communities, some of
whom live in and around Bhimbetka, while others live far away, such as
northern Maharashtra. The painting style, which is described as Warli,
comprises stick-like human figures, and although its origins are not known,
modern artists and viewers appraise the art as resembling the style of
Bhimbetka and possibly originating from prehistory. They therefore add to
the archaeological views of the prehistoric paintings by drawing analogies
from the folk and tribal arts of the present day to explain their meanings and
motives. This viewing of Bhimbetka thus nurtures an anomaly – the recent
paintings of the tribal communities are perceived as expressions of
prehistoric art.
The long chronological span of painting at Bhimbetka provides a unique
temporal space for enquiries into the shifts and transformations over time of
the ways in which humans recorded and transcribed their expressions,
emotions and views of their worlds. In fact, Bhimbetka seems a potential
field area for sourcing histories of aesthetics, recording and transcription
that are little known. As India’s foremost prehistoric art gallery, the painted
rock shelters promise revelations about the shifting histories of
humankind’s approaches to art.

MISRA, V.N. (2013). ‘Mesolithic Culture’. In M.K. Dhavalikar (Ed.), Prehistory of India: A
Comprehensive History of India [Vol. 1, Part 1] (pp. 131–85). Manohar.
NEUMAYER, E. (2013). Prehistoric Rock Art of India, Oxford University Press.
Archaeological Survey of India. (2003). Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka: Continuity Through Antiquity,
Art and Environment. Proposal for Nomination for Inclusion in the World Heritage List, No.
925. whc.unesco.org/uploads/nominations/925.pdf
3
THE SARAI KHOLA JAR AT
BURZAHOM
Burzahom, Srinagar District, Jammu and Kashmir
c. 2800–2600 BCE

THE THIN GLOBULAR JAR OF RED, OR ORANGE, SLIPPED WARE was found in the
1970s during excavations at Burzahom, in Srinagar district, Jammu and
Kashmir, from deposits of the Neolithic period (c. 3000–1700 BCE). The
excavators deemed it an import from Sarai Khola, near Taxila, Pakistan,
more than 300 kilometres away. They based their inference upon the
observation that the jar resembles that which is found at the archaeological
site of Kot Diji, Sindh, Pakistan – of the Chalcolithic period with an
assemblage of artefacts that belong to the Early Harappan cultural phase (c.
3200–2600 BCE) – and built upon this view through another inference;
namely, that since Sarai Khola, is the only representative site of the Early
Harappan cultural phase near Burzahom, the jar was possibly manufactured
there.
Thus, the cultural chronology of the jar to the early phases of the Indus
Civilization, namely, the Early Harappan, was gauged through the
observation of similar painted motifs – long curving animal horns – on
finely made jars of Red Ware from some of the prominent Early Harappan
sites (now in Pakistan), such as Kot Diji, Gumla (Gomal Valley) and
Rehman Dheri (southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), and also on terracotta
cakes in related settlements. Archaeologists consider the recurrence of the
motif as a symbol of a shared belief system, and notably Jonathan Mark
Kenoyer suggests that the motif denotes the horns of the water buffalo
which, he believes, was feared and revered within the Indus Civilization.
Significantly, the Early Harappan jar at Burzahom informs us of the
networks of exchange during the third millennium BCE between the
contemporary Neolithic and Chalcolithic communities within proximal
geographies. It is thereby an object that draws our attention to connections
in prehistory, between faraway places and among contemporary
communities with different lifestyles.

Painted slipped ware with horned motif on neck and shoulder. Early Harappan (c. 2800–2600 BCE)
found within Neolithic deposits at Burzahom (c. 3000–1700 BCE) and displayed as containing a
necklace of carnelian beads.

The Neolithic period, which follows the Mesolithic, was celebrated for
much of the twentieth century as heralding major technological
developments that fundamentally altered the course of human history. It
saw the domestication of plants and animals, whereby humans could
successfully cultivate crops and rear animals and hence lead a settled life,
and the invention of the wheel, which revolutionized communication and
nurtured many new and utilitarian domestic goods, including wheel-thrown
pottery. Additionally, excavations at Jericho, Iraq, documented the
emergence of the ‘first towns’ during this age, and therefore evidence of
marked social hierarchies. Notably, one of the seminal prehistorians of the
twentieth century, Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957) coined the phrase
‘Neolithic Revolution’ for emphasizing the total transformation in
lifestyles, ideas, habits and societies, ‘just as the Industrial Revolution of
historical times had done’. Although archaeologists today inform us that
developments towards domestication had begun in the Mesolithic Age,
Childe’s phrase merits remembering as it directs attention to the unique
characteristics of the Neolithic.
The excavations at Burzahom brought to light an immensely rich
Neolithic site with continuous occupation for more than a thousand years.
They yielded evidence of bell-shaped pit formations in the early
occupational deposits, of c. 3000 BCE–2800 BCE, which were surmised as
dwelling pits of the inhabitants of the area during the cold winter months.
While the functional inference of the pits is debatable today, similar pits
have been found in other sites in Kashmir, Swat and Potwar, and they
appear to be typical of the Himalayan Neolithic.
The Burzahom Case of the Harappa Gallery, National Museum (New Delhi) with the Sarai Khola Jar.

Burzahom, in Kashmiri, means ‘the place of birch trees’, and the

archaeological site commands a picturesque view. It is surrounded by
towering mountains and overlooks the Jhelum valley. The location, no
doubt, facilitated its connections with other areas and we note beads of jade
and agate and stone tools that archaeologists describe as harvesters – as
they were possibly used for agricultural activities – along with the jar of
Sarai Khola in the Neolithic deposits. The presence of jade beads and stone
harvesters indicates evidence of connections between Neolithic Burzahom
and Neolithic sites in north China where these artefacts occur in profusion.
A type of handmade pottery with impressions upon the surface that look
like they have been made by a straw brush also occurs in Burzahom.
Significantly, this pottery appears remarkably similar to those in the
neolithic settlements at Yangshao (c. 5000–3000 BCE) Middle Yellow River
and Henan Province, all in China. Therefore, as Kenoyer reminds us, the jar
of Sarai Khola in Burzahom adds to reasons ‘for learning more about
contact and development’ during the Neolithic period, when distant and
distinct regional cultures were brought into circuits of networks.
The Early Harappan represents a ‘diverse mosaic of material culture,
ideological practice, subsistence practices and connections’, as Robin
Coningham and Ruth Young remind us in their histories of South Asian
archaeology. An archaeological cultural phase, it pre-dates the Mature
phase of the Indus Civilization with complex economies of cities and
towns. Archaeologists, prominently Kenoyer, deem it as a period of
regionalization, when distinct regional cultures emerged over large parts of
northern South Asia – in Baluchistan, South Afghanistan, Swat Valley,
Potwar plateau, Sindh, Punjab, Cholistan, Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar
Pradesh. Each had one or two settlements with high walls and other distinct
architectural features, and they appear bigger than villages. Each, therefore,
seemingly embodies incipient polities, possibly of the level of chiefdoms
and nascent commercial economies. The Early Harappan jar is displayed in
the Harappa Gallery of the National Museum in New Delhi, India, as an
attempt to bring Neolithic Burzahom into the geo-cultural fold of the
Bronze Age Indus Civilization. Thus, a carnelian necklace of the Indus
Civilization is shown emerging from it, and the creator of the gallery in
1994, R.S. Bisht, then director general of excavations at the Archaeological
Survey of India, affirms that it is meant to draw attention to the likely
association. Burzahom has yielded specimens of stone drills, possibly for
making beads, and a wheel-made pot of Red Ware containing more than
950 beads of carnelian and agate. However, there is no evidence as yet of
bead-making at the site, and the display of the jar therefore patently asserts
the reality of an inference.
The Sarai Khola Jar in the National Museum allows us to look beyond
field archaeologies and consider those established within museums through
the curation of collections. The exhibit draws our attention to the myriad
ways of creating and searching for the past, and brings us to see the
importance of museum studies for exploring endowments of historicity.

CHILDE, V.G. (1950). ‘The Urban Revolution’. Town Planning Review, 21, 3–17.
CONINGHAM, R. and R. Young. (2015). The Archaeology of South Asia: From the Indus to Asoka,
c. 6500 BCE–200 CE. Cambridge University Press.
KENOYER, J.M. (1998). Ancient Indus Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. American Institute of
Pakistan Studies & Oxford University Press.
SHAFFER, J.G. (1992). ‘The Indus Valley, Baluchistan and Helmand Traditions: Neolithic through
Bronze Age’. In R.W. Ehrich (Ed.), Chronologies in the Old World (pp. 425–46). Chicago
University Press.
SHARIF, M. and B.K. Thapar. (1992). ‘Food Producing Communities in Pakistan and Northern
India’. In A.H. Dani and V.M. Masson (Eds), History of Civilizations of Central Asia: The
Dawn of Civilization: Earliest Times to 700 BC (pp. 127–51). UNESCO.
SINGH, P. (2002). ‘Neolithic Cultures of Northern and Eastern India’. In S. Settar and R. Korisettar
(Eds), Indian Archaeology in Retrospect: Prehistory – Archaeology of South Asia, Vol. I (pp.
127–50). Manohar.
Tentative Lists. (2014). ‘The Neolithic Settlement of Burzahom’. UNESCO.
https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5917
4
THE DANCING GIRL
Mohenjodaro, Pakistan
c. 2600–2200 BCE

THE FIGURINE ACQUIRED THE NAME ‘DANCING GIRL’ POSSIBLY due to the
ruminations of Sir John Marshall, director general of the Archaeological
Survey of India (1902–28), who had noted ‘something special about her’.
Found during the excavations of 1926–27 at Mohenjodaro from a small
house in the HR area, it was mentioned as the ‘dancing girl’ within the
excavation report, and the nomenclature was subsequently explained by
Marshall in his magnificent volumes on Mohenjodaro and the Indus
Civilization (1931) where he stated that the figurine ‘gives a vivid
impression of the young aboriginal nautch girl, her hand on hip in half-
impudent posture, and legs slightly forward as she beats time to the music
with her feet’.
However, the figurine was retrieved, to quote the excavation report, ‘in
perfect preservation except for the feet, which are broken off’. Therefore,
Marshall’s impressions, which were decidedly subjective, appear, especially
in retrospect, to convey the British obsession with the Indian nautch
(dance), which persisted well until the end of the Raj irrespective of the
long history of the puritanical condemnations, as immoral, by the colonial
government. While the consistent use of ‘dancing girl’ has given the
figurine its unique identity, it is important to remember that a similar-
looking, slightly taller bronze figurine was also found at Mohenjodaro in a
subsequent excavation in 1930–31 (Field No. DK 12728), which the then
director of excavations, Ernest Mackay, had described as ‘much coarser’
but ‘an exceptionally well modelled figure of a dancing girl, which
unfortunately, has suffered badly from corrosion […] and though the
posture is not exactly the same many points of similarity make it seem
likely that both figures were made by the same maker’. This figurine is now
in the Indus Collections of Pakistan, in the National Museum, Karachi.
Notably, Mackay was of the opinion that both figurines did not denote
goddesses although he acknowledged that in India dance was closely
associated with religion ‘through the ages’. Mackay suggested that both
were ‘probably made for purely aesthetic reasons and kept as prized
ornaments’.

Figurine, Mature Harappan, Bronze, 10.8 inches tall, NM: HR 5721.

 Excavations at the house in which the Dancing Girl was found yielded a
copper spoon with a tubular handle, a rectangular blade with a narrow tang,
a well-executed copper statuette of an elephant and three seals, of which
two were of the unicorn motif and one of the bull. Whether the antiquities
were all made in Mohenjodaro or in other places is not known. And
although the excavators considered them all valuable, they prized the
Dancing Girl as the most remarkable.
The figurine is tiny and stands upright. It is naked but bedecked with
ornaments comprising a necklace with large pendants and many bangles.
The left arm, as Marshall recorded, is covered with bangles from ‘shoulder
to wrist’ while the right has two at the wrist and two at the elbow. When the
figurine was retrieved, Daya Ram Sahni, who supervised excavations of the
area named the HR, regarded the sheer number of bangles – around 24 – as
evidence of ‘why so large a number of ornaments of this class [namely,
bangles] in copper, conch, faience and terracotta have been found both at
Mohenjodaro and Harappa’. Detailed research of the ornaments of the Indus
Civilization by Jonathan Mark Kenoyer now informs us that while bangles
were also made in a range of materials in the near contemporary Bronze
Age civilization at Mesopotamia, the ‘variety and quantity of these
ornaments were significantly less than what can be seen in the Indus sites’.
The figurine provides a glimpse of the truism of the statement.
In describing the Dancing Girl, Sahni possibly followed Marshall’s lead
in noting, in his report, that the face was ‘characterised by coarse negroid
features but not devoid of a peculiar primitive vigour’. The myriad
descriptions that have since been imposed upon the object have endowed it
with various identities of race and region. Marshall and Sahni had regarded
the figurine ‘primitive’ and ‘aboriginal’, or tribal, because of the ‘broad
nose’ and ‘large lips’. During the 1930s, scholars debating the types of
inhabitants of the Indus Civilization characterized the Dancing Girl as
belonging to the ‘dravidian’, ‘nubian’, and ‘proto-australoid’ race. These
and the later attributions have all added to the figurine’s exoticized
description, and they have charged it as a highly sensual object. One
significant example is the recollection of R.E.M. Wheeler of his encounter
with the figurine in the 1960s. Wheeler, for sure, would have seen the best
bronzes of Ancient Rome as he was one of the foremost specialists of
Roman archaeology. Yet, for the highly popular BBC television programme
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, where a panel of British archaeologists
identified unusual museum objects, and in which he appeared regularly
between 1952 and 1959, Wheeler chose the Dancing Girl as his favourite
statue, and recalled her as follows:

There is her little Baluchi-style face with pouting lips and insolent
look in the eye. She’s about fifteen years old I should think, not
more, but she stands there with bangles all the way up her arm and
nothing else on. A girl perfectly, for the moment, perfectly confident
of herself and the world. There’s nothing like her, I think, in the
world.

The nakedness and singularly striking posture of the figurine, with her
head tilted back, ‘left leg bent forward and the right hand placed on the
right hip’ has lent to many impressionable academic descriptions regarding
the figurine’s titillating power, and although the statements have become
guarded over the years, they continue to charge the object with a palpable
sensuality. Thus, we note that even while writing in the twenty-first century,
one of the leading archaeologists of the Indus Civilization Gregory Possehl
(1941–2011) considered it worthwhile to declare that the figurine exudes
the impression that ‘she was good at what she did and she knew it’. The
scholarly viewing of the Dancing Girl in the modern world thus illustrates
the biases that often creep into the supposedly neutral descriptions of the
forms and functions of antiquities.
Not much is known of the figurine apart from the manufacturing
technique. It is possibly one of the earliest examples of casting bronze
sculptures through the cire perdue, or lost wax technique. The process was
thriving in South Asia more than a thousand years later, as seen in the
bronze sculptures of the Chola period, such as the statue of the Nataraja of
Tiruvalangadu (see ch. 23). The lost wax process, which was used in the
manufacture of the bronze figurines at Harappa and Mohenjodaro, is a
labour-intensive manufacturing technique. It requires complex heating and
cooling techniques and precise timing, and therefore the casting of such tiny
objects is indeed noteworthy. The Dancing Girl can fit into the palm of a
hand, and its size beckons explorations of the ways in which it may have
been seen and valued by those who made and owned it.
The figurine was exhibited as one of the masterpieces of The Art of India
and Pakistan in London in 1947–48, and came to be part of India’s share of
the Harappan objects after Partition. Since then, it has been on permanent
display in the National Museum of India. Judging by the display at the
Museum’s Harappa Gallery today, visitors may wonder at the fuss about
her. For, the large glass case in which she is exhibited – which also contains
three miniature copper/bronze animals and a tiny, but meticulously
designed, animal-headed pin – not only dwarfs her, but also hides the ‘back,
hips and buttocks’, the rendition of which Marshall reckoned ‘quite
effective’. The dimly lit case also masks the ‘almond shaped eyes’ which
Marshall admired as representing the ‘sound observation on the part of the
artists’, and in which Wheeler saw the ‘insolent look’. Yet, the figurine and
the other exhibits in the case cajole viewers to appreciate the adage that
small is beautiful. And despite not knowing their uses 4,000 years ago when
they were made, the exhibits allow us to reflect upon the possibilities of
Kenoyer’s opinion that ‘during the period of the Indus cities [when
Mohenjodaro was in ascendant] the need for unique and appealing objects
for ritual and political status resulted in the invention of many new
technologies’, significantly, the lost wax technique.
A closer look at the figurine, and also at the similar one subsequently
found by Mackay, show the thumb and forefinger of the left hand of both to
form a circle. Scholars in the past have suggested that the space held a small
object, like a lamp. However, in a recent curation of the Dancing Girl for
the exhibition India and the World: A History in Nine Stories, at
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai, in
2017, one of the co-curators, Naman Ahuja, deftly points out to viewers that
‘if she was a dancing girl by profession, surely it would have been relevant
to keep both arms decorated?’ Ahuja, therefore, invites viewers to rethink
what she may be; reimagine the representation. He suggests we ‘look
[again] at the way she is standing. Look at her confidence. One arm on hip.
Head thrown back. The way her hand is sculpted […]’ and wonders
whether there may have been a spear in the hand, and if she could ‘be a
soldier rather than a dancing girl?’
The above provocation – to rethink what the figurine held – illuminates
the new and careful scholarship of ancient female figures, which the earlier
scholarship saw largely as agents of titillation or veneration, if not both.
However, the increasing appropriation of the Indus Civilization for India’s
national histories seems to embellish the flaws of the earlier scholarship
instead of dismissing them. For, we note that the Dancing Girl has also
made headline news in the Indian press, in 2016, as ostensibly depicting the
goddess Parvati, and thus, 5000 or more years of continued history of the
Hindu nation.
Although the claim cannot be backed up with credible historical proof, it
offers a glimpse of the increasing nationalization of the Indus Civilization.
Notably, in the same year, 2016, a Pakistani barrister attempted to retrieve
the object for his nation and reminded the High Court of Pakistan that since
the figurine was placed in the Lahore Museum after it was excavated, it
should have gone back to the Museum’s collections once it returned to the
partitioned subcontinent from the exhibition in London. The petitioner
substantiated his request with the declaration that the ‘5000-year-old statue
enjoys the same status in Pakistan as the Mona Lisa in Europe’ and is ‘part
of Pakistan’s cultural heritage’.
The views of the Dancing Girl as Parvati and the ‘Mona Lisa of Pakistan’
represent claims towards the national ownership of antiquities. We may see
them as warring claims for the ownership of the antiquity by India and
Pakistan, and they provide a glimpse of the contestations that embed the
heritage-making of new nations.
Inevitably, issues related to heritage draw our attention to the
‘souveniring’ of objects, and we note that the Dancing Girl is being
increasingly reproduced in India today as a souvenir. The replicas, in metal
mounted on wood, are available for sale in the high-end museum shops as
well as on websites such as Amazon. Furthermore, the figurine is
prominently replicated as an etching on the new sliding glass door that
leads visitors to the Harappa Gallery. The souveniring, no doubt, enhances
the public visibility of the object. However, it is worth noting that this may
be the first time of the figurine’s replication for sale by the National
Museum, which has sold select Harappan replicas for over 30 years,
including the Priest King in the Indus collection of Pakistan. The
souveniring of the Dancing Girl thus informs of the changing value of an
antiquity over time and tells us that different kinds of antiquities acquire
different values at different times.

The ‘Dancing Girl’ etched on the entrance door of the Harappa Gallery, National Museum (New
Delhi).

As commercial products, souvenirs of antiquities bear upon issues of

copyright and licensing, which remain little known in the Indian public
domain, and which occasion us to enquire whether the museums and
institutions that are the keepers of the ‘real stuff’ are involved in their
designing. Moreover, the Dancing Girl replicas lead us to think about the
disbursement of the rights of patenting and selection of designers, and
whether decisions regarding the re-designing of antiquities as souvenirs are
at all informed. They also remind us that souveniring entails infusing the
past into new things. For, the valuation of the replica, namely a modern
object, is solely conditioned by its indexical quality as a replicated antiquity
and hence, a receptable of that past.
The Indian souvenirs of the Dancing Girl beckon a regard of the
increasing nationalization of the Indus Civilization in a milieu of strident
religious nationalism that seeks to unearth truisms of a primordial Hindu
India. The heritage-making of this object today thus speaks of the changing
trends of post-colonial nationalisms, and encourages reflections of the
complexities and inherently divisive legacies of the politics of
decolonization.

AHUJA, N. (2017, November 17). ‘What if the “Dancing Girl” was actually a warrior’. Livemint.
KENOYER, J.M. (1991). ‘Ornament Styles of the Indus Valley Tradition: Evidence from Recent
Excavations at Harappa’. Paleorient, 17(2), 79–98.
KENOYER, J.M. (1998). Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. Oxford University Press and
American Institute of Pakistan Studies.
MACKAY, E.J.H. (1938). Further Excavations at Mohenjodaro: Being an Official Account of
Archaeological Excavations at Mohenjodaro carried out by the Government of India between
the years 1927 and 1931. Government of India Press.
MARSHALL, J.H. (1931). ‘Other Antiquities and Art’. In J.H. Marshall (Ed.), Mohenjodaro and the
Indus Civilization: Being an Official Account of Archaeological Excavations at Mohenjodaro
carried out by the Government of India between the years 1922 and 1927 (pp. 38–47). Arthur
Probsthain.
POSSEHL, G.L. (1999). Indus Age: The Beginnings. Oxford and IBH.
POSSEHL, G.L. (2002). The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. Alta Mira.
SAHNI, D.R. (1930). ‘Mohenjodaro’. In J.H. Marshall (Ed.), Annual Report of the Archaeological
Survey of India, 1926–27 (pp. 60–88). Government of India Press.
SINGH, K. (2017, January 6). ‘“Dancing Girl” as Parvati is just one of the many bizarre claims in
ICHR Journal Paper on Harappan Civilization’. Scroll.in.
USMAN, M. (2016, October 17). 'Whose "Dancing Girl" is it Anyway'. The Tribune.
5
AN INDUS SCALE
Mohenjodaro, Pakistan
c. 2600–2200 BCE

TUCKED AWAY IN A CASE FULL OF WEIGHTS FROM MOHENJODARO and Harappa,

in the Harappa Gallery of the National Museum is this tiny object, which
was described as a ‘measure of length’ by Ernest Mackay, who directed the
excavations at Mohenjodaro when this was found. It is a scale, or a ruler,
made of shell, and was recovered broken at both ends, from Room 46,
Block 18, in the section of the archaeological site designated the DK area.
Nine dividing lines and a circle are clearly incised upon the flat surface. A
few lines which look like scratches go across the dividing lines.
Linear scales and other small and portable instruments of measure remain
rare archaeological finds, especially in South Asia. A tiny bronze rod, 1.5
inches long and with four divisions, which was subsequently found at
Harappa is the only other linear scale known from the Indus Civilization.
Archaeologists, for example Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, suggest that ‘these
measuring devices […] may have been prepared for some special occasion
or elite consumer, but the average person living in these cities probably
used other means of measurement’. Mackay knew of the finds of linear
scales from Bronze Age Egypt, and so he ordered a cast to be made of the
shell scale of Mohenjodaro, to be provided for examination to Sir William
Matthew Flinders Petrie, the renowned Egyptologist (1853–1942). The
casting of this scale is a one-off in the early scholarship of the Indus
Civilization and adds to the historic value of the object as a rare find.

Scale Measure representing the decimal system. Mature Harappan, Shell, 167 mm × 157 mm × 69
mm, NM: DK 10144.

Petrie compared the cast with an ivory scale of Twelfth Dynasty Egypt
and declared that ‘the weighted average length of one space’ was 0.2 inches
and the ‘mean error of graduation=0.003 inches’. Mackay followed up on
the complicated math in Petrie’s description of the Indus scale and
stipulated that the divisions were possibly ‘multiple of five’. He stated that
‘the rod is divided upon a decimal system; group of ten divisions were
marked off by circles and were halved into sub-groups of five’. The
divisions would have needed a very sharp and thin instrument to incise on
the shell, and the lines illustrate the incredible precision of the
workmanship. Notably, while describing the object, Mackay emphasized
that ‘in conjunction with the system of weights, it shows the people of
Mohenjodaro to have reached an advanced stage of mental development,
with capabilities of precision and mathematical accuracy in thought and
work’. Of its several unique features he identified one to be the raw
material, which he stated was the best that could have been used;

[for] it is not liable to warp or crack, nor even to be affected by

changes of temperature – if, indeed, such an idea as this last ever
entered into the head of the maker. [The] only objection to the use of
shell for making measures of length is the obvious one that only short
lengths can be procured; but this difficulty could have been obviated
by the provision of metal joints.
 Shell working is a difficult and intricate task, and during the third
millennium BCE would have demanded bronze chisels as hard as modern
steel saws for breaking the internal columella and interior whorls. As we
now know, much of the manufacturing processes happened in specialized
workshops, and shells procured from the coastal areas of the Arabian Sea
were brought to select centres to be made into artefacts. Objects of shell
abound in many sites of the Indus Civilization, and the intricate pieces of
inlays and objet d’arts, of which some are simply masterpieces – such as
two miniature crocodile heads, distinctive bangles incised with a chevron
pattern, and carefully carved large spoons, possibly for libation –
demonstrate the very high aesthetic skills of their makers. These shell
artefacts, along with the steatite seals, terracotta spindle whorls, beads of
various material, baked bricks, cubical weights, and remarkable
architectural elements – such as grid-like layouts, parallel streets, wells and
bathing platforms, reservoirs (at Dholavira), the Great Bath (Mohenjodaro),
and the Great Granary (Harappa), now described as a Great Hall for dyeing
– illustrate the careful regard of the Indus craftsmen for exactness and
detail.
Significantly, the ‘standardized concept of measurement’, which the
Mohenjodaro scale conveys through the decimal system, is not
representative of any ‘overarching authoritarian or political force’ as
Kenoyer cautions us to note. This is because the ‘basic measurements
themselves are at the root of the standardization. […] the width of hands or
the weight of specific types of grains would have been generally uniform
throughout the greater Indus valley, and consequently the measures derived
from them would have been relatively uniform.’ Kenoyer reminds us of the
hand as a cubit unit of measuring length in the Indus Civilization, especially
in brick making and construction of buildings and has also carefully
demonstrated the exactness of the manufacturing technologies, largely
through his studies of the bead-making technology that ‘required the use of
precise measurements by craftsmen in order to prepare tools such as saws
and drills, as well as the finished beads themselves’. The scale from
Mohenjodaro thus provokes enquiries into perceptions of accuracy within
the Indus Civilization. Clearly, such perceptions were not guided by the
impositions of the political authorities.
The Indus Scale is older than those of the Twelfth Dynasty Egypt through
which, as noted above, inferences regarding what it may have been were
first derived. The object stirs up questions about Bronze Age knowledge
systems, and thereby also coaxes reflections upon the extent to which field
archaeology, through which the Indus Civilization is known, allows
explorations of the intellectual histories of such non-text worlds.

BISHT, R.S. (2015). Excavations at Dholavira 1989–2005. Archaeological Survey of India.

[Unpublished report].
KENOYER, J.M. (2010). ‘Measuring the Harappan World: Insights into the Indus Order and
Cosmology’. In I. Morely and C. Renfrew (Eds), The Archaeology of Measurement:
Comprehending Heaven, Earth and Time in Ancient Societies (pp. 106–21). Cambridge
University Press.
MACKAY, E.J.H. (1938). ‘Household Objects, Tools and Implements’. In E.J.H. Mackay (Ed.),
Further Excavations at Mohenjodaro: Being an Official Account of Archaeological Excavations
at Mohenjodaro carried out by the Government of India between 1927 and 1931, Vol. 1. (pp.
392–440). Manager of Publications.
6
A DAIMABAD BRONZE
Daimabad, Maharashtra
c. 2000–1800 BCE

THE INTRICATE CHARIOT IS PART OF A HOARD OF BRONZES THAT was discovered

in 1974 at Daimabad. It has solid wheels that rotate through an axle, and the
body is made of vertical and horizontal bars that join as a central pole
which can be yoked to a pair of bronze bulls. Archaeologists value the
Chariot as the most remarkable piece of the hoard that comprises, besides
this, a bronze rhinoceros, elephant and water buffalo. All are rather large
and exquisitely made and all have wheels. Scholars infer that these
moveable objects were made for ritualistic uses in religious ceremonies,
especially for processional purposes. The prominent display of the Chariot
– the largest of them all – in the National Museum has established the
national value of the Daimabad Bronzes.
The archaeological site at Daimabad was located in 1958 and excavated
between 1959 and 1961 by the Archaeological Survey of India. The
excavations revealed a vast and exclusively Chalcolithic site, more than 30
hectares in size. The Bronzes were thus found more than ten years after the
excavations. They were chanced upon by local Bhil people while they were
digging the roots of a tree within the premises of the excavated area. Since
the objects were not found within any stratified archaeological deposit, their
discovery occasioned a raging controversy regarding their cultural
chronology. The excavators of Daimabad dated them provisionally to the
period of the first occupation of the site, which they inferred was around c.
2000–1800 BCE. But other archaeologists and scholars saw them as ‘tribal
objects’ of modern origins, from around c. 1800 CE. They pointed out that
the Bronzes were significantly larger than the copper and bronze antiquities
of the Indian and South Asian Chalcolithic, and that all contained a high
percentage of arsenic, which meant that their manufacture required
sophisticated furnaces that could reach very high temperatures for smelting.
Such furnaces, they emphasized, are absent not only in Daimabad but in all
Chalcolithic sites of South Asia.

Chariot among the hoard objects found within the archaeological site at Daimabad. c. Late Harappan,
Bronze, 44.9 cm long (height of the driver 16 cm).

The debate regarding the date of the Bronzes led to fresh excavations at
Daimabad between 1976 and 1979, and the second phase of excavations
endowed the site with a cultural chronology from c. 2300 BCE to 1000 BCE
that included a Late Harappan settlement (c. 2000 BCE–1800 BCE). M.K.
Dhavalikar, one of the members of the excavating team who was also
India’s preeminent archaeologist of Protohistory, identified the Harappa
Culture as the earliest occupational level through the find of ‘six houses
[that] belonged to a well to do family.’ He and the other excavators fixed
the Harappan affiliation through the brick size of the houses, which follows
the ratio of 4:2:1 and therefore equates to the bricks in the architecture of
Mohenjodaro, Harappa, Kalibangan, Lothal and other Indus cities. They all
affirmed that the earliest occupational level at Daimabad was contemporary
to the last phase of the Harappan settlements in Gujarat and Rajasthan (c.
2200–1750 BCE), and this inference of a relational chronology nurtured
assumptions about the Harappans travelling with the Bronzes southwards,
after the fall of their towns and cities up north. The ‘inferential evidence’
also substantiated another archaeological claim, that ‘just as [the
Harappans] descended into Gujarat for exploiting its mineral wealth and
other raw materials, they also came to Maharashtra’. However, we do not
really know who made the Bronzes and where or why, and why they appear
as a hoard. We also do not know for sure whether Daimabad represents a
Harappa Culture because the evidence for this is rather thin, derived only
through a few bricks from six structures.
Notably, Daimabad is bereft of the characteristic Indus, or Harappan,
artefacts, such as steatite seals with motifs and legends, weights and
measures of a binary system, public architecture, and particular types of
beads and ceramics. In fact, the evidence of a Harappan occupation is led
through the finds of the undatable Bronzes. Dhavalikar pointed out that ‘the
Harappan occupation at Daimabad came to light accidentally because of the
discovery of a unique hoard of bronzes’.
The Chalcolithic, or Bronze, Age to which the archaeological site at
Daimabad belongs, is a period when technologies of mining and using
copper, possibly the first metal exploited by man, were developed. This age,
as we know from the Indus, or Harappan, Civilization, heralded remarkably
complex societies with political systems, administrative mechanisms,
expansive trade networks, specialized strategies of subsistence and
manufacturing technologies, brilliant craftsmanship, and a plethora of
rituals and religious practices. Some Bronze Age civilizations, including the
Indus, Sumerian in Mesopotamia, Pre-Dynastic Egypt, Shang China, and
Minoan and Mycenaean in Crete, are widely studied today as
representations of early states. Others, classified as regional cultures of less
political complexity, are little known outside archaeological scholarship.
Daimabad depicts one such regional cluster in the Deccan, when the first
farming communities appear within the region.
The Deccan Chalcolithic, the archaeological term for the entire cultural
chronology that is noted at Daimabad, is classified on the basis of
diagnostic pottery types into distinct archaeological cultures of the Kayatha
and Savalda (c. 2300–2000 BCE), Late Harappa (c. 2000–1800 BCE),
Daimabad (c. 1800–1600 BCE), Malwa (c. 1600–1400 BCE) and Jorwe (c.
1400–1000 BCE). Its unearthing relates to India’s loss to Pakistan at
Partition of two historic archaeological terrains, namely, the then known
geography of the Indus Civilization and prehistoric Soan Valley, in Potwar
Plateau and Salt Ranges, with its promise of the finds of Early Man. Indian
archaeologists soon built upon the merit of exploring the Deccan Plateau,
the oldest geological terrain of the Indian subcontinent for recouping some
of the loss, and notably H.D. Sankalia of Deccan College, Pune, led
archaeological explorations within the Narbada valley from 1950 for
establishing ‘a proper idea of the development and evolution of Indian
culture’. The excavations by Sankalia and his team, at places such as Jorwe,
Nevasa and Nasik in Maharashtra, and Maheshwar and Navdatoli in
Madhya Pradesh, led to the identification of a Chalcolithic Age in the
Deccan.
The communities of the Deccan Chalcolithic lived in various types of
settlements ranging from large villages to small farmsteads and transitory
nomadic camps, and represented non-urban societies. They appear
remarkably different from the city dwellers of the Indus Civilization. They
grew a wide variety of crops, on the fertile but difficult to till black cotton
soil, and reared sheep, goats, buffaloes and pigs, which they slaughtered for
food. They also developed distinct styles of painted pottery, made
microliths, especially blades and burins from locally available stones such
as chalcedony and chert, and manufactured copper artefacts, such as axes,
chisels, beads and fish-hooks, by heating the metal and cold hammering.
They worshipped many gods and goddesses, and their death rituals
comprised burials and internments in urns and jars.
 The descriptions of the Chariot added to the assumptions of a Harappan
presence at Daimabad. Archaeologists note resemblances between the facial
features of the charioteer and a terracotta head from the Harappan site of
Kalibangan, Rajasthan, and in the technology of rotating the wheel with that
of the miniature copper carts from Chanhudaro in Sindh, Pakistan. Some,
for example S.A. Sali who wrote about the excavations at Daimabad, have
described the Chariot as a Hindu object, stating that the iconography of the
four-hooded cobra-like figure that surmounts the charioteer’s penis, and the
dog that stands in front on the central pole, represent pashupati, the lord of
beasts. They see the charioteer as an early version of Shiva, and in
promoting the understanding that the Chariot and three Bronzes are
ritualistic objects they derive evidence from the practices of Brahmanical
rituals that were performed at least a thousand years after the proposed
dating of the Daimabad Hoard. The archaeological attributions of
‘Harappan’ and ‘Indian’ features to the Bronze Chariot provide a glimpse of
the arbitrary manner in which narratives of cultural continuities are often
established through objects whose uses remain unknown.
The Daimabad Bronzes encourage a recall of the archaeology of the
Deccan Chalcolithic that gathered momentum from the mid-1950s, and
which aimed at recovering the history of India from Prehistory to the Early
Historic period (c. 600 BCE). In celebrating the feats of his discoveries at
Nasik and Jorwe, Sankalia had remarked that the ‘[…] darkness, which
intervened between the earliest historical period and the Indus Civilization
on the one hand, and the former and the undefined Stone Ages in Peninsular
India has now been dispelled’. Daimabad provided the historic connection
between the Harappa Culture and the Deccan Chalcolithic. Yet, despite
numerous explorations and excavations, a ‘dark age’ of the unknown
remains for the Deccan, between the Jorwe culture of the Deccan
Chalcolithic (c. 1000 BCE) and the Saka–Satavahana period of the third
century BCE. If the dates attributed to the Chariot and the other Daimabad
Bronzes are indeed correct, then they would be the atypical objects for the
entire history of Early Deccan, as no such artefacts of bronze have been
found from this region even during the period of the resplendent Satavahana
rule.
The scholarship of the Bronze Chariot provides a glimpse of some of the
ways in which inferences often come to act as material evidence. We also
note the attempts at establishing the social histories of archaeological
cultures that appear ephemeral, in this instance the Late Harappan of the
Deccan, which has a fleeting presence in the region. The Chariot invites
new research of the Daimabad Hoard and the Deccan Chalcolithic, and
reminds us to interrogate the ways in which unknowable things are
historicized, often through the imposition of our classificatory schemes.

SANKALIA, H.D. (1962). Prehistory and Protohistory in India and Pakistan. University of Bombay.
‘On the first excavations at Daimabad’. Indian Archaeological Review, 1958–59 (pp. 15–18).
Archaeological Survey of India.
DHAVALIKAR, M.K. (1982). ‘Daimabad Bronzes’. In G.L. Possehl (Ed.), Harappan Civilization: A
Recent Perspective (pp. 361–66). Oxford and IBH.
SALI, S.A. (1986). Daimabad 1976–79: Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India.
Archaeological Survey of India.
SHINDE, V. and R. Pappu. (1990). ‘Daimabad: The Chalcolithic Regional Centre in the Godavari
Basin’. Bulletin of the Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, 50, 307–16.
7
COPPER ANTHROPOMORPH
Shahabad, Uttar Pradesh
c. 1800–1500 BCE

THIS DISTINCTIVE AND ENIGMATIC HUMAN-SHAPED BUT FLAT object of copper,

forms a class of antiquities that continue to remain one of the greatest
mystery objects of Indian history. Archaeologists call them
anthropomorphs, and they are found in the assemblages of the copper
hoards of the second millennium BCE, which comprise artefacts that look
like weapons and tools, such as harpoons, antenna-headed swords, bar- and
shouldered-celts, socketed axes, adzes, large and small rings, spear heads
and hatchets. All are made of copper and virtually nothing is known about
them.
Although most anthropomorphs look similar to the one from Shahabad,
the latter is unique in that it has inspired a logo design – of the Indian
National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), which was
established in 1984 for spearheading public awareness of India’s rich and
diverse archaeological, cultural and natural heritage. Its selection followed
the evaluation that ‘the classic simplicity and vitality of its lines makes it a
striking example of primitive man’s creative genius’, to quote the INTACH
website. It is a brilliant example of an antiquity being prized today for its
aesthetic modernity.
Anthropomorphic figure, prototype of the INTACH logo, Shahabad Copper Hoard. 39 cm × 36 cm.

Copper hoards were increasingly chanced upon since the finds of a

harpoon at Bithur, near Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, in 1822. Today more than
197 hoards are known, of which the largest is from Gungeria, Madhya
Pradesh, with 424 copper objects that weigh over 376 kg, along with 102
sheets of silver discs. Large numbers were located in the Ganga–Yamuna
Doab and Chhota Nagpur plateau during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and since then many have been found in a vast area
comprising the Deccan and the modern states of Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar
Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Bengal, Bihar and Odisha. In addition,
there are reports of finds of similar copper artefacts in the Nepali Terai, and
of antenna-headed swords, harpoons and celts in Andhra Pradesh, Kerala
and Tamil Nadu.
 Most copper hoards are recorded as chance discoveries and have proved
difficult to date as they have not been found within an archaeological
deposit. In the past, archaeologists have attempted to associate them with
Ochre Coloured Pottery (OCP), which occurs in a few hoards, such as at
Saipai, Uttar Pradesh, and Ganeshwar, Rajasthan. The association provides
the hoards with circumstantial dating, through the presumed dates of OCP,
to the period between 1800 BCE and 1500 BCE, which is of the Bronze Age.
The speculative dating, however, has not contributed to knowledge
regarding why such copper objects were made and by whom.
The terms archaeologists use to describe the hoard finds – ‘harpoons’,
‘swords’, ‘axes’, ‘celts’ – represent weapons and tools. Therefore, the
anthropomorphs are also interpreted as such. D.P. Agrawal, who undertook
the chemical analysis of a selection, experimented with a few
anthropomorphs and suggested that they might have been used for killing
birds. Agrawal reported that ‘when thrown in, it went in a whirling fashion
and seemed to make a trajectory which made one suspect a boomerang-like
effect […] The sharp arm could cut the bird, the thick head could stun it and
the incurved arms could entangle and bring it down.’ However, his
inference remains unverifiable, and a 5 kg anthropomorph from Bisauli,
Uttar Pradesh, provides good reasons for contesting it. The Bisauli
anthropomorph recalls a look-alike (though headless) megalith at Mottur,
Tamil Nadu, which is over 3.2 metres tall. This massive anthropomorph is
part of an arrangement of stones laid in three concentric circles. Locals
today believe it to be the god of the Valiyar people, who refused to go with
them when they fled the area from an impending attack of ‘rain fire’. The
Valiyars therefore cut off their god’s head and took it with them, hence the
headless anthropomorphic megalith.
The folklore creates the possibilities of regarding anthropomorphs as cult
objects, and urges us to consider the observations of Paul Yule, who has
studied the copper hoards of India extensively, that the hoard artefacts
appear unusable. Yule found the axes with ‘intentionally blunt edges’,
considered the weight of the harpoons and the shape of their hooks
unsuitable for killing animals, and stated that ‘the long and heavy bar celt-
ingots with their dull chisel-like edges and bell shafts [were] poorly suited
for hand digging’. He pointed out that:

It is curious that metal implements belonging to the usual memory of

ancient and modern Indian villages, such as knives, digging tools and
arrowheads, are absent in the Copper Hoards. They and other cultural
goods may have been made of wood and bamboo […] Hoard objects
often show excellent workmanship and are pleasing in form. But
technically speaking, their metallurgy is simple, since they are
fashioned of non-alloyed copper.

Archaeologists of South Asia today recognize the merit of Yule’s

hypothesis and emphasize that the copper swords in the hoards are either
extremely thin or too long for use-value. However, they also point out that
the swords found recently, in 2005 and 2007, from excavations at Sanauli,
Uttar Pradesh, appear used.
Recalling the various speculations about the anthropomorphs, Kurush
Dalal notes that the ‘theriomorph’ of Kheri Gujjar, Uttar Pradesh, with its
clearly defined animal head, an image on the torso that looks like a
Harappan unicorn and ‘a series of upraised letters that look like a cross
between the Indus script and Brahmi’, is increasingly theorized today as an
early representation of the varaha avatara (Lord Vishnu as a boar). He
reminds us that although such theories are at best inconclusive, ‘there are
more questions than ever before and fewer answers’.
The increasing finds of copper hoards provoke enquiries into what they
are, and they lead us to question whether all represent hoarded items. A
hoard, as the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is ‘an accumulation or
collection of anything valuable hidden away or laid by for preservation or
future use’. It usually represents uncertain and insecure times, and we note
from the Daimabad Bronzes (see ch. 6) that the archaeological literature of
India is replete with finds of hoards. With regard to the finds of the copper
hoards, Robin Coningham and Ruth Young assert that ‘the presence and
frequency of such committed wealth might alternatively suggest displays of
wealth enabling individual or group to compete directly with other
individuals or groups for power and hegemony’. We might ask: how is
wealth displayed by hiding things?
Notwithstanding the little available knowledge about it, the
anthropomorph of Shahabad brings us to note the powerful visual agency of
the antiquities that remain unknowable. In its use as a logo, it provides a
glimpse of the many ways in which such unknown objects inspire their
viewers to see the possibilities of creativity through their beauty. Therefore,
it encourages evaluations of the claims of archaeologists that an antiquity
without its archaeological context – or detailed knowledge of provenance –
is ‘just another pretty thing’, as James Cuno aptly paraphrased such
statements in his critique. The anthropomorph makes us reflect upon
impressionable things and engage with the ways in which enigmatic
antiquities act upon our senses in the contemporary world. Therefore, it also
draws us to think about the agency of objects for establishing the
materiality of enigma and impressions.

CUNO. J. (2012). ‘Introduction’. In J. Cuno (Ed.), Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the
Debate Over Antiquities (pp. 1–35). Princeton University Press.
DALAL, K. (2020, June 17). ‘Metal Men of the Doab: Still Figuring It Out’. Live History India.
SMITH, V.A. (1905). ‘The Copper Age and Prehistoric Bronze Implements in India’. Indian
Antiquary, 34, 229–44.
AGRAWAL, D.P. (1984). The Archaeology of India. Select Book Service Syndicate.
CONINGHAM, R.A.E. and R. Young. (2015). The Archaeology of South Asia from the Indus to
Ashoka, 6500 BCE–200 CE. Cambridge University Press.
YULE, P. (1985). Metalwork of the Bronze Age in India. München.
8
THE ALLAHABAD PILLAR
Fort, Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh
3rd century BCE

IT WAS FIRST INSCRIBED DURING THE REIGN OF ASHOKA, AND carries six of the
emperor’s seven edicts, a version of his Schism Edict and a Queen’s Edict,
which are all in Prakrit. It was subsequently inscribed during the reign of
the Gupta emperor Samudragupta (r.c. 335–375 CE) with the latter’s
prashasti or royal eulogy which is in Sanskrit, and with the genealogical
record of the Mughal emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–27) in Persian. It also bears
a ‘graffiti’ from the reign of Firuz Shah Tughluq (r. 1351–88), and ‘jottings’
of a visit to Allahabad – then known as Akbarabad – by Raja Birbal (d.
1586), a minister of Jahangir’s father, the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–
1605). Jahangir’s inscription cuts across the Ashokan edicts, below which is
Samudragupta’s eulogy. The Allahabad Pillar appears thus as a palimpsest,
albeit of stone, which was written upon over and over again. The placement
of the inscriptions subsequent to the Ashokan edicts tells us that the latter
could not be read at the time of each re-inscription.
Ashokan Pillar with royal inscriptions of Ashoka, Samudragupta, and Jahangir, and other
inscriptions. Sandstone, Allahabad Fort.

The acts of re-inscription demonstrate the historical valuation of the

Pillar over a long time span and guide us to note its changing meaning with
every instance of use.
 The Ashokan inscriptions inform us that the Pillar was erected in the city
of Kaushambi, approximately 50 kilometres away from the fort at
Allahabad, where it stands today. In his Schism Edict, Ashoka instructed
the mahamatras of Kosam to punitively deal with the dissension within the
Buddhist Sangha, and stated, as the pre-eminent scholar of Ashokan
inscriptions K.R. Norman (1925–2020) retold, that ‘anyone who shall break
the Order shall be made to dwell […] outside the avasa (which is the usual
dwelling place for bhikkhus) having been made to wear white clothes’. The
Queen’s Edict, of Kaluvaki, Ashoka’s second queen and ‘the mother of
Tivala’ as she is described by the German Indologist and epigraphist Ernst
Hultzsch (1857–1927), records her gift to the Buddhist Sangha of a mango
grove, orchard and almshouse. The royal benefaction appears as a marked
imperial strategy for appeasing rebellions within Kaushambi, an important
centre of commerce at the time.

Details of the inscriptions on the Allahabad Pillar. Note inscription in Nastaliq across the Ashokan
Brahmi.

Norman noted that the edicts, in Pali language and Ashokan Brahmi
script, were carved upon the Allahabad Pillar when it was upright, while the
other Ashokan edicts on pillars were all inscribed when the latter were on
the ground, horizontal. This makes the Allahabad Pillar an exception, but
why it was so we do not know.
 The Pillar, as the intrepid explorer of Ashokan objects Harry Falk tells
us, is made of stone quarried from the nearby hills at Phabosa, which is 5
kilometres away from Kaushambi. The stone is the ‘light shining sandstone
[with] exactly those black inclusions which are so typical of the Ashokan
pillars’, and a twentieth-century gazette of the Kaushambi district informs
us that the quarry was used in antiquity as ‘tradition has it that Phabosa was
a muhalla (locality) of Kaushambi and was inhabited by stone masons’.
Having studied the Ashokan pillars in detail, Falk informs us that they were
all manufactured from long blocks of stone with square cross-sections,
‘which were turned over and over again’ by square trunnions.
The pillar edicts were inscribed towards the end of Ashoka’s life,
possibly in the 26th year of his consecration and Norman ruminated that
they convey an autobiographical element: an ageing Ashoka looking back
at his eventful reign. They are exquisite objects. Crowned with animal
capitals they would have been striking in the landscape. They were also
placed strategically within the heartland of the empire, straddling the
Buddhist pilgrim routes, linking the towns and cities of the emperor’s
realm.
The edicts on rocks and pillars, however, constitute a small portion of the
textual production during Ashoka’s reign. In fact, not all were the emperor’s
ipsissima verba. As Norman demonstrated long ago, the inscribed texts had
extra-inscriptional lives, upon perishable material such as palm leaf or birch
bark, and public readings were carried out from the latter by Mauryan
officials, accompanied by oral commentaries. Norman had drawn attention
to the identical scribal mistakes in all the pillar edicts and suggested that
they were all copied from the same or near-identical written copies that
must have been carried to the inscriptional sites. He noted the need for
exploring the creations of anthologies and of other editorial activities that
facilitated the transmission of the texts as inscriptional material.
The Pillar was possibly first re-erected when it was inscribed with
Samudragupta’s prashasti, during the mid-fourth century, at Kaushambi,
which remained a flourishing city of the Gupta realm. The prashasti, in the
Gupta Brahmi script, was composed by a court poet called Harisena, whose
titles include Sandhivigrahika or the minister of war. To date it is the only
known document of Samudragupta’s vast conquests, and the list is indeed
impressive. It tells us, to quote John Faithfull Fleet (1847–1917) who
deciphered the inscription, that Samudragupta ‘was without an antagonist
on earth […] has wiped off the fame of other kings with the soles of (his)
feet; (he is) Purusha (Supreme Being)’. The prashasti, as Ashoka’s
foremost historian Romila Thapar emphasizes, ‘endorses all that was
contrary to what was said in the [Ashokan] Edicts, as it glorifies conquest
through violence’. Since dharma for the Gupta kings was the Brahmanical
dharma, we could ask whether they knew of the Ashokan dhamma, which is
often historicized and simplified erroneously as Buddhist. The Gupta
inscriptions cut into the Ashokan edicts slightly, which possibly shows that
the latter could not be read when they were inscribed and were therefore
disregarded. Notably, the prashasti makes a passing reference to the Pillar
itself, as the ‘lofty column […] the raised arm of the earth’ and Thapar
ruminates that

the absence of comment on why it was chosen is puzzling. After all,

it was no mere piece of polished sandstone but was deemed
appropriate for the most important record of Samudragupta’s
activities […] presumably the pillar appeared an impressive object. A
lion capital would have given it an added royal significance.

The next act of re-inscription was a century later, a ‘graffiti’ which has
been dated to the reign of the Tughluq Sultan, Firuz Shah, and the German
Indologist Alois Anton Führer (1853–1930), who noted the inscriptions,
believed that the Pillar was moved to Allahabad at this time. The travel
history of the Pillar, however, remains uncertain, but we do know that Firuz
Shah moved two other Ashokan pillars, at Meerut and Topra, to his new
capital near the Jamuna in Delhi, and in their study of his reign Catherine
Asher and Cynthia Talbot state that
 while he did not know the actual dates or historical events associated
with these two pillars, he was aware they were of considerable
antiquity – so old that the script written on them […] could be
deciphered by no living person. In time these pillars from the reign of
[…] Ashoka became associated with Alexander the Great, a hero of
the Islamic tradition, thereby giving Firuz Shah a dual-edged
legitimacy he needed to cover for his lack of expansionist policy.

Jahangir’s use of the Pillar to inscribe his genealogy – in fine Nastaliq of

the brilliant calligrapher Abdullah Mushkin Qalam – displays its currency
as a memorial to the heroic king of Islam, Alexander, or Sikander. It is
possible that the Pillar may have been moved to Allahabad by Akbar for
installation in the new fort that he built, which would also explain the
record of Birbal’s visit on it. Jahangir sought refuge in Allahabad after
rebelling against his father and went to ascend the throne at Agra from
there. His first genealogical record on the Allahabad Pillar is easy to
understand when we follow the statement of the cultural historian of Islamic
art and architecture Finbarr Flood, that ‘just as the Egyptian pharaohs or
Byzantine emperors inscribed their names on columns and pillars that were
already antique, medieval Indian rajas also re-inscribed existing
commemorative pillars in order to commend their own glorious deeds to
history’. That the Pillar memorialized a powerful king who Jahangir may
have wished to emulate is evident from the note of William Finch, an
Englishman who travelled within the Indian subcontinent between 1608 and
1611. Finch saw the Pillar inside the Allahabad Fort and reported that

You enter thorow two faire gates into a faire court, in which stands a
piller of stone fiftie cubits above ground […] which by circumstances
of the Indians seemeth to have beene placed by Alexander or some
other great conqueror, who could not passe further for Ganges.

Lost knowledge and new valuations explain some of the acts of re-
inscription, and notably the Allahabad Pillar continued to accrue historical
memories during the nineteenth century. Lt. T.S. Burt of the East India
Company, who made the Pillar’s first measured sketch in 1834, recorded
that the locals called it Bhima Sena’s gada – the mace of the mythological
Bhima. Such epithets for antiquities, monuments and historical landscapes
imbued them with memories of stories from the Ramayana and
Mahabharata, and they were increasingly recorded with the formal
archaeological surveys of India, which began by the 1830s. The local
naming is not surprising given the ‘epic-long’ oral traditions which the two
epics accrued over a millennium. However, the memorialization beckons
careful mapping and historical research, so that the growing tendencies
among many scholars and heritage-makers of India today to unearth the
facts of the epics is decisively laid to rest, scientifically.
The Allahabad Pillar’s memorial to Alexander and Bhima shows that
objects often acquire historical values with little reference to their contents.
Memorialization, as the Pillar illuminates, fashions use values of objects
and adds to their material worth.
The Pillar stands as a memorial also to the feats of the scholarship of the
stellar British epigraphist and numismatician James Prinsep (1799–1840),
who deciphered both the Brahmi inscriptions, the Ashokan and Gupta. In
following the history of Prinsep’s decipherment, we note the curious acts of
the Pillar’s dismantling and re-erecting. It stood in one of the inner
gateways of the Allahabad Fort, in the Jumna Darwaza, when it was taken
down, in 1804, by a Col. Kydd. It was re-erected in 1838 in the central
roundabout inside the fort, which was designed by one of the archaeological
surveyors, Edward Smith, who got the inscriptions impressed upon cloth
and paper for Prinsep before he placed the Pillar upright. The latter
immediately recognized the Gupta Brahmi, and soon after, by comparing
hundreds of copies of the legends, or scraps of ancient-looking inscriptions
he had collected, made out the word danam (gift) in the Minor Rock Edict,
of Ashoka, at Bairat, Rajasthan. He thereby deciphered the unknown
alphabets and configured the historical association of Piyadasi – the name
by which Ashoka refers to himself in his edicts – and dhamma.
 The Allahabad Pillar possibly presents one of the earliest British attempts
at archaeological restorations in India. Recognizing that the Pillar had lost
its capital, which he surmised correctly was a couchant lion, Smith
fashioned a lion capital in stone. Notably, a sketch from the seventeenth
century by the Jesuit priest Joseph Tieffenthaler (1710–85) indicates that
Jahangir may have placed his imperial insignia, the globe, upon the capital-
less pillar.
The ‘semiotically charged’ Allahabad Pillar, as Flood reminds us,
represents a site ‘of an on-going process of “translating” the past’, which
often encompasses a physical displacement of the object. As a palimpsest
constituting acts of re-inscription, the Pillar conveys the inalienability of
objects, wherein every instance of use memorializes a previous owner.
Palimpsests demand a note of what seeps through despite erasures, the
encounters of new and old, and processes of reiteration. As a palimpsest,
the Allahabad Pillar provides a view of the ways in which historical objects
are often acted upon through new imaginations of histories. It, thus, stands
as a powerful critique of the heritage-making practices that obliterate the
multiple pasts of objects, monuments and landscapes.

ASHER, C. and C. Talbot. (2006). India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press.
BURT, T.S. (1834). ‘A Description with Drawings, of the Ancient Stone Pillar at Allahabad called
Bhim Sén’s Gadá or Club, with accompanying copies of four inscriptions engraven in different
characters upon its surface’. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 3, 105–13.
CUNNINGHAM, A. (1871). ‘Prayaga, or Allahabad’. Archaeological Survey of India, Four Reports
Made During the Year 1862-63-64-65, Vol. 1 (pp. 296–310). Government Central Press.
DILLON, S. (2007). The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. Continuum.
FALK, H. (2006). Asokan Sites and Artefacts. Philipp von Zabern.
FLEET, J.F. (1981). ‘Allahabad Stone Pillar Inscription of Samudragupta; Inscriptions of the Early
Gupta Kings and their Successors’. In D.R. Bhandarkar, B.C. Chhabra and G.S. Ghai (Eds),
Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Vol. 3 (pp. 203–19). Archaeological Survey of India.
(Original work published 1888).
FLOOD, F.B. (2003). ‘Pillars, Palimpsests and Princely Practices: Translating the Past in Sultanate
Delhi’. Res, 43, 95–116.
FÜHRER, A. (1969). The Monumental Antiquities and Inscriptions in the North-Western Provinces
and Oudh: New Imperial Series, Vol. 12 (reprint). Archaeological Survey of India. (Original
work published 1896).
HULTZSCH, E. (1925). ‘The Allahabad Kosam Pillar’. In E. Hultzsch (Ed.), Corpus Inscriptionum
Indicarum, Vol. 1 (pp. 155–59). Clarendon Press.
JOSHI, E.B. (1968). Uttar Pradesh District Gazetteers: Allahabad.
NORMAN, K.R. (1990). ‘Studies in the Epigraphy of the Asokan Inscriptions’. In R. Webb (Ed.),
K.R. Norman: Collected Papers, Vol. I (pp. 214–19). Pali Text Society, Oxford. (Original work
published 1975).
NORMAN, K.R. (1992). ‘The Inscribing of Asoka’s Pillar Edicts’. In R. Webb (Ed.), K.R. Norman:
Collected Papers, Vol. III (pp. 173-82). Pali Text Society, Oxford. (Original work published
1987).
NORMAN, K.R. (1992). ‘Asoka’s Schism Edict’. In R. Webb (Ed.), K.R. Norman: Collected Papers,
Vol. III (pp. 191–218). Pali Text Society, Oxford. (Original work published 1987).
PRINSEP, J. (1837). Interpretation of the Most Ancient of the Inscriptions on the Pillar called the Lat
of Feroz Shah near Delhi, and of Allahabad, Radhia and Mathiah. Journal of the Asiatic Society
of Bengal, 6, 566–609.
THAPAR, R. (2018, February 16). ‘India and the World as Viewed from a Pillar of Ashoka Maurya’.
[Special Lecture]. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai.
guftugu.in/2018/06/13/pillar-of-ashokamaurya-romila-thapar/.
THAPAR, R. (1973). Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. Oxford University Press.
9
THE YAKSHI OF DIDARGANJ
Patna, Bihar
c. 1st century BCE–1st century CE

…the statue exudes a romance and magic of a time gone and is a

breathtaking example of the superior level of craftsmanship
thousands of years ago in Bihar. Witness her splendour at the Bihar
Museum, where she now has a permanent home!

– The Wonder that is Bihar Museum

THE GRAND DISPLAY OF THE DIDARGANJ YAKSHI AS THE coveted object of the
new state-of-the-art Bihar Museum, which opened to public in 2017, has
laid to rest fears that it would become a fossilized treasure within the
provincial museum of Patna. The rich and eventful life of India’s pre-
eminent antiquity and most fetishized art object is worth recalling as it
provides a glimpse of the ways in which we create commodity values of
antiquities by extracting their singular features, for uses in our partisan
region- and/or nation-making schemes.
Within the native religions of South Asia, the yaksha and yakshi figures
symbolize powerful semi-divine male and female beings, respectively, who
bestow fecundity, wealth and abundance. By the first century BCE, their
anthropomorphic images were affixed to many religious monuments, of
which the Eastern Torana of Sanchi is a brilliant example (see ch. 10). The
yakshi was found at Didarganj near Patna in 1917 without liturgical,
historical or associated context, and scholarly attempts at configuring its
true identity convey the fraught histories of its reclamation for
custodianship.

A yakshi figure possibly holding a fly whisk. Sandstone, 5’ 2”, Bihar Museum Arch no: 134.

The account of the discovery, published by David Brainerd Spooner, then

deputy director general of the Archaeological Survey of India (1918–25), is
slightly different from the report of the find at the police thana of Didarganj
Rasul, near the find-spot, in the accession registers of the Patna Museum.
The former notes the date of discovery as 18 October 1917, the latter a day
earlier. The former tells us that a local maulvi, Qazi Sayyid Muhammad
Afzal, alias Ghulam Rasul Kalam, chanced upon a protruding stone upon
the banks of the Ganga at Didarganj. In the hope of taking it away for
domestic use purposes, he dug, and found the stone to be the pedestal of a
life-sized female statue buried upside down. The latter tells us that the
statue was excavated following the sighting of a serpent entering a hole
next to a protruding stone upon the riverbank but does not mention by
whom. Notably, a blog about this object authored by the Bihar Museum
celebrates the ‘allegorical’ discovery for ‘reminding us of the nature of
history itself, how often we casually use some part of it that is visible
without really knowing the rest, which is hidden’. The police report is
slightly modified in the Museum blog. We are told that the protruding stone
near the hole into which the snake disappeared was used by local dhobis for
washing clothes. The blog informs us of the ‘serendipitous’ manner in
which the ‘Yakshi made her presence felt, at the right time, the very year
the Patna Museum was established’, and concludes the narrative
simplistically, by stating that ‘ever since, she has been the star attraction’ of
the institution.
Both accounts, however, mention that the local people who helped in the
excavations identified the statue as a deity, and immediately set it up for
worship in a makeshift shrine comprising a canopy and bamboo poles.
From this shrine, the statue was decisively ‘rescued’ by the colonial
administration for the new Patna Museum that was formally inaugurated the
same year, in 1917. Patna’s eminent antiquary, Jogendranath Samaddar
intervened in the deliberations at the behest of the museum’s president,
E.H.C. Walsh, and the sculpture was ‘brought safely and in triumph within
the walls of the Patna Museum’, as Spooner reported with a flourish.
With excavations of the Mauryan capital of Pataliputra behind him
(1912–13), Spooner, then superintendent archaeologist for the Eastern
Circle, categorically identified the sculpture as a ‘chowry [fly-whisk]
bearer’, who may have been an ‘attendant on some divine or royal figure’,
and emphasized that it was ‘no member of the Hindu pantheon nor entitled
to worship of any kind by any community’. Through the above
identification he divested the sculpture of all divinity, and the resolution of
housing and identity, as one of the historians of the object Richard Davis
asserts, was ‘political’.
It was their power and authority, the latent ability to impose their will by
force, if necessary, that enabled Walsh and Spooner to dislodge the yakshi
from her incipient temple and relocate her in their own recently founded
institution, the Patna Museum, which itself represented through its neat
classifications and displays British rule over the material remains of India’s
past.
By wresting the sculpture from ‘inappropriate’ use of religion, and
bringing it into a museum, the authorities, as another of the yakshi’s
historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta recounts, facilitated its study as an
antiquity. Spooner deemed it representative of ‘the same general school’ as
the two life-sized male figures in the Museum’s collections, from Parkham
and Besnagar, and thereby classified it as indigenous art. And on stylistic
grounds, raw material and finishing techniques, he credited the ‘Mauryan
masters’. Made of ‘a single block of speckled Chunar sandstone’ and
‘bearing the high polish’, then considered characteristic of Mauryan
imperial art, the sculpture, he stated, represented the manufacturing
techniques of the Ashokan pillars. He drew attention to its natural and
lifelike features, such as the head, but inevitably emulated the colonialist
historiography, and stated that the modelling was ‘primitive’ due to the
‘curious distortions in the right hand, feet, lower drapery’ and most
prominently, the ‘flattened tree-trunk like back’. The overt sexuality of the
sculpture, we may be certain, affronted its Western viewers who shirked
from the ‘unabashed and smirking nudities’ of the ‘voluptuous’ female
figures of Ancient India, to quote Alexander Cunningham during his
encounter with the yakshis at Mathura in 1862. Cunningham considered
such sculptures proof that ‘at least certain classes of women must have been
in the usual habit of appearing in public almost naked’. The art historical
canon for India, which the Western scholarship established by the early
twentieth century, no doubt revealed ‘a basis in Christian thinking on
sexuality’, as the art historian Partha Mitter reminds us.
Unexpectedly, the nationalist historiography countered the Western, and
colonialist, views by celebrating the superb craftsmanship of sensuality.
And the seemingly flawless heavily bejewelled sculpture, found with its
right hand broken and nose chipped, became the Patna Museum’s ‘chief
treasure’, as Spooner had foreseen.
By the time the sculpture appeared in the pioneering international
exhibition of The Art of India and Pakistan at the Royal Academy in
London (1947–48), it had been widely replicated as plaster casts for
enhancing the collections of seminal museums in British India, including
Varendra Research Museum and Library, Rajshahi (Bangladesh), and
Government Museum, Madras, where we can see the cast displayed to date.
On its return from London in 1948, it graced the Exhibition of Indian Art at
the Government House, New Delhi (1948–49), after which it was retained
for the new National Museum that was inaugurated within the precincts. It
was eventually sent back to the Patna Museum after the National Museum
moved into its own buildings, at Janpath, New Delhi, in December 1961.
The long stay of over twenty years at the national capital increased its
iconic value, and the art establishment, fascinated by the sexually charged
image, began to refer to it as a yakshi by the late 1960s. This we note in the
poem by the legendary writer and publisher P. Lal (1929–2010), who
enthused

But all in delight! All in sensuous

Delight, yakshi, with left arm missing, the right,
With feather fan, broad thighs feasting the scenes,
Hair in two frozen buns,
 Breasts between whose two suns
A rivery necklace awaits descent of night.

In the 1980s, the Didarganj Yakshi toured the international festivals of

India as the national mascot and the Indian government subsequently
commemorated her cultural value through the issue of a postage stamp. Her
last international venue was the Sculpture of India show at the National
Gallery, Washington, DC (May–September 1985), which inaugurated a
year-long festival of India in the United States. The exhibition was curated
by Pramod Chandra, who labelled her a ‘goddess holding a fly whisk’.
Chandra lauded ‘the elegant naturalism’ of ‘the fleshy body, the ease
with which its weight is carried by the left leg, and the sensitive features’.
He retained Spooner’s dating of the sculpture to the Mauryan period, and
thereby affirmed it as India’s ‘earliest visual statement of female beauty’.
Significantly, he noted that ‘the life size sculpture […] came to light
accidentally in 1917, due to erosion caused by the Ganges River at the
modern city of Patna’, which possibly denotes his curatorial attempts at
establishing the rationality of the discovery for the ‘discerning’ viewers of
the West. Significantly, he saw no need to engage with the contrary
valuations of the antiquity as a sacred and secular figure, through the
display as a goddess and art. Therefore, the chowrie-bearing yakshi of
Didarganj directs introspection of the emulation of the curatorial practices
of the colonial government, which entailed transpositions of religious and
art objects, by the early post-colonial scholars of Indian art.
The national valuation of the Didarganj yakshi was fiercely debated after
its return to India, when museum authorities noticed a fresh damage: a chip
on the left cheek. The Indian media denounced the government’s displays
of India’s precious heritage abroad, and, as an article in the India Today
noted, senior archaeologists reportedly pointed out that ‘if France did not
allow the Mona Lisa out of the Louvre then why should India despatch its
precious lady to impress a handful of art enthusiasts abroad.’ The festival
officials, who were also chastised for exhibiting Chola bronzes in worship
within some of the temples of Tamil Nadu, defended their action by saying
that they ‘were doing it for the greater glory of Indian Art’. Additionally,
the Bihar government stoked the disquiet by demanding from the National
Museum the hefty sum of ₹250 million, which was the insurance value of
the international loan. The priceless yakshi, for sure, commanded a very
high price as a Bihari antiquity, and the Indian government quelled the
controversy by declaring that she would no longer travel.
The yakshi has followed the antiquity collections of the Patna Museum
into the new Bihar Museum. The international-standard museum was
planned with the creation of the new state of Bihar in 2000, separated from
Jharkhand, for promoting Bihari history, culture and development. The
grand display of the yakshi was carefully planned while designing the
avant-garde building, and as the trustees of the Museum now emphasize,
she conveys the greatness of ‘Bihar’s history as India’s history’.
Notably, both the Patna and Bihar Museums convey similar histories of
place-making labours in the colonial and post-colonial eras. They both have
furnished a new state – the British India province of Bihar and Orissa in the
case of the Patna Museum – with an ancient cultural history, and the
collection histories of both present the compulsive endeavours of
‘heritagizing’ new political entities with deep antiquity. Thus, the homing
anew of the yakshi in the Bihar Museum resonates with the age-old politics
of belonging.
The Didarganj yakshi is now the brand ambassador of Blissful Bihar, the
catchy slogan that enshrines the promise of the state. The ‘Indian creation
with Indian sensibilities’ as an official of the Museum tells us, supposedly,
‘conveys happiness’. Crucially, she is exhibited as a Mauryan object despite
the fact that careful scholars of the arts of Ancient India, such as Frederick
Asher, have dated the sculpture a couple of centuries later, possibly to
Kushan times. They have also affirmed that ‘the chowrie is not an
identifying attribute of a yakshi’ through their studies of the sculptures of
the Bharhut stupa (Satna District, Madhya Pradesh), that bear identifying
labels as yakshis. In fact, Ellen Raven’s study of sculptures with fly whisks,
or the chamara, clearly highlights the difficulty of using this object for
identifying deities.
 In its exhibition at the Bihar Museum presently, the yakshi of Didarganj
appears as a linking object, connecting the, supposed, golden age of
Ancient Bihar, when Pataliputra was India’s foremost city, with the
progressive age of Modern Bihar that strives towards greater achievements
in the sciences and arts. The shifting role indicates the clear move of the
new state towards seeking an urban heritage through the use of antiquities
and presenting this new heritage as a well-established public history.

ASHER, F. and W. Spink. (1989). ‘Maurya Figural Sculpture Reconsidered’. Ars Orientalis, 19, 1–
25.
The Wonder that is Bihar Museum. Film by Vinod Bhardwaj for Bihar Museum Society, 2018.
CHAKRAVARTY, A. (2018). ‘Provincial Pasts and National Histories: Territorial self-fashioning in
twentieth-century Bihar’. Modern Asian Studies, 52(4), 1347–74.
DOI:10.1017/S0026749X16000561.
CHANDRA, P. (1985). The Sculpture of India, 3000 BC–1300 AD. National Gallery of Art,
Washington DC. [Exhibition Catalogue].
CHENGAPPA, R. (1986, November 30). ‘Festival of India: Damaging Display’. India Today.
CUNNINGHAM, A. (1871). Archaeological Survey of India: Four Reports Made During the Years
1862–63–64–65, Vol. 1 (pp. 231–44). Government Central Press.
DAVIS, R.H. (1997). Lives of Indian Images. Princeton University Press.
GUHA-THAKURTA, T. (2002). ‘The Endangered Yakshi: Careers of an Ancient Object in Modern
India’. In P. Chatterjee and A. Ghosh (Eds), History and the Present (pp. 71–107). Permanent
Black.
GUHA-THAKURTA, T. (2007). ‘Our Gods, Their Museums: The Contrary Careers of India’s Art
Objects’. Art History, 30(4), 628–57.
MITTER, P. (2001). Indian Art. Oxford University Press.
RAVEN, E. (2008). ‘The Yak Tail’s Flywhisk (Chamara)’. Asiatische Kunst, 38(4), 123–36.
SPOONER, D.B. (1919). ‘The Didarganj Image now in the Patna Museum’. Journal of the Bihar and
Orissa Research Society, 5(1), 105–13.
10
THE EASTERN TORANA
Sanchi, Madhya Pradesh
c. 1st century BCE

OF THE FOUR MAJESTIC TORANAS, OR GATEWAYS, THAT FLANK the Mahastupa at

Sanchi on four cardinal points, the one in the east has a rich life history in
the modern world. The Eastern Torana is also perhaps the most
internationally travelled Indian architecture in the form of structural replica.
The uses and viewing show us that the meaning of monuments as cultural
and historical artefacts often does not emanate from their material
authenticity.
The toranas, crowned with Buddhist symbols of the dharmachakra and
triratna, reveal the emergence of Buddhist art. A ‘microcosm of the
Buddhist experience’, as one of their historians Vidya Dehejia succinctly
describes them, they unfold histories carved on every surface, front and
back, through expressive and vibrant scenes of celestial, mythical and
human beings, wild and domestic animals, geometric and plant motifs,
forests and towns. They command awe.
In his anthropological study of Buddhism’s visual histories, Christopher
Pinney paraphrases the experience of seeing the toranas as darshanic,
which ‘dictate different modes of beholding’ – allowing flashes of
recognition, demanding detailed inspection, and capable of turning back on
itself. The pictorial technique which the art of the toranas represent is
remarkably different from the ‘static notion of perfection in classical Greek
and Roman art’, Partha Mitter tells us. To make sense of the complex
imagery, viewers often find themselves circumambulating the Mahastupa
many times, something the worship of the monument demands. The toranas
thus guide the rituals of worshipping the Stupa.

The East Gateway of Stupa No. 1, Sanchi. Sandstone, 54 ft tall.

East Gateway photographed by Deen Dayal in 1881 during first formal restorations at the site.

The sensuous yakshi that still hangs from the Eastern Torana is, as Lonely
Planet affirms, ‘Sanchi’s best image’. A catalogue entry of a photograph of
the torana taken in 1882 by Deen Dayal tells us that

The Eastern Torana consists of two square posts crowned with a

group of four elephants and two shalabhanjika, female figures,
grasping the branch of a tree. These support a triple architrave with
scrolled ends and carved figures of winged lions, peacocks and
elephants. The gateway is completely covered with sculptures
depicting various episodes of the life of Buddha Shakyamuni
represented aniconically. The sculptures on the top architrave depict
the seven Manushi Buddhas, the previous Buddhas; the middle
architrave shows the Great Departure of Buddha from his palace at
Kapilavastu while the lower architrave depicts a royal visit of Ashoka
to the Bodhi tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment.

The scene of Ashoka’s visit to Bodh Gaya in the lower architrave

possibly refers to the Mauryan emperor’s consecration of a stupa at Sanchi.
The place may have been then known as Kakanava, or Kakanaya, and the
hills upon which the stupa was built overlooked an east–west route, which
became an important conduit of trade and exchange during the first to
second century BCE. This is when the Ashokan stupa was enlarged, and we
note efforts towards the creation of a distinct sacred geography. The stupa
was encased in stone and brick, and endowed with stone railings,
balustrade, chhatri, or parasol, harmika, or railing, enclosing the relic
coffer, and the majestic toranas, which increased its visibility as the
Mahastupa. Two smaller stupas, no. 2 and 3, were built at the time.
Monasteries, temples, chaitya grihas or prayer halls, dvajas or distinctive
pillars, large votive stupas and free-standing sculptures added to the sacred
geography at Sanchi well until the end of the twelfth century, after which
the place was more or less deserted.
 Typically, the British claimed discovery of the historical site in the early
nineteenth century, and the nearby town of Bhilsa was subsequently brought
into the route of the Indian Peninsular Railway (see ch. 54). Edward Fell, a
captain of the 10th Native Infantry, who possibly stumbled upon the
Mahastupa while on an excursion in 1817, was the first to publish a field
report. Fell saw three toranas standing – the southern one had fallen by then
– and stated that although the monuments were infested with thick
vegetation and undergrowth, they all appeared architecturally ‘solid’. Taken
aback by the sheer beauty of the toranas, he lamented his ‘deficiency in
technical knowledge and want of sufficient ability in the art of drawing to
do justice to the highly finished style of the sculptures’.
Fell’s visit prompted the Political Agent of Bhopal, T.H. Maddock, to
explore the site archaeologically. In 1822 with assistance from a Captain
Johnson, Maddock dug shafts into the dome and sides of the Mahastupa
which also made the torana in the west collapse. The damage were
compounded by Alexander Cunningham and Frederick Maisey during their
archaeological reconnaissance of the site in 1851–52. They sank more
shafts into the Mahastupa, and also into stupas nos. 2 and 3, causing one of
them to collapse. Yet, Cunningham conscientiously documented the threat
to the site from ‘the petty avarice of the local zamindar’ who, he
emphasized, destroyed the pillars for ‘making sugar presses’. Having
suggested upon visiting Ajanta, the splendid Buddhist monastic complex of
the fifth century in Maharashtra (see ch. 18), that the paintings in the caves
be peeled off and sent to Britain, Cunningham now recommended the ‘two
fallen gateways’, namely, the western and southern, be removed to the
British Museum where they would ‘form the most striking objects in a Hall
of Indian Antiquities’. The removal, he qualified, ‘would ensure their
preservation’. However, the suggestion illustrated personal ambition. For,
Cunningham excavated at Sanchi in the shadow of the sensational
excavations at Nimrud by Austen Henry Layard (1846–50). He hoped to be
able to receive the kind of fame and recognition that Layard did, and, in his
monograph The Bhilsa Topes (1854), declared that ‘in the illustration of the
ancient history of India, the bas reliefs and inscriptions of the Bhilsa topes
are almost equal in importance to the more splendid discoveries made by
the enterprising and energetic Layard in the mounds of Euphrates’.
Cunningham’s proposal of transporting the Sanchi gates overseas to
London was based upon his great expectations of their enthusiastic
reception in Britain, matching, if not outshining, the great awe and
sensation with which Layard’s cargoes of Assyrian antiquities were
received in London. The Political Agent of Bhopal, H.M. Durand, tried to
legitimize the inglorious proposal by suggesting to the ruler of Bhopal, a
princely state, that the gates be gifted to Queen Victoria. Begum Sikander
Jahan (1817–1868) was willing to do so. Fortunately, the forbidding costs,
logistics of transportation and the uprisings of 1857 stopped her from
committing to the project. A decade later, in 1868, the Begum received a
request from the French to present the Sanchi gates to Napoleon III, and
when she informed the British of the request, Governor General Canning
retorted that ‘it would be an act of vandalism and little creditable to the
British government, to let the Gateway go either to London or Paris’.
The French request made the British think of ways of possessing the
Sanchi gates and, in the light of growing demands in Britain for in situ
preservation, the colonial government hit upon the logic of creating plaster
casts that could be transported. The plans followed the declaration of
European powers in Paris in 1867, to share with each other the masterpieces
of art and architecture in their realms, through casts, electrotypes and
photographs. Henry Cole, director of London’s South Kensington Museum
(1857–73), instigated the signing of the declaration as ‘essential to the
progress of art’, which he said could be achieved ‘without the slightest
damage to the originals’.
The man selected for casting operations at Sanchi was, unsurprisingly,
Cole’s son, also named Henry, then a lieutenant in the Indian Army. In
retelling the history of the operations undertaken between December 1869
and March 1870, Kavita Singh points out that

[a]fter five months in training and trials in London, [Henry Hardy]

Cole and his [three] sappers [of the regiment] returned to Calcutta
 carrying with them some 28 tons of materials, including fine-quality
plaster of Paris, gelatin, ropes, pulleys, pails, cauldrons, tin-lined
packing cases and other equipment. In Calcutta these were packed
into 88 boxes that travelled to Jabalpur in central India by train; there
Cole and his party were joined by ‘Burnald and Puneswamy from the
Madras School of Industrial Art; Nobin Chander Mukerji, Bonomali
Pal and Khudiram Das from the Calcutta School of Art and Girder,
Modeller from Agra’ – presumably sculptors – and ‘two mistries’ or
masons, as well as numerous coolies and labourers who took the
material overland on an arduous journey to the site. […] The gateway
was cast in 112 separate pieces, which were shipped to London […]
to be used as the ‘parent’ for further copies.

The younger Cole chose the Eastern Torana to be cast, and the facsimile
cost a fortune; Singh notes this to be around £200,000 in the present. A set
of paintings made at the time depict the British engineering feat, undertaken
in the forbidding jungle-clad hilly terrains. The parent cast that came to
Britain in 1871 was immediately displayed in the London International
Exhibition of the year. Valued as Britain’s national copy of the Sanchi Gate’
it drew large crowds and occasional exclamations such as ‘how good Indian
work often is’, to quote a report of 1872. Subsequently, Edinburgh, Dublin,
Paris and Berlin were each sold a plaster cast torana.
In India, a series of casting projects followed the one at Sanchi. Of the
few supervised by Cole are those at the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque at
Mehrauli (New Delhi), and some of the architectural elements of Fatehpur
Sikri (near Agra), prominently the massive pillar with four walkways that
was then deemed Akbar’s throne pillar in his Ibadat Khana. When the
galleries of cast objects, known as Cast Courts, at the South Kensington
Museum were inaugurated in 1873, the Eastern Torana was displayed as the
centrepiece of the Oriental wing. It was flanked by a plethora of monuments
from the East, especially India, including the throne pillar, to display it as
the crowning glory of the prowess of imperial Britain.
 The plaster cast Eastern Torana, as Singh tells us, became a ‘metonym for
the strange and wondrous constructions of the East’. Its myriad
reproductions – as publications, pamphlets and packages – made it a highly
popular iconography of the Orient. The ‘plaster facsimile’, to use the
younger Cole’s terminology, also inspired emerging practices of
archaeological site-photography. In 1900, during January and March, Henry
Cousens, Archaeological Superintendent for Western India (1891–1910),
devised ways of photographing every part of each torana at Sanchi to a
fixed scale of one-eighth. Placing his camera on a scaffold at adjustable
heights, he successfully created a monumental photographic replica of all
four. The prints of the 200 or so negatives were mounted on sheets of paper
for assembly into the architectural order.

Of the three architraves, the lowest may depict the story of Emperor Ashoka’s consecration of this
stupa site.

Plaster casts, as Michael Falser carefully documents, allowed colonial

powers to appropriate the built cultural heritage of their colonies and
transfer the Oriental architecture for their ‘newly invented museum spaces’.
The casts constituted the three-dimensional archives that also contributed to
the canonization of the ‘original site as an eternal ruin’. Sanchi came to be
India’s best-preserved archaeological site, largely due to the restorations,
between 1913 and 1918, by the Archaeological Survey of India at Sir John
Marshall’s initiative. Ironically, the plaster cast of the Eastern Torana was
wilfully destroyed in England, in 1955, by its custodians at the Victoria and
Albert Museum (V&A, former South Kensington Museum) when the India
collections moved into a new home across the road. Although casts were by
then undervalued as museum exhibits because they were copies, those of
many European architecture were saved because their fate was for long
debated. Not so for the Indian ones, which were found unquestionably
dispensable, possibly also because they appeared as poor replicas of the
riches which Britain owned of its former colony.
The growing scholarship on casts of historical monuments increasingly
invests in mapping the shifts over time in notions of authenticity and
authorship, and we note that the surviving ‘eastern toranas’ in the West are
now being taken out of their closets. In 2017, the one at Berlin, in the
collections of the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, was proposed for display
‘as an exact replica’ at the new Humboldt Forum that was then being
constructed, by the founding directors of the Humboldt Forum Steering
Committee. The Sanchi Gate on display is a replica of the Eastern Torana,
and the ‘ancient Buddhist monument’ shall represent the message of the
newly developed ‘space for experiencing world cultures’, to quote an article
in the Humboldt Forum newsletter, of June 2017. An academic advisor for
the project, Laura Goldenbaum further unpicks the new symbolism of the
proposed display, as a bridge between East and West that shall be a
‘messenger of transformation’ and the ‘transcontinental migration of
images, symbols, shapes and ideas’. Clearly, the Eastern Torana at Berlin is
being moulded to fit into the concerns of the cultural politics of
cosmopolitanism that seeks the multidimensionality of history. And perhaps
this is a good way to rethink the agencies of religious architecture for
navigating the politics of polarization that revels in stoking and
memorializing partisan, and erroneous, histories of the clash of religions
and civilizations.
CUNNINGHAM, A. (1854). The Bhilsa Topes, Or, Buddhist Monuments of Central India:
Comprising a Brief Historical Sketch of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Buddhism with an
Account of the Opening and Examination of the Various Groups of Topes Around Bhilsa. Smith,
Elder.
DEHEJIA, V. (1997). Discourse in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India. Munshiram
Manoharlal.
FALSER, M. (2013). ‘From Gaillon to Sanchi, from Vézelay to Angkor Wat. The Musée Indo-
Chinois in Paris: A Transcultural Perspective on Architectural Museums’. International
Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art (RIHA Journal). nbn-
resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:101:1-2013072310921.
FELL, E. (1834). ‘Description of an Ancient and Remarkable Monument near Bhilsa’. Journal of the
Asiatic Society of Bengal, 3, 490–94.
GOLDENBAUM, L. (2017). ‘The Sanchi Gateway – a portal to the world’. Humboldt Forum 1, 15
June.
GUHA-THAKURTA, T. (2013). ‘The production and Reproduction of Monuments: The Many lives
of the Sanchi Stupa’. South Asian Studies, 29(1), 15–47.
dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2013.772801.
LENDING, M. (2017). Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction. Princeton
University Press.
MITTER, P. (2001). Indian Art. Oxford University Press.
PARZINGER, H., H. Bredekamp and N. MacGregor. (2017). ‘Giving the Cross the Benefit of the
Doubt’. Humboldt Forum, June 27. www.humboldtforum.org/en/magazine/article/giving-the-
cross-the-benefit-of-the-doubt/.
PINNEY, C. (2011). ‘Buddhist Photography’. In S. Guha (Ed.), The Marshall Albums: Photography
and Archaeology (pp. 178–201). Alkazi Collection of Photography & Mapin.
ROGERS, T. (1872). ‘Report on Architectural Designs’. In G.E. Eyre and W. Spottiswoode (Eds),
Report on the International Exhibition of 1871, Part III (pp. 62–63). Her Majesty’s Stationery
Office.
SINGH, K. (2019). ‘Sanchi: In and Out of the Museum’. Sculpture Journal, 28(3), 345–63.
https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2019.28.3.6.
11
A PORTRAIT OF KANISHKA I
Mat, near Mathura, Uttar Pradesh
2nd century
THE LIFE-SIZE, HEADLESS STATUE OF KANISHKA I (r.c. 127/8–153 CE), the
foremost ruler of the Kushan dynasty that flourished during the first–second
centuries was found at the archaeological site of Tokri Tila in the village of
Mat, near Mathura. The discovery, in January 1912, was historically
significant as this was among the first contemporary free-standing portraits
of a ruler of Ancient India. Like the Didarganj Yakshi, the statue of
Kanishka too was found protruding from the ground, and was recovered
headless and without the arms. The superintendent of the excavations,
Indologist Pandit Radha Krishna, identified this as Kanishka through the
Brahmi inscription on the body, which read

Maharaja Rajatiraja Daivaputro Kanishko

[Great King, King of Kings, Son of the Gods, Kanishka]

The Kushans were of Central Asian nomadic ancestry and originally

belonged to the tribes of the Da Yuezhi, who had left their homeland in
western China during the third millennium BCE. The political dynasty was
founded by Kujula Kadphises (r.c. 40–90 CE), who amalgamated a splinter
group of five tribes and established his rule over Bactria, Kabul and parts of
Kashmir. His successors were his son, Wima Taktu (r.c. 90–113 CE), and his
grandson, Wima Kadhphises (r.c. 113–128 CE). Kanishka was the latter’s
son and the fourth king of the dynasty.
Portrait statue of Kanishka found without the head. Possibly made during the early years of his reign.
Sandstone, 5’ 4”, Government Museum Mathura 12.213.

By the time Kanishka came to power, the Kushans had conquered a vast
area extending across Ancient Sogdiana, Kashmir, Bactria and Gandhara.
The kingdom they built straddled the major routes between Rome and
China. Emulating the Indo-Greek kings they defeated, the Kushans made
inroads into north India and the Upper Ganga valley by the first century. It
is possible that Wima Kadphises captured the region around present-day
Mathura. Kanishka, his son, and the most powerful of the Kushan kings,
annexed areas further south. Through conquests and consolidation of areas
along the Middle Ganga basin he brought north India into the orbit of the
existing trade routes that connected Asia and Europe.
In 1993 an inscription found at Rabatak, Afghanistan, added considerably
to the known histories of Kanishka’s rule. The inscription dates from
Kanishka’s sixth regnal year, c. 132/3 CE, and documents in detail his
military conquests. It records that

In the year One, it has been proclaimed unto India, unto the whole
realm of the Kshatriyas, that [as for] them—both the [city of] … and
the [city] of Saket, and the [city of] Kausambi, and the [city of]
Pataliputra, as far as the [city of] Sri-Campa–whatever rulers and
other important persons [they might have] he had submitted to [his]
will, and he had submitted all India to [his] will.

The Rabatak inscription documents Kanishka’s successful inroads into

the Ganga valley. It affirms that his empire extended into Magadha in the
east and eastern Malwa in the southwest and that he ruled over the cities of
Saket (near Sialkot, Punjab), Kaushambi, Varanasi, Shravasti and Vidisha,
if not over Pataliputra (Patna) and Champa (in Bengal). Historians of the
Kushan dynasty tell us that Kanishka devised a novel strategy for
administering his dispersed kingdom by establishing two core areas of
centralized authority: one around Peshawar–Taxila with a capital city at
Kanishkapura (or Purushapura, near Peshwar), and the other in the Ganga–
Yamuna Doab with a capital city in the Mathura region. He thereby created
direct political linkages between the regions of Mathura and Peshawar,
which facilitated the rise of both cities as important commercial and cultural
centres during the second century. Through his rule over Mathura, Kanishka
could also keep in check the powerful neighbouring republics, such as
Yaudheyas in Malwa.
Kanishka’s military prowess is depicted in the statue which represents
him as a heroic king. The statue, made from locally available sandstone and
possibly by local artisans of the Mathura region, is significantly different
from the other royal statues, all of stone, which were excavated from the
area in 1912. These include a male figure seated on a throne, now known to
be the image of Kanishka’s grandfather Wima Taktu, a superbly carved
male torso wearing a rich and ornate belt, and remnants of a standing figure
with a lion at the feet, which could be a portrait of Kanishka’s immediate
successor, Huvishka (c. 153–190 CE). They were all located within the
brick-built architectural complex that was interpreted at the time as a
devakula, or a shrine for gods.
The statue of Wima is seated on a decorative lion throne and is much
larger than that of Kanishka. It was found in the western end of the above
architectural complex from, to quote Susan Huntington, ‘a sanctum like
structure consisting of two concentric, rounded walls surrounded by a
number of small cells’. Wima’s statue, Huntington informs us, was
‘apparently undisturbed when the shrine was destroyed, perhaps at the close
of the Kusana period’, and may have been ‘the chief object of the shrine’.
The massiveness is possibly indicative of its status as a shrine object and
Wima’s genealogical supremacy in the Kushan dynasty.

Details of the tunic, boots, sword and inscription.

 The statue of Kanishka was found near the outer walls of the shrine.
However, this was probably not the in situ position, and the relationship of
Kanishka’s portrait to Wima’s remains unknown. Noticeably, Wima is
shown wearing a richly embroidered tunic, a torque around his neck, and
holding a sceptre or a sword, and Kanishka is shown standing astride with
his right hand resting on a mace and his left clasping the hilt of a sword.
Kanishka’s portrait draws viewers’ attention to the contrast between his
plain garb and heavy boots, and the richly decorated weapons he holds in
his hands. The excavators noticed the contrast, as Jean Phillipe Vogel
reported, and suggested that Kanishka was shown quite specifically as ‘a
warrior not delighting in costly dress but trusting in his good sword’.
Scholars such as Gerald Fussman subsequently declared that ‘even without
its head this statue can be considered an archetypal symbol of the assertive
conqueror with its imperious pose, unmitigated frontality, and massive
weapons’. Notably, the statue of Kanishka differs from the other portraits
that have been found in the shrine. The back is not round, and the upper
parts near the neck and head are carved with incised lines. The shape and
the carvings suggest that the upper back may have held the ends of a halo
around the head.
The devakula, the architectural complex where the statues were found, is
now more aptly described as a royal sanctuary. Although the exact purpose
of the architecture remains unknown, it served as a ceremonial centre that,
possibly, enshrined the royal portraits as objects of devotion. It was repaired
at least once – during Huvishka’s reign, when the latter’s dedicatory statue
was added. The excavations of 1912 yielded vast quantities of sculptural
fragments, which were all found from the sanctuary’s premises and are
possibly of religious intent. These include statues of various deities, such as
a Naga (serpent god), Bodhisattva, Varuna, Krishna, Durga, and Balarama,
as well as ordinary men and women. Scholars infer that one of the
sculptures was of the mahadandanayaka, who had supervised the
restoration of the sanctuary during Huvishka’s reign.
The sanctuary at Mat may have been built by Kanishka. We know of a
similar structure from the archaeological site of Surkh Kotal in Baghlan
province, Afghanistan, which was excavated between 1952 and 1968. This,
too, contained a free-standing headless image of the king, and the
excavators estimated that this complex was also built by him.
The discoveries at Surkh Kotal raise possibilities of other, as yet
unknown, royal sanctuaries within the Kushan Empire. We know that the
Achaemenid kings of Ancient Iran built similar structures for worshipping
tutelary deities and commemorating their lineage, and the Kushan kings,
who annexed their lands, possibly emulated their practice. The Kushan
kings also followed them in promoting the cult of divine kingship and
brought into the Indian subcontinent new and exalted symbols of royalty,
including the title daivaputro (son of heaven). The remarkable displays of
the imperial status through large statues and sanctuaries were possibly
aimed at acquiring respect from their foreign subjects, with vastly different
cultural traditions.
Kanishka’s control over Mathura revealed the strategic geography of the
region and its potential to command routes connecting the East–West trade
through Central Asia. Before the Kushan conquest, trade routes went
through the towns of Bairat, Rajasthan, and Kaushambi, Uttar Pradesh,
which grew in wealth and importance as religious centres, prominently of
Buddhism. This changed with the changing status of Mathura as a Kushan
city; it now became a nodal point for commercial transactions. The
archaeological sites of Kankali Tila, Khatra, Chaubra, Jail Mound, Sonkh,
and Parkham, near Mat, illustrate the region’s spectacular growth during the
second century.
Mathura acquired a mint, and the large quantities of inscriptions that date
to the Kushan period illustrate its wealthy inhabitants – bankers, jewellers,
ironsmiths, traders, actors and merchants – who are mentioned as sresthi,
manikara, lohikarika, vyavhari, nataka and sarthavaha. The inscriptions
also mention people of the Northwest, with their ‘foreign’ names: Surana,
Horamurndaga, Visvasika and Varamihira. The cultural influences from the
northwest, which seemingly fused with indigenous traditions in Mathura,
established the city’s cosmopolitan ambience, nurtured different schools of
philosophy and religion, and shaped the nascent iconography of Buddhism,
Jainism, and Brahmanism. Mathura pioneered the production of figural
representations of the Buddha, Jina, Surya, Krishna, Balarama, Skanda and
Durga, among others. The sculptures that are not of the Kushan kings in the
royal sanctuary at Mat possibly constitute a part of this early iconography
of Ancient India.
It might appear ironical that a ‘foreign’ king created the resplendence of
a city that has been emphatically historicized from the nineteenth century as
the essence of Hindu India. Notably, the eminence of Mathura diminished
with the declining fortunes of the Kushan dynasty, and the cosmopolitan
city became a local pilgrim centre during the successor Naga kings.
The statue of Kanishka prompts us to ask whether the local people saw it
or whether it was seen only by the Kushan kings, their families and
officials. The excavators of Mat believed that the portrait of Wima was
‘broken systematically and with a certain amount of care’. Considering that
all the royal statues from the site are headless, as is the life-sized statue of
Kanishka at Surkh Kotal, we could indeed ask many questions: Why the
decapitation, and where are the heads? Why have none been found during
subsequent archaeological explorations? How did the locals perceive the
‘foreign’ statues? Did they vandalize the royal sanctuary and destroy the
statues when they were free of the Kushans. If so, why?
Kanishka’s statue coaxes us to develop relevant methods for enquiries
into the changing meanings of political iconography in Ancient India. It
also shows us the historic contributions of the ‘foreign’ rulers towards the
economic prosperity and cultural efflorescence of regions that are
increasingly promoted today as bastions of Hinduism.
The statue of the foreigner king of Mathura, therefore, directs us to
interrogate the reasons for the enduring legacies of the colonialist histories.

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Srinivasan (Ed.), Mathura: The Cultural Heritage (pp. 193–99). American Institute of Indian
Studies.
HUNTINGTON, S. (1985). The Art of Ancient India: Buddhist, Hindu, Jain. Weatherhill.
JOSHI, M.C. (1989). ‘Mathura as an Ancient Settlement’. In D.M. Srinivasan (Ed.), Mathura: The
Cultural Heritage (pp. 165–70). American Institute of Indian Studies.
ROSENFIELD, J.M. (1967). The Dynastic Arts of the Kushans. University of California Press.
SCHLUMBERGER, D. (1961). ‘The Excavations at Surkh Kotal and the Problem of Hellenism in
Bactria and India’ [Lecture]. Oxford University Press.
SIMS-WILLIAMS, N. (1995–96). ‘A New Bactrian Inscription of Kanishka the Great; The Rabatak
Inscription, Text and Commentary’. Silk Road Art and Archaeology, 4, 77–97.
VOGEL, J.P. (1915). ‘Excavations at Mathura’. In J.H. Marshall (Ed.), Annual Reports of the
Archaeological Survey of India for the year 1911–12 (pp. 120–33). Superintendent Government
Printing.
12
AN AYAGAPATA
Kankali Tila, Mathura, Uttar Pradesh
c. 1st century

THIS INTRICATELY CARVED STONE TABLET IS AN AYAGAPATA, the earliest

distinctive Jaina iconography. It possibly presents a Tirthankara, teacher,
who is the ford-maker; one who fords the gulf between samsara, the
phenomenal world and liberation. Scholars have variously identified the
figure in the central panel as Ajitanatha, the second, or Mahavira, the
twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara. The consensus now seems to be towards
the latter, and therefore the ayagapata appears to be one among the four –
all found in Mathura – which depicts Mahavira’s first image. The
Tirthankaras were also Jinas and arhats, the supreme conquerors of all
forms of attachments and aversions. The ayagapatas document the earliest
production of their images, at Mathura.
The inscription in Brahmi script records the donor’s name as Sihanadika,
providing a cue of the rich patronage of Jainism in Ancient Mathura. In the
past, ayagapatas were described simplistically as homage tablets for use as
receptacles for flowers and other offerings during worship. Recent
scholarship, however, suggests that the ayagapatas themselves were objects
of veneration. The near-mint condition of this ayagapata tells us that the
object was possibly seen and venerated and not used in any other manner,
which may illuminate the logic of the new description.
Ayagapata with icon possibly of Mahavira, and inscription in Brahmi. Mottled red Sandstone, 65 mm
× 57 mm × 95 mm, Kankali Tila Mound, Mathura. NM J. 249.

The ayagapatas are rare objects of early Jainism, and only 28 are known
to date. Barring one from Kaushambi, all have been found in the Mathura
region, mainly at the archaeological site of Kankali Tila. Excavations at the
site, between 1888 and 1896, demonstrated the presence of several
unattributed stupas and among them a Jaina stupa. As Paul Dundas notes,
this was a funerary structure, and the Jaina traditions mentions the
construction of one in Mathura, in gold and jewels. The monument
supposedly replicated the one at Mount Meru, and although ‘the Buddhists
and Hindus claimed this great stupa as their own, a miracle demonstrated
that it had in reality been dedicated to the seventh ford-maker Suparshva,
whose image it had contained.’ The ayagapatas of Kankali Tila may have
been part of the sacred goods of this Jaina stupa.

Jain stupa in worship. Sandstone, Kankali Tila Mound, Mathura, 1st century. Government Museum
Mathura.

The ayagapatas remind us that Jaina texts abound with stories of

abandoned and decrepit stupas. Scholars of Jainism have for long suggested
that the Jainas may have taken to stupa worship in imitation of the
Buddhists. However, this ritual seemingly came to an abrupt end by the end
of the Kushan dominance of Mathura, and injunctions in the Jaina text
Jambudvipaprajnapti Sutra state that the practice was ‘pointless’ since the
bodily remains of the Tirthankara were taken away by gods and could not
be contained in a stupa. The passage in the text, as Johannes Bronkhorst
emphasizes, is a later addition, and the Jainas possibly abandoned the stupas
‘due to competition with the Buddhists’.
Despite the firm association with Jainism, first-time viewers of this
ayagapata can easily mistake it for a Buddhist object because of the
imagery: the seated figure in the dhyana mudra looks very much like the
Buddha, and the auspicious symbols which flank him resemble those of
Buddhism, such as the wheel or dharmachakra, a sacred tree or
chaityavriksha, an elephant on a pillar, and triratna or the three jewels
which is the ω-shaped motif on all sides of the central figure. Notably, the
srivatsa emblem on the figure’s chest that would have characterized the
image as a Tirthankara is prominently absent. Art historians tell us that this
emblem, considered today characteristic of the Tirthankara images, appears
subsequently in the latter’s figural representations and statues. The
ayagapata thus provides evidence of the shared motifs in the iconographic
fashioning of Jainism, Buddhism and Brahmanism. Considering that
Mathura was the premier centre of image-making within north India at the
cusp of the first millennium, it beckons enquiries into the ancient histories
of common motif pools.
Significantly, the provenance cajoles us to seek the myriad cultures of
Ancient Mathura. As mentioned in the essay on the Kanishka Statue, the
city emerged as the preeminent commercial centre during the first century
BCE/CE with a markedly cosmopolitan ambience. This was when the
ayagapatas were produced. The city’s affluence is noticeable from the list
of donors in the inscriptions which the objects carry, of whom many were
goldsmiths, merchants and people of ‘skilled and moneyed classes’, to
quote Dundas. Recent scholarship of the early coins of Mathura indicates,
as Shailendra Bhandare has shown through his scholarship of the early
coins of Mathura, that ‘a degree of monetization in the region […] could
well have predisposed the flourish of art’. This is because ‘visible
characteristics of iconic representations’ of the notable attributes appear
first on the coins ‘before they become evident in stone sculpture’.
Bhandare’s study encourages us to explore the ‘interplay between cultural
activities and political structures in the region’.
Mathura became a prominent centre of Jainism from the first century
BCE, and Jaina tradition maintains the city’s legendary antiquity. Phyllis
Granoff recalls the tale of Jinaprabhasuri, the fourteenth-century
Shvetambara poet and grammarian, who recorded that

two monks, Dharmaruchi and Dharmaghosha, famous for their

asceticism, came to Mathura in the course of their monastic
 wanderings. They stopped in the garden outside the city […] The
tutelary goddess of the city, Kuberadevata, pleased by their
asceticism and meditation appeared to them one night. She granted
them a boon; they in turn preached Jain doctrine to her and asked her
to become a lay follower. The monks then decided to make a
pilgrimage to the temples on Mount Meru. […] They set off with the
goddess […] but beset by supernatural difficulties caused by
antagonistic gods they had to give up […] the goddess decided to
fabricate Meru right there […] and made a marvellous stupa of gold
studded with precious gems, surrounded by many gods, adorned with
gateways, flags and hanging gardens.

The legend goes that the Buddhists and followers of Brahmanism

claimed the great stupa as their own, but a miracle demonstrated that it had
been dedicated to the Jainas. Jinaprabha’s story, as Dundas emphasizes,
corroborates the archaeological evidence of the latter at Mathura and allows
us to see that the Jainas ‘cohabited’ with other religious groups. Notably,
there were no significant differences in the religious architecture of the
different groups. Additionally, Jaina texts link the life of Neminatha, the
twenty-second Tirthankara, with that of the Hindu god Krishna, whose cult
centre Mathura came to be by the beginning of the first century. The close
association of Jainism with the Krishna cult is best seen today in Gujarat,
where Jainas and Vaishnava families intermarry.
The ayagapatas epitomize the connected histories of the religions that
flourished in the Mathura of the first century. Notably, the Brahmanical and
Buddhist texts of the period mention silapatas and bhikhu phagula silas,
respectively, which appear like their look-alikes: flat, rectangular, thin, and
intricately carved upon one side. The similarities, Sonia Rhie Quintanilla
suggests, raise the possibility that all such stone tablets were manufactured
in and around Mathura from the first century until about the third century.
With the increasing production of ‘three-dimensional anthropomorphic
representations’ of Jinas, Buddha and Brahmanical gods, the tablets lost
their votive value as objects of veneration.
 A Tirthankara on an ayagapata illustrates that devotional worship, or
puja, of sacred images was important to Jainism from the earliest times.
The Jaina texts, as Dundas explains, make frequent references to ‘eternal
images’ scattered in the universe and various heavens. The Tirthankaras
appear in the ayagapatas in padmasana, or cross-legged, and in dhyana
mudra, absorbed in meditation with hands placed upon the lap. Notably,
this ayagapata is unique in depicting an umbrella over the head, which is
why the image is identified as Mahavira.
As Dundas recalls, the Tirthankaras, born into families of the warrior
class, were ‘awakened by the gods to their destinies as great spiritual
teachers’. They renounced the world of the householder to become
wandering mendicants, and after a period of austerities, through which they
burnt away the karma of their innumerable existences, they attained
enlightenment or ‘full omniscience’. They comprise the primary Jaina
pantheon, and as Bronkhorst suggests, their number – 24 – may have been
created ‘under the influence of the Buddhist tradition of 24 Buddhas’.
Furthermore, their story also links to the Hindu belief ‘in a group of twenty-
four emanatory forms of Vishnu’, as Pratapaditya Pal tells us. Thus,
similarities between the religions reverberate in many different forms.
The first Tirthankara is Rishabanatha and the last, Mahavira, was a near
contemporary of the historical Buddha. Notably, both Buddha and Mahavira
were born in an exceptional manner into the same warrior clan, the
Licchavis, renounced their princely lives, attained enlightenment after
severe austerities, and were among a chain of teachers who challenged
aspects of Brahmanical orthodoxy. The Tirthankaras appear in succession to
activate the triratna of dharma, namely right faith, right knowledge and
right practice, and the placement in the ayagapata of the triratna – the ω-
shaped nandyavarta motif on all sides of the central Tirthankara –
illustrates, according to Quintanilla, the ‘presence of the arhat through his
teachings into the four directions of the universe’.
Historians of South Asian art regard the ayagapatas as precursors of the
tantric mandala, or yantra, that was an aid to meditation in Jainism,
Buddhism, and Hinduism. The yantra incorporated the mantra towards
enlightenment and was widely used in worship for charting a human path
towards the cosmos. With specific reference to this ayagapata, Shridhar
Andhare emphasizes that its ‘eight auspicious symbols, or ashtamangalas,
‘may have been the precursors to the tantric pata’, in which the square and
circle dominate the composition of the ‘mystical diagram’. Early examples
have rarely survived as the patas are made on cloth. Nevertheless, the
comparison allows us to note the enduring imprints of the ayagapatas upon
the efficacy of religious art.
The art of the ayagapatas, as Pal surmises, are ‘very likely’ precursors of
the later samavasarana, or the celestial assembly halls of the Jina, where he
gave his sermons. The two brilliant but very different representations of
such assembly halls are the elaborately carved interiors of the Vimala
temple at Mount Abu, Rajasthan, and the didactic boards of ‘gyanbazi […]
the forerunner of the modern-day game of snakes and ladders’ (see ch. 51).
The ayagapatas, therefore, appear foundational to the visual history of
Jainism.
Although the acts of donation which they inscribe ‘bear clear witness to
the fact that Jainism was not in its earliest period purely ascetic’, as Dundas
reminds us, the religion has been largely historicized through the ‘literature
emanating almost exclusively from the ascetic environment’; therefore, the
academic histories of Jainism relate solely to the ‘pre-occupations of the
ascetic community.’ Yet, the most striking feature of the religion, and one
which has nurtured its long life, is the utter dependence of the monastic
community upon the laity.
The ayagapatas direct us to see the rites of worship, which ‘define one of
the principal avenues through which lay Jains of the image worshipping
groups actually came into contact with their religion’. We would agree with
Dundas in believing that present-day Jaina industrialists probably do not
speculate about the possible infringement of non-violence in their factories
and workshops, nor does the Jaina laity regard its attitudes towards matters
of government policy, international politics or capital punishment as being
conditioned by the doctrine of non-violence. Because, as Dundas
emphasizes, ‘what is important in Jain lay behaviour is not precise
conformity to a canonical pattern of religiosity […] but the manifestation of
pious intentions and correct ethical dispositions through public participation
of religious ceremonies, worship and community affairs […]’. In fact, the
Jaina laity has successfully nurtured Jainism’s attraction and popular appeal
for over two thousand years as an ascetic and puritan religion.
As one of the premier historical objects of early Jainism, the ayagapata
constitutes the materiality of a people’s history of religion. It also allows us
to bring together philological, art historical, archaeological and other forms
of enquiries for sourcing the connected histories of the objects of religion
and, thereby, those of philosophy and ritual.

ANDHARE, S. (1994). ‘Jain Monumental Painting’. In P. Pal (Ed.), The Peaceful Liberators: Jain
Art from India (pp. 77–88). Thames and Hudson.
BABB, L. (1996). Absent Lord: Ascetics and Kings in a Jain Ritual Culture. University of California
Press.
BHANDARE, S. (2019). ‘The Numismatic Chronology of Mathura and Its Bearing on Art’. In C.
Wessels-Mevissen and G.J.R. Mevissen (Eds), Indology’s Pulse: Arts In Context: Essays
Presented to Doris Meth Srinivasan in Admiration of Her Scholarly Research (pp. 145–68).
Aryan Books.
BRONKHORST, J. (2020). ‘The Formative Period of Jainism (c. 500 BCE – 200 CE)’. In J.E. Cort,
P. Dundas, K.A. Jacobsen and K.L. Wiley (Eds), Brill’s Encyclopedia of Jainism Online. Brill.
dx.doi.org/10.1163/2590-2768_BEJO_COM_047082.
DUNDAS, P. (1992). The Jains. Routledge.
GRANOFF, P. (1994). ‘Jain Pilgrimage: In Memory and Celebration of the Jinas’. In P. Pal (Ed.), The
Peaceful Liberators: Jain Art from India (pp. 63–76). Thames and Hudson.
KISHORE, K. (2019). ‘Symbol and Image Worship in Jainism: The Ayagapatas of Mathura’. Indian
Historical Review, 42(1), 17–43. DOI: 10.1177/0376983615569814.
PAL, P. (1994). ‘Introduction’. In P. Pal (Ed.), The Peaceful Liberators: Jain Art from India (pp. 13–
38). Thames and Hudson.
QUINTANILLA, S.R. (2007). History of Early Stone Sculpture at Mathura, ca. 150 BCE – 100 CE.
Brill.
13
THE POMPEII YAKSHI
Ter or Bhokardan, Maharashtra
1st century
Found during excavations of the roman city of pompeii in 1938, in a house
in Via dell’Abbondanza, this ivory figure documents the interconnected
ancient world and the wealth of luxury goods traded from the Indian
subcontinent by the beginning of the first millennium. The Italian
archaeologist Amedeo Maiuri, who helmed the excavations, saw this as
Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth) and dated it on stylistic grounds to c. 20–
50 CE. However, historians of Ancient India saw it as a representation of the
yakshi forms that appeared in profusion in north India between the third
century BCE and the first century. Among them, Elizabeth During-Caspers
noted stylistic similarities with the ivories unearthed at the ancient city of
Begram, near Kabul, Afghanistan, between 1937 and 1939, and the Pompeii
yakshi, she suggested, possibly served as a furniture fitting, just as some of
the Begram ivories might have done. During-Caspers interpreted the hole
on top of the yakshi’s head as a slot for attaching it to a piece of furniture or
possibly a mirror, and read the letters si in Kharoshthi at the base of the
sculpture as denoting a fitter’s mark. Subsequently, two similar-looking
sculptures were found at Ter and Bhokardan, Maharashtra, during
excavations in the 1950s, and archaeologists of the Deccan, prominently
M.K. Dhavalikar, suggested that the Pompeii yakshi was possibly
manufactured in one of the two ancient towns, then ruled by the Satavahana
kings. He subsequently pronounced the find of a tiny ‘foreign’ alabaster
etched with a figure of a male child at Junnar, Maharashtra, also in
Satavahana domain, as Eros, and suggested that it was possibly a personal
item of a merchant from Alexandria who resided in the city. The Pompeii
yakshi brings us to note the ‘Eros from Junnar’ and nudges us to enquire
into the histories of the reception of curios from foreign lands.
FIGURINE OF ANCIENT INDIA FOUND AT POMPEII. Ivory, 240 mm. Museo Archeologico
Nazionale di Napoli 149425.

Irrespective of differing opinions regarding whether it was a goddess or a

yakshi and the place of its make, scholars have dated it to the first century,
when Roman trade with the Indian subcontinent was at its peak, and the
luxuries of the Orient were highly coveted by the Roman elite. The finds of
this ‘Indian sculpture’ at Pompeii appear understandable since the city,
situated on the Gulf of Naples close to the coast of Campania, was
inhabited by wealthy Romans from the second century BCE. Here the
emperors and aristocracy built grand sea-facing villas, which they lavishly
decorated with beautiful mosaics and wall paintings, and to which they
added extensive gardens with vineyards and intricate water features.
However, as is well known, Pompeii came to an end in 79 CE, after being
buried under volcanic ash, and its inhabitants were charred in the aftermath
of Mount Vesuvius’s eruption. The unfortunate destruction proved to be a
boon for archaeology as it preserved all that happened in the city on that
particular day.
The bejewelled figure reminds us of the Didarganj yakshi in her
sensuality. Although she appears to be naked, she is clothed below the waist
in a diaphanous garment. She wears heavy bangles, anklets, a long
necklace, a belt around the waist and prominent hair ornaments. Flanked by
two attendants who possibly carry cosmetic boxes or wine containers, she
holds her head to one side, with one hand on her heavy earring. The other
she keeps bent back. Her presence in Pompeii reminds us of the antiquity of
the long-distance trade from South Asia, at least from the third millennium
BCE, and from the time of the Indus Civilization, when goods and merchants
connected cities and towns far away from each other, such as those in the
Punjab and Sindh with those in Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, Oman and
northern Egypt. The archaeological evidence of this trade highlights the
glaring errors of the colonial histories which defined an enclosing
geography for the Indian subcontinent – with high mountain ranges in the
north and vast seas in the east, west and south – and affirmed that India
opened up to the world only through foreign invasions and foreign rules.
The histories endowed the march of Alexander (c. 356–323 BCE), a prince
of Macedon, on to the banks of the Jhelum in 326 BCE as the momentous
event that transformed India’s fortunes by connecting it to the West.
However, increasing scholarship of maritime trade since the 1980s shows
us, to quote Lionel Casson, that

From at least the beginning of the second millennium B.C. […]

Mesopotamian ships went from ports at the head of the Persian Gulf
 along the southern coast of what is today Iran and Pakistan to Indian
ports at the mouth of the Indus; Indian ships did the journey in
reverse. Further west, the Old Kingdom pharaohs sent vessels to the
Straits of Bab el Mandeb at the mouth of the Red Sea and possibly as
far as Cape Guardafui. During the subsequent ages such voyaging
was continued by Phoenician, Arab, Indian, and perhaps other
seaman […] for centuries before Greek vessels appeared in these
waters. In the course of these centuries the Arabs and Indians
unquestionably learned to exploit the monsoons. […] Somehow they
were able to keep this knowledge from Greek seamen so that, when
these do start taking part in the trade with Arabia and India, they
sailed […] no further east than Eudaimon Arabia, where Aden now
stands, less than one hundred nautical miles from the mouth of the
Red Sea. Here they unloaded whatever cargoes they were carrying
and took on what Indian vessels had brought from their home port
[…]. Then came the moment when Greek seamen no longer stopped
short at Eudaimon Arabia but continued all the way to India, when,
in other words, they had learned to exploit the monsoons […] from
then on, Greek ships sailed regularly to India. But they did so only in
limited numbers, and this remained the case until Augustus made
Egypt part of the Roman Empire. That ushered in a new era: from the
Augustan Age on, the ships of Roman Egypt plied the route to Arabia
and India in greatly increased numbers; we not only have Strabo’s
word for it but the tangible evidence of quantities of Roman coins
and Roman pottery found in India.

The long history of trade in the Ancient Indian and Mediterranean worlds
also shows us that the story of the discovery of monsoon winds by
Hippalus, a Greek navigator, during the first century is, as Casson also
reminds us, a ‘fictional narrative’. The narrative of discovery was possibly
created in the contemporary Graeco-Roman literature for asserting Roman
authority on the monsoon trade in the Indian Ocean. The conquest of the
Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt by emperor Augustus in 30 BCE provided the
Roman Empire ‘the mercantile command over South Asian coasts’, as
Rajan Gurukkal reminds us. From then on, wealthy Romans began to
commission ‘huge overseas vessels to get goods imported through
Philistine, Arab and Greek merchants’, and contemporary sources attest to a
booming trade of Indian goods by Rome. The Periplus Maris Erythraei,
written by an Egyptian Greek as ‘a guide for merchants’ in the middle of
the first century, provides a detailed list of goods that were traded by ‘those
sailing out of “Limrike” to Soqotra with rice, cloth, slaves, and etc. [It]
would have us believe that navigation between the east African coast and
the Indian west coast was, indeed, a common feature of the period’, as
Gurukkal quips. The Tamil Cankam literature (c. 300 BCE to 300 CE) adds to
the lists in the Periplus and makes frequent references of yavana ships
laden with wine and oil coming to ports in the Tamil lands and sailing away
with cargoes, especially of long black pepper. In this literature, there is also
a mention of a Pandyan queen representing a confederacy of chiefs who
negotiated trade relations with Augustus. As the essay on the Fortuna
Intaglio notes (see ch. 14), the archaeological evidence adds to this literary
evidence of trade with Rome.
The cargoes from India for the Mediterranean markets comprised items
highly sought within the Roman Empire, such as spices, woods, textiles,
beads of precious and semi-precious stones, pearls, items of ivory and
possibly also elephants. From the Indian subcontinent, the goods travelled
either overland, through Afghanistan and Persia, and reached Egypt and the
Red Sea, or sailed on the Arabian Sea to ports in Egypt, from where they
were dispatched to southern Europe. The flourishing trade was famously
recorded by Pliny the Elder in Natural History as creating great anxieties in
the Roman Senate due to the drain of gold. Pliny noted that merchants from
the Indian subcontinent were able to sell their goods at a hundred times the
actual costs and that ‘the subject is one well worthy of our notice, seeing
that in no one year does India drain our empire of less than five hundred
and fifty millions of Sesterces’. Pliny, unfortunately, died in Pompeii with
the volcanic burial of the city.
 The finances for purchasing the goods came directly from Alexandria
and Rome; therefore, the term Indo-Roman trade, often used in Indian
history, is a misnomer. For, as Gurukkal also tells us, this was a

Roman trade run under the financial support and physical protection
of the emperor […] not accidental but very much a structured
outcome of the political economy and society of the Roman Empire.
[It] was characterised by huge wealth, absolute state power,
eminently organised militia, an adventurously enterprising
aristocracy, a rich entrepreneurial middle class, sustained social
demand for consumable overseas goods and a wide network of trade
and market.

In contrast, the chieftains of the Indian subcontinent who became rich

through the trade by acquiring the ‘prestige goods’ of the time, such as
Roman gold coins, precious stones and horses, never assumed its
leadership. They are mentioned in the Graeco-Roman literature as rich
chiefs, and the Cankam literature tells us that they navigated the seas, took
measures to reduce instances of piracy and provided safety in the ports
within their territories by installing lights. However, unlike the Roman
aristocrats and entrepreneurs, they did not establish laws for protecting their
trading interests or the trade routes. The political economies of trade in
southern India differed vastly from those within Imperial Rome.
The Pompeii yakshi could have travelled by land to a port on the Red Sea
and then to Italy if it were dispatched from Begram, or by sea from the
ancient ports on the Konkan coast, such as Baroach or Sopara. It could have
been a furniture piece and may have accompanied a cargo of natural dyes,
as it was found in a house next to a dyeing area. Its foreign presence begs
the question of what its Roman owner(s) thought of it, and whether, as
Chandreyi Basu asks, they may have viewed it through references to their
goddess Aphrodite/Venus and the paintings, especially in their villas, of
semi-nude and nude European women in banquets and toilettes. The latter
illustrated the sexual profligacy of the rich, and we may wonder if this
object too aroused curiosity for its overt sensuality and was valued only as
an exotic foreign nude.
By the third and fourth centuries, as contacts between Rome and India
waned, Indian spices and gems acquired a ‘mystical flavour’ in the Roman
world. From ingredients of cooking and enhancing beauty, they took ‘on a
ritual power’ as Elizabeth Pollard notes, and thereby travelled an
‘ideological distance […] in space, time and use’. We do not know when
the Pompeii yakshi was placed in the collections of the Archaeological
Museum at Naples and seen as an item of erotica. But we do know that with
many other nudes in the collection she too was hidden in a secret chamber
away from the gaze of women and children well until 2000, when the room
was reopened to the public with a newly arranged gallery display.
The tiny ivory figurine prompts questions regarding cultural perceptions
of the foreign. It guides us to map the different and changing values which
objects acquire within societies for whom the world that produces them
remains remarkably alien.

BASU, C. (2010). ‘The heavily ornamented female figure from Pompeii’. In B.P. Venetucci (Ed.), Il
Fascino Dell’Oriente Nelle Collezioni E Nei Musei D’Italia (pp. 59–63) [Exhibition Catalogue].
Artemide.
CASSON, L. (Ed.). (1989). The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation and
Commentary. Princeton University Press.
D’ANCONA, M.L. (1950). ‘An Indian Statuette from Pompeii’. Artibus Asiae, 13(3), 166–80.
DEHEJIA, V. (1997). Indian Art. Phaidon.
DHAVALIKAR, M.K. (1992). ‘Eros from Junnar’. In D.W. MacDowall, S. Sharma and S. Garg
(Eds), Indian Numismatics, History, Art, and Culture: Essays in the Honour of Dr. P.L. Gupta
(pp. 325–27). Agam Kala Prakashan.
DURING-CASPERS, E.C.L. (1981). ‘The Indian Ivory Figurine from Pompeii – A Reconsideration
of its Functional Use’. In H. Hartel (Ed.), South Asian Archaeology, 1979 (pp. 341–53). Dietrich
Reimer Verlag.
GURUKKAL, R. (2013). ‘Classical Indo-Roman Trade: A Historiographic Reconsideration. Indian
Historical Review, 40(2), 181–206.
POLLARD, E. (2013). ‘Indian Spices and Roman “Magic” in Imperial and Late Antique
Indomediterranea’. Journal of World History, 24, 1–23.
14
FORTUNA INTAGLIO
Pattanam, Kerala
c. 1st century

FORTUNA, A ROMAN GODDESS, OR TYCHE, HER COUNTERPART in Greek

mythology, is depicted in this tiny intaglio that was found during
excavations in 2007 in the coastal town of Pattanam in Vadakkekara village,
25 kilometres from Kochi, Kerala. The figure is shown with a cornucopia,
which is the main attribute of the goddess, who is the giver of abundance
and associated with the bounty of the soil and fertility.
The art of intaglio, or the engravings upon gemstones, was highly
developed in Europe by the first century. However, the Fortuna Intaglio was
partially made in or near the present-day town of Pattanam, on the Periyar
delta, and occasions a regard of the ancient histories of copying foreign
things, in this instance possibly for local consumption as a souvenir. It also
illustrates the significance of mapping the histories of copying while
enquiring into histories of trading.
The carnelian for the intaglio was sourced from the Western Ghats, and
the native craftsmen who made the shape of the form, or the blank as this is
called, at or near Pattanam, would have seen such objects in possession of
the Greek and Roman traders in the town. Notably, Pattanam has yielded
many tiny, oval or round-shaped blanks of agate, carnelian, onyx, beryl,
chalcedony, garnet and quartz, which were subsequently fashioned into
intaglios and also cameos. The latter were carved in relief, unlike the
intaglios, which were incised, and scholars suggest that the gemstones,
procured from near and distant places were shaped as blanks here and then
exported to Rome, where they were carved and sold. Scholars also suggest
that although the intaglio and cameo blanks were made for the Roman
markets, some, including the Fortuna Intaglio, were acquired, possibly as
prestige items and curios, by local chiefs who participated in the Roman
trade or resided close to the ports of western India.

An intaglio of Roman design and possibly depicting the goddess Fortuna, made in Pattanam.
Carnelian, 1.5 cm × 1 cm, Kerala Council for Historical Research, Thiruvananthapuram, 30675.

The Intaglio, like the Pompeii yakshi (see ch. 13), is an object of the
Roman trade in the Orient. However, it tells a local story of this trade in the
Indian subcontinent. Additionally, it creates a view of the archaeological
site of Pattanam, which excavators now identify with the wealthy mart of
Muziris on the Malabar Coast that was described by Pliny the Elder as the
‘Emporium of India’. That Pattanam was a thriving bazaar and port during
the first century can be gauged from the rich archaeological finds of a vast
array of goods shipped overseas from there. They were forest products,
such as teak, ivory, peacock feather, akil and medicinal herbs; spices such
as black pepper, cardamom, costus, bellium, lykion, nard and malabathrum;
marine products such as coral, pearls and tortoise shells; fabricated products
such as gems, glass, semi-precious stone beads, intaglio and cameo blanks;
and textiles, also of silk. In addition, the excavations at the site provide
evidence of the shipping of moong beans, green gram, gooseberry, sesame
seeds and coconut, possibly documenting the cargoes sent from Muziris to
the Romans and substantiating the description of the town in the Periplus as
representing the ‘zenith of prosperity’.
Significantly, the excavations furnish evidence of Roman residents in the
city through finds of antiquities such as sherds of terra sigillata, amphorae
jars which contained olive oil, wine, grain and garum (fermented fish sauce
used as a condiment in Ancient Greece and Rome), painted and non-painted
glass, also for mosaic and tableware, and board game counters. The
Romans traded in wine with the Indian subcontinent. However, the sheer
quantities of amphorae jars suggest that some of the wine from Rome may
have catered to the needs of the Greek and Roman traders in Pattanam, who
were required to stay back and wait for favourable winds for the return
journey. They possibly consumed olive oil, garum and grain that came in
the amphorae jars and utilized the glassware and board games.
We get a glimpse of the Roman residents of Muziris from the Tabula
Peutingeriana, a twelfth-century copy of a fifth-century map of the Roman
Empire and its trade connections. It shows a temple of Augustus in the
town. Furthermore, the Muziris Papyrus, of unknown authorship and from
the first century, records that each vessel in the city was loaded with cargo
worth over 5,000 million drachmas; it also tells us of a loan agreement that
was drawn between an Alexandrian creditor and a transmarine trader. The
agreement, as Rajan Gurukkal informs us, was ‘signed under Roman law’.
It therefore illustrates the autonomy of Muziris as a ‘foreign merchant camp
under Roman control in functional terms’. Notably, the Akananuru
anthology of poems in the Cankam literature, composed between c. first
century BCE and second century CE, informs of a town ‘where traders used
tōni boats to bring goods from ships (kalam) anchored in the deep sea’ and
that ‘the yavanas come with their fine ships, bearing gold, and leave with
pepper’ (v. 149). The descriptions, Gurukkal states, are possibly of Muziris.
The poems confirm the affluent town’s autonomy by telling us that the local
chiefs did not wield much control.
Pattanam’s identity as Muziris is mainly text-based, with literary
evidence documenting its Roman connections. The archaeological
evidence, however, presents the settlement’s long participatory history
within the networks of maritime and long-distance trade, prominently from
c. 300 BCE with southern Arabia and Mesopotamia, until about 1900 with
areas in the Indian Ocean, through which Chinese porcelain came into the
region.
In informing of the local craftsmanship of goods valued as foreign, the
Fortuna Intaglio reminds us of the myriad histories of arts, aesthetics and
skills that embed the diverse networks of trade. It guides us to see the
academic merit of exploring and situating these histories within the
burgeoning scholarship of economic history that now investigates into the
social worlds of commerce.

CHERIAN, P.J. and J. Menon. (2014). Unearthing Pattanam: Histories, Cultures, Crossings.
[Exhibition Catalogue]. New Delhi: National Museum.
GURUKKAL, R. (2013). ‘Classical Indo-Roman Trade: A Historiographic Reconsideration’. Indian
Historical Review, 40(2), 181–206.
RATHBONE, D. (2019). Muziris Papyrus. Oxford Classical Dictionary [published online, March 26]
doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.8258.
15
THE CHANDRAKETUGARH PLAQUE
OF HARVESTING
Berachampa, West Bengal
c. 1st–3rd century

AN ANCIENT TERRACOTTA PLAQUE OF A HARVESTING SCENE from southern

Bengal, where clay is plentiful, might seem an unexceptional object of daily
life. Terracotta antiquities are usually perceived as domestic goods of local
use, and the plaque was most likely made at the archaeological site of its
provenance, namely, Chandraketugarh in the district of North 24 Parganas.
However, two things strike us when we begin to engage with it: first, we do
not know what it is, or rather how it was used by the society which made it,
and second, the archaeological site is on a deltaic region of rapidly shifting
river courses, where frequent floods have greatly threatened agricultural
lands throughout history. Therefore, harvesting time would have often
appeared precarious. The plaque provides an occasion to think through the
representational value of the antiquities and their collection histories.
Scholars now affirm that the vast archaeological complex of
Chandraketugarh extends over many villages and, to quote Suchandra
Ghosh, was an ‘important feeder port to Tamralipta […] the port par
excellence in Ancient Bengal’. Chandraketugarh grew to be a prosperous
metropolis during the Early Historic period, c. second/first centuries BCE–
second/third centuries, and the ‘rise’ relates to the growing riverine trade
within lower Bengal that increasingly fed the maritime trade in the Bay of
Bengal. The archaeological complex skirts the banks of the river Bidyadhari
and its palaeochannels, and a string of Early Historic sites have been
mapped in a linear pattern upon other rivers in this Ganga–Brahmaputra
delta. The settlements upon riverbanks made up the arterial lines of
communication and feeders that emerged in response to the growing
networks of trade routes within the delta. Therefore, we may rightly
postulate that the iconography of the plaque depicting three men kneeling
and reaping grain – perhaps paddy, with large sickles – alludes to increasing
agricultural activities in an area that was prone to constant flooding, for
sustaining the cities and their regional economies that were reliant on
trading. Notably, plaques with harvesting scenes, made about the same time
have been found from some of the nearby ancient settlements, prominently
Tamluk, which is identified as the Ancient Tamralipta, and can be used to
establish archaeological evidence of the historical connections.
Three men, in side profile, each holding a sickle and a sheaf of grain, possibly, paddy. Terracotta, 95
mm × 81 mm, West Bengal State Archaeological Museum, 99.103.

However, in extending the significance of the plaque as a representation

of the everyday life in and around Chandraketugarh, we are reminded of
how little we know about this vast complex and its hinterlands, although it
is ‘one of the largest Early Historic sites in Bengal’, as one of its
archaeologists, Sharmi Chakraborty, tells us. Chandraketugarh has also
gained international attention and notoriety because of the staggering
amounts of antiquities, especially terracottas, it continues to yield but which
are often lost to scholarship as they are collected and taken away in a
clandestine manner by ‘treasure seekers’. The extensive surface finds of
objects of stone, ivory, wood and bronze, beads, implements and tools,
ceramics, coins, seals and sealings, among others, have been described as
‘the soil churning up’ vast numbers of antiquities ‘in this dramatically
flooded plain’, to quote Naman Ahuja, who has studied the terracottas
extensively. The plaque brings us to see the historical gaps in the material
ubiquity, and reminds us that although terracottas are often the largest cache
of archaeological finds within ancient and medieval settlements, they
remain some of the most neglected subjects of historical enquiries.
Artefacts which appear in plenty and which seem to refer to everyday
activities often slip through scholarly scrutiny.
The Chandraketugarh terracottas are exquisite. They reveal an
inordinately high level of technological sophistication, and in describing a
selection, Chakraborty encourages note of ‘the variety of […] subjects
depicted, intricate details and crisp execution’. They were made in many
ways: hand modelled, wheel-thrown, and in single and double moulds. All
forms of manufacturing processes were used simultaneously, at least by the
first century when production peaked. Significantly, Ahuja moots ‘the
tantalising question of how the moulds themselves were made [since] no
object has yet been recovered that can definitely be understood to be the
“first” positive’. There is the possibility, although ‘less likely, that a first
original was made of soft wax (already in use for bronze casting) over
which putty like clay would have been impressed’. The question and
postulations demand a more analytical study of the ancient terracottas.
The sheer volume of terracottas at Chandraketugarh leads scholars, such
as Joachim Bautze, to observe that the site was a ‘dumping ground’ as well
as a major production centre of these objects. However, the areas of
‘industrial production’ remain buried, and therefore, questions raised over
50 years ago regarding what the plethora of terracotta plaques found at
Chandraketugarh represent remain unanswered and we are reminded of
those asked by the intrepid historian of Bengal, Nihar Ranjan Ray, namely:

What purpose in contemporary society was served by and through

Terracotta plaques? Did they serve any cult purpose? If so, which cult
[…]? In which level of society did it have currency? Or was it a
 manifestation of an urban phenomenon brought about by migratory
traders and sailors […] a phenomenon that penetrated the local
society as well?

Ray’s questions speak of the contemporary scholarship that invested in

excavating India’s ‘first cities’ after the Indus Civilization, and which led to
the archaeological exposures of Ahichchhatra, Mathura, Sisupalgarh and
Kaushambi, among others. Chandraketugarh was then historicized as
Gange, the capital city of the people of Gangaridae, which finds mention
within the ancient Greek and Roman texts, such as the Periplus of the
Erythrean Sea, that inform of the trade with Rome during the first
millennium BCE–CE. Excavations undertaken between 1955 and 1966 by the
Ashutosh Museum of Indian Art, of the University of Calcutta, in the
mound of Khana Mihirer Dhipi and areas of Itakhola and Noongola provide
evidence of a long occupational history from at least the third century BCE
to the thirteenth century. Following the prosperity of the Early Historic
period (c. second century BCE to the third century), Chandraketugarh
became an important centre of the overseas trade in horses from Bengal to
China, the Southeast, and the Coromandel coast. In fact, during his study of
a seal found at the site depicting a masted ship Ranabir Chakravarti noticed
a figure of a horse on the right-hand edge, which he thinks might be ‘the
earliest known visual representation of the shipping of the horse in the
context of an ancient Indian port’. Chakravarti reminds us that ‘as Bengal
was the only […] region in land-locked north India watered by the Ganga
system, it could simultaneously function as a receiving point of imported
horses from the northwest and northeast and as an outlet for maritime trade
in war horses in the eastern sector of the Indian Ocean.’
Yet, despite Chandraketugarh’s historic importance to maritime trade
from ancient times, its ancient name, or the name of the settlements that
comprise the archaeological complex, remains unknown. For,
Chandraketugarh, or the fort of Raja Chandraketu, is a relatively recent
toponym of this extensive area that establishes association with a legendary
raja of the second millennium. Locals, however, call large parts of the
archaeological complex Berachampa, after one of the villages that exists
here.
As Chandraketugarh accrues notoriety as one of India’s premier terrains
of illegal antiquity trade, we note an increasing pressure from local and
other heritage groups to conserve this ‘Bengal’s Harappa’. The demands for
new and more effective laws preventing the illicit traffic of antiquities
inspire many academic and local projects to save Chandraketugarh’s
historic heritage. They provide a glimpse of the moral dimensions that
antiquities accrue as they get tied to issues ‘of territoriality and loss,
preservation and destruction’, to quote from a study by William Carruthers
and Stephane Van Damme. The legal, ethical and emotional debates to save
Chandraketugarh document the highly charged heritage-making histories of
many archaeological domains.
The Chandraketugarh harvesting plaque prompts us to follow the
histories of collections and collectors. It reminds us to recall its collector,
who unfortunately remains unknown, because the histories of the site have
been primarily recouped through collections, often of the local people. It
provides an insight into the efficacy of antiquities in creating civic
communities of local historians, thereby nurturing antiquarianism. In this,
the ancient plaque demonstrates the historical value of engaging with
antiquities as present-day objects of the past.

AHUJA, N.P. (2018). Art and Archaeology of Ancient India: Earliest Times to the Sixth Century.
Oxford: Ashmolean Museum.
AHUJA, N.P. (2018). ‘Rumour has it…The Case of Chandraketugarh [with contribution by Pieter
Meyers]’. Marg, 69(3), 79–91.
CARRUTHERS, W. and S. Van Damme. (2017). ‘Disassembling Archaeology, Reassembling the
Modern World’. History of Science, 55(3), 255–72. DOI: 10.1177/0073275317719849.
CHAKRABORTY, S. (1998–99). ‘Double Mould Terracotta Human Figurines from
Chandraketugarh, West Bengal’. Bulletin of the Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research
Institute, 58–59, 149–60.
CHAKRABORTY, S. (2002). ‘Chandraketugarh: A Site in Lower Bengal’. In G. Sengupta and S.
Panja (Eds), Archaeology of Eastern India (pp. 143–61). Kolkata: Centre for Archaeological
 Studies and Training.
CHAKRAVARTI, R. (1999). ‘Early Medieval Bengal and the Trade in Horses’. Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 42(2), 194–211.
GHOSH, S. (2005–06). ‘Monetization and Exchange Network in Early Historical Bengal: A Note’.
Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 66, 110–19.
Information Desk. (2020, March 4). ‘Chandraketugarh–Bengal’s Harappa. How is it being
Preserved?’ Get Bengal.
RAY, N.R. (1980). ‘Chandraketugarh: A Port City in Ancient Bengal’. Pushpanjali, An Annual of
Indian Arts and Culture, VI (1), 13–22.
SENGUPTA, G., S. Roy Chowdhury and S. Chakraborty. (2007). Eloquent Earth: Early Terracottas
in the State Archaeological Museum, West Bengal. Kolkata: Directorate of Archaeology and
Museums.
16
KHAROSHTHI TABLET
Niya, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China
3rd–4th century

THE WOODEN TABLET WITH AN INSCRIPTION IN TEN LINES IN the Kharoshthi script
conveys, to quote its finder Marc Aurel Stein (1862–1943), ‘uniform
extension of an Indian script and language to the extreme east of the Tarim
basin’. Stein, the Sanskritist, archaeologist and intrepid explorer of Central
Asia, described it as an ‘under tablet’. It was covered by another tablet, also
made of wood, upon which were traces of fibre. He correctly inferred that a
string tied the two tablets together to protect the inscription from prying
eyes, and was very impressed with the safety and safeguarding measures of
the past, declaring that

when once the seal of the sender had been impressed into the clay, it
became impossible to separate the under tablet from the upper tablet
and to read the writing on the inner surfaces without either breaking
the seal impression or cutting the seal. Thus unauthorised inspection
of the communication was absolutely guarded against […] Where the
double tablets had remained together, and thus protected each other,
the black ink of the writing on the inner surfaces looked as fresh as if
penned yesterday.
Official document in Kharoshthi. Part of a double tablet. Wood, NM: 99/16/3.

Stein had found the wooden tablet with Kharoshthi inscriptions in January
1901, along with more than 200 other double tablets in ‘rubbish heaps’ and
‘wastepaper baskets’ in the ruins of third century houses in the oasis
settlements at Niya, approximately 120 kilometres north of Mingfen in
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Province. This find occurred during the first
of his four pioneering archaeological explorations of Central Asia, which he
undertook in 1900–01, 1906–08, 1913–16 and 1930, and which were all
hailed at the time as ‘the most daring and adventurous raids upon the ancient
world that any archaeologist had attempted’, to quote the renowned British
archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley (1880–1960). The philologically trained
Stein, who had just finished translating the eleventh-century Kashmiri text
Rajatarangini (see ch. 25), rightly concluded that the ‘Kharoshthi
inscriptions were of an early Indian Prakrit [language] and with large
admixture of Sanskrit terms’. He also gauged correctly that the double
tablets were

quasi-official documents […] reports and orders to local officials in

matters of local administration and police; complaints; summonses;
orders for safe conduct or arrests […] everyday life and
administration.

During his second expedition to Central Asia in 1906–08, which took him
once more to Niya, Stein affirmed that the ‘ingenious’ double tablets
originated in China. He found many more at another site, Lou-lan, far away
in the Lop Nor region. Significantly, he did not find ‘a single scrap of paper’
at either Niya or here. His discoveries changed prevalent views regarding the
sharp decline in the manufacture of wooden stationery in China from around
105, with the advent of paper. For, the double tablets proved that the Chinese
made wooden stationery well into the early fourth century – i.e., until the
time when Niya was abandoned – for delivering messages to distant towns in
Central Asia which they protected.
Although the inscription of this tablet remains unread, other wooden
tablets in the collection of the British Museum which come from Stein’s
fieldwork at Niya, and which have been translated, provide us with a
glimpse of the brevity of the declarations. Of them the two examples below
state

Lyipeya complains that he has a dispute about a child Apisae adopted

from Kungeya. When this sealed wedge-tablet reaches you, forthwith
you must carefully inquire in person with oath and witness. According
to the law of old recompense is paid for a child adopted, and thus a
decision is to be made.
Apge complains that Bhagarka killed a camel belonging to him.
This is the second time that a sealed wedged tablet goes to you
concerning this matter (telling you) to send him here under escort;
(but) he does not come here.
(Nos. 11 and 262, translated by Thomas Burrow)

The messages inform of taxes and assessments which were imposed upon
residents of Jingjue by the Khotanese ruler, the administrative and military
duties they were expected to undertake and the gifts demanded from them by
the deputies and representatives. They also report tax evasions, property
disputes and family rivalries, and record family histories, marriages and
occasional divorce settlements. Furthermore, many convey the threats of the
authorities when orders were neglected.
 The settlements at Niya, which Stein excavated, are mentioned in the
account of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim to the Indian subcontinent,
Xuanzang (d. 664 CE), as the place of Ni-jang where ‘the king of Khotan
makes the guard of his eastern frontier’. They constituted the small kingdom
of Jingjue, that emerged as a semi-autonomous state within the Khotan
territory in about 60 BCE. The territory was ruled by kings of the former Han
Dynasty (202 BCE–c. 700 CE). The settlements dotted the Niya oasis on the
southern branch of the silk routes that went from Dun Huang, Miran, and
Keriya to Khotan, Yarkand and beyond but were all abandoned by the
beginning of the fourth century when the Chinese rulers lost control of
Khotan. Archaeologists now estimate that they comprised approximately
480 households.
In highlighting the spectacular nature of his finds, Stein emphasized that
the double tablets

seem to echo the local tradition recorded by Xuanzang that the

territory of Khotan was conquered and colonized for about two
centuries before our era by Indian immigrants from Takshashila, the
Taxila of the Greeks, in the extreme northwest corner of the Punjab.

Stein’s visualization of the Indian colonization of Niya in Xuanzang’s

account may seem far-fetched to historians today. However, the ‘written
antiquities’ demonstrate, as the expert of Kharoshthi Sten Konow (1867–
1948) noted, ‘the predominant role Indian Civilization played in Asia at a
very early period [that] contributed to the history of Central and East Asia
during the long centuries’. As Konow’s remark suggests, the Kharoshthi
documents of Niya illustrate the need to explore the transnational histories of
Ancient India.
The Niya tablet exhibited at the Indian National Museum is a strong
reminder of Stein’s indomitable stewardship of field-oriented research,
which brought the histories of the silk routes and Ancient India to public
attention in Europe and Asia. Susan Whitfield, one of the foremost scholars
of Stein’s Central Asian expeditions, tells us that until Stein’s discoveries at
Niya, ‘Kharoshthi writing had been found in this vast area only on the
earliest Khotan coins (first and second centuries AD) and on the unique
fragment of a birch bark codex’, viz., the Prakrit Dhammapada. We now
know that the earliest version of Kharoshthi appears in the Ashokan edicts at
Mansehra, Pakistan, and Shahbazgarhi in Afghanistan. The script was
widely employed between the third century BCE and the third century for
Sanskrit and Prakrit (and thereby, Gandhari), languages within the area that
spans northern Pakistan, eastern Afghanistan and northwest India. The
Kharoshthi script on the double tablets of Niya at Lou-lan resembles the
inscriptions of the Kushan and Indo-Scythian kings, who ruled over large
parts of north and north-western South Asia during the first and second
centuries, and who had ancestral relationships with the geography of Central
Asia. In this respect, the ‘written antiquities’, as Konow foresaw, herald
‘questions on Indian art, Indian history and Indian literature’ in connection
with the histories of the silk roads.
When Stein first embarked upon his expeditions to Central Asia in 1900,
the geographical and historical knowledge of this vast region, whose
heartland comprises the dreaded Taklamakan desert, was at best fragmentary.
The term Silk Road was coined at the end of the nineteenth century, in 1897,
by a German baron, Ferdinand von Richthofen, when European scholars
began to take note of the intricate trade routes straddling the region that
seemingly connected Europe and Asia from very early times. Stein’s
biographer Jeannette Mirsky recalls that the translations during the mid-
nineteenth century of the Chinese annals of Faxian and Xuanzang informed
Orientalists that the agents of the Han emperor Wu-ti had opened an East–
West highway, and that ‘with the traffic in luxuries, Buddhist missionaries
and pilgrims had carried the India-born religion—its sacred statues as well
as its scriptures—to the Far East’. Stein had ‘good reason to believe that in
the six centuries between [the Venetian trader Marco] Polo’s time and his
own, no man of Western Europe had followed the entire length of the
overland route from India to China’. Mirsky reminds us that
 for forty five years after his initial archaeological reconnaissance into
the Khyber Pass [in 1898] and until his death in 1943 […] near Kabul,
Stein made a succession of expeditions that were aimed at restoring
the lost chapters in the history and prehistory […] of the Central Asian
area, and to read the geographical language of that region’s mountain
ranges and deserts, those awesome hurdles which in the past had not
separated East from the West.

Stein aptly described the Kharoshthi inscriptions on the double tablets as

‘an Indian language and writing issued by officials with strangely un-Indian
titles’. He found many cover tablets with traces of sealings embossed with
figures of Greek gods and heroes, such as Eros, Heracles and Athena. Made
in China, written in ‘an Indian writing’ and sealed with stamps bearing
European gods, they embody the cultural imbrication of West and East,
constituting the silk roads’ cosmopolitan cultures.
The silk roads served as global pathways of commerce well until the
fifteenth century. We know of Africans, Semites, Turks, Indians, Chinese,
Tibetans and Mongols living in the thriving market towns and cities along
the routes from the first century CE. Although many religions were practised
in the settlements, Buddhism dominated for over 1,000 years. In this respect,
the stories of Chudda (855–870), a monk from Kashmir, and Miafou (880–
961), an abbess of a nunnery in Dun Huang, China – which Whitfield has
translated in Life Along the Silk Road (1999) – provide a glimpse of the rich
histories of politics, commerce and religion that await explorations.
Having traced the area where the silk roads left China during his first and
second expeditions, Stein aimed his archaeological investigations towards
the eastern rim of the Roman Empire. In this endeavour, he located some of
the colonies that were established by the Greek generals of Alexander and
Stein, notably, brought to light the historical centres of Graeco-Buddhist art
by following the call of the double tablets he found at Niya and Lou-lan,
with Greek gods and heroes protecting the messages of the Chinese
authorities in Kharoshthi.
 While recalling Stein’s archaeological field explorations Mirsky tells us
that ‘he knew what he was looking for’. He was also a brilliant cartographer
who mapped over 25,000 miles of unknown terrain with great precision –
covered on foot and pony, often under savage weather conditions. Moreover,
he followed contemporary norms of archaeological excavations and aimed at
scientific accuracy in plotting and recording. He oversaw the safe packing of
the antiquities he collected and excavated, for dispatch to the British
Museum (London) and Central Asian Antiquities (Delhi).
At the oasis site of Dun Huang, Stein’s ‘sharp ears caught a vague rumour
about a great mass of manuscripts’ and through incredible patience and
delicate negotiations he was able to haul a priceless hoard from the Mogao
Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, the largest cave complex in the area. The
haul earned him the Chinese sobriquet, albeit retrospectively, of a burglar.
Yet, Stein was a careful documenter who provided specific instructions of
the ways in which his vast and diverse Central Asian collections were to be
archived and stored. The unread Niya tablet poignantly reminds us that much
of his collections at the National Museum remain in storage despite his
explicit instructions to the receiving institutions to display his deposits and
make them fully accessible for research.
The Kharoshthi tablet of Niya guides us to recall a pioneering explorer of
the Archaeological Survey of India whose power of persuasion for
successfully negotiating support for surveying politically difficult terrains
remains unmatched. Significantly, the tablet jogs our memory of Stein’s
formidable scholarship, reminding us that he founded his research projects
upon the judicious intellectual approach of engaging with archaeological,
historical and philological enquiries as a unified disciplinary domain. His
scholarship, therefore, commands a critical introspection of the merit of
promoting the efficacy of undertaking historical research through
frameworks bound by subject specializations.
BURROW, T. (1940). A Translation of the Kharoshthi Documents from Chinese Turkestan. The Royal
Asiatic Society.
JEONG, S. (2016). The Silk Road Encyclopaedia. Seoul Selections.
KONOW, S. (1914). ‘Review of the Bower Manuscript’. The Indian Antiquary, 43, 179–81.
MIRSKY, J. (1964). ‘Introduction’. In M.A. Stein, On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks: Brief Narrative
of Three Expeditions in Innermost Asia and Northwestern China (Edited and Introduced by
Jeanette Mirsky, pp ix–xx). Pantheon Books, Random House.
MIRSKY, J. (1977). Aurel Stein: Archaeological Explorer. University of Chicago Press.
STEIN, M.A. (1903). Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan: Personal Narrative of a Journey of
Archaeological and Geographical Exploration of Chinese Turkestan. T.F. Unwin.
STEIN, M.A. (1933). On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks: Brief Narrative of Three Expeditions in
Innermost Asia and Northwestern China. MacMillan and Co.
SILBERGELD, J. (2021). ‘Dunhuang’s Contribution to Chinese Art History: A Historiographic
Inquiry’. In Ching, Dora C.Y. (Ed.). Visualizing Dunhuang: Seeing, Studying and Conserving the
Caves (pp. 287–354). Princeton University Press.
WHITFIELD, S. (1999). Life Along the Silk Road. John Murray.
WHITFIELD, S. (2004). Aurel Stein on the Silk Road. The British Museum Press.
17
SAMUDRAGUPTA’S GOLD COIN
Bayana, Uttar Pradesh
Mid–4th century

THIS GOLD COIN, OF THE LYRICIST TYPE, WAS FIRST ISSUED BY Samudragupta
(r.c. 335–375), whose extensive conquests we know of from the Allahabad
Pillar. On the obverse side, it depicts the king playing, possibly, the vina
(lute), and the legend in Gupta Brahmi is Maharajadhiraja-sri-
Samudraguptah. On the reverse side is a goddess, considered by historians
to be Lakshmi, seated on a wicker stool facing left. The type, also known as
the Lute-Player Type, conveys Samudragupta’s accomplishments in music
and confirms the mention in the prashasti (eulogy) on the Allahabad Pillar
that

(He) has put to shame Brihaspati by (his) sharp and polished

intellect, as also Tamburu, Narada and others by the graces of his
musical performances; (his) title of ‘King of Poets’ has been
established through (his) many compositions in poetry which were a
means of subsistence to the learned people.
(line 27, translated by D.R. Bhandarkar)
Lyricist coin type of Samudragupta, from the Bayana Hoard. Gold.

In illustrating Samudragupta’s mastery of music, the Lyricist Type

conveys the expectations from a powerful mid-fourth century monarch of
the Indian subcontinent. It presents a mighty conqueror’s self-fashioning of
his regality, also evident in another series issued by him, namely, the Tiger
Slayer Type.
The gold coins are mentioned in the inscriptions of the Gupta rulers as
dinara. Historians believe they were first issued by Samudragupta’s father,
Chandragupta I (r.c. 320–335), who consolidated his victories through a
powerful marriage alliance with a Lichchavi princess. The King and Queen
Type, in gold, with the figure of Chandragupta’s spouse, Kumaradevi, is
also the first coin in the Indian subcontinent to depict a queen.
Samudragupta surpassed his father and his successors in the issue of
multiple series of gold coins. The Lyricist coin was possibly issued with the
Ashvamedha Type, and therefore, may date to the latter part of his reign.
 The coin shows Samudragupta with a bare torso and wearing a dhoti and
a skull cap, and the iconography was judged by the pioneering scholar of
Gupta coins V.S. Altekar as without any ‘foreign influence’. Altekar
declared that the skull cap, which may have come into vogue with the Saka
kings, became common in the arts of the Mathura region. He saw the lute
(vina) on Samudragupta’s lap resemble a musical instrument, ‘depicted in
the early sculptures of Bharut, Besnagar and Amravati’. Of the motif on the
reverse, he remarked that ‘save for the presence of the cornucopia in the
hand of the goddess’, the iconography was native. The presentation of the
Lyricist Type as illustrating features of native iconography follows the
scholarship of presenting the Gupta Empire as innately Indian. The
inferences attempt to separate the origin histories of the king-bearing coins
of the Gupta rulers from the coins bearing ‘foreign’ rulers who preceded
them, namely, Kushan, Indo-Greek, Indo-Parthian and Saka.
Historians trace the beginnings of the currency in coinage within the
Indian subcontinent through the appearance of the punch-marked coins.
Primarily of silver and in circulation from the sixth century BCE until the
first century, they were issued by the mahajanapadas and are non-dynastic.
They bear no legends, and their minting and wide circulation indicated the
evolving economies and increasing spheres of commercial transactions
within the northern parts of South Asia from the mid-first millennium BCE.
Coinage with dynastic affiliations came into circulation within northern
South Asia through the Indo-Greek kings during the late second century
BCE. They are superbly crafted coins bearing the busts of the issuing rulers
on the obverse, and with inscribed legends mentioning the title and name.
The Kushan and Gupta kings continued the tradition.
The Indo-Greek coins, like the punch-marked coins, are of silver. The
issue of gold coins was initiated by the Kushans, who emulated the Roman
gold coins and the weight standard. The gold coins of the Gupta kings
followed the weight standard of the Kushan gold coins well until the fifth
century, when Skandagupta eventually fixed a different rate. However,
despite the inherited traditions, the Gupta coinage features a novelty in the
coin legends – the Gupta rulers initiated the practice of delineating them in
beautiful metrical lines. Scholars of epigraphy, such as Harry Falk, point
out that ‘where the Kushanas simply gave all the titles of the king, the
Guptas started to develop perfect phrase, often following metrical scheme,
eulogizing the king and his victories’. An example is the legend on the gold
Battle Axe Type, first issued by Samudragupta, which declares that:

He who has the axe of Krtanta (Yama, Death) conquers, the

unconquered, conqueror of unconquered kings.

Falk has suggested that the ‘Gupta mint-master had at least one poet in his
staff’. Noticeably, the metrical legends add to the histories of the cultural
efflorescence during the Gupta period, which according to Romila Thapar,
exemplify ‘a Classical Age in which standards of excellence were
established’.
The chronological period of Gupta rule and its immediate successor
states (c. third to sixth century) within northern India was exceptionally
creative. It represents an age in which innovations in literature, grammar,
philosophy, art, architecture, mathematics, and sciences matured into formal
and enduring styles. This was when the astute commentator Vishakadatta
dramatized the political past through plays such as Mudrarakshasa and
Devi-chandra-gupta. The exceptional poet Bhasa wrote Svapna-
vasavadatta, and dramatists Shudraka and Vatsyayana conveyed glimpses
of the sophisticated urban life through their brilliant compositions
Mrichchakatika and Kamasutra, respectively. Playwright and poet par
excellence, Kalidasa crafted the magnificence of nature through lyrical
poems such as the Meghaduta, and the extraordinary satirist Vishnusarman
composed the fables Panchatantra to educate an aspiring prince about the
ways of the world. This was also an age in which disparate sciences were
nurtured. Varahmihira, for example, conceptualized the Panchsiddhantika,
or the five astrology schools. His eclectic treatise Brihatsamhita broached
subjects like agricultural practices that led to the compositions of manuals
such as Manasara on practices of crop-growing. Aryabhatta wrote treatises
on aspects of astronomy and mathematics, Charaka and Susruta devised
manuals for practices of medicine, and Ashvaghosha composed the earliest
known charita, or biography, namely, the Buddhacharita. In addition,
philosophies of Nyaya, Vaisheshika and Sankhya were further investigated,
new Puranas such as Vishnudharmottara and new Dharmashastras were
created, the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata were written down, and
Sanskrit flourished as a literary genre and debates between orthodoxy and
heterodoxy bred new formulations. There were also developments in
religious architecture, especially temples and Buddhist monastic complexes,
and the magnificent paintings at Ajanta and Bagh, Maharashtra and Madhya
Pradesh respectively, provide a glimpse of the sophisticated urban milieu
that nurtured classicism in the arts.
The Gupta kings took the title of parama bhagavata, which was
consistently used by Indian historians of the early twentieth century for
portraying the rulers as quintessentially Hindu – champions of the
Sanskritic culture and Brahmanic religion. Through their scholarship of the
Gupta period, they sought to challenge the colonialist histories of a
decadent Hindu civilization. They historicized this period as India’s Golden
Age, and regarded the arts of this age as the pinnacle of Indian art.
The historical possibility of a golden age is of course non-existent,
because such an age can only be utopic. However, in nurturing the art of the
Gupta period as national art, the new Republic of India created visual
realities of utopia. A brilliant example of the phenomenon is the prominent
display of the Gupta gold coins, including the Lyricist Type, in the
Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi. The exhibits are large plaques of plaster of
paris, which are copies of five coin types in gold issued by five successive
rulers, which depict kingly pursuits. The plaques were commissioned at the
request of the governor of Uttar Pradesh, K.M. Munshi, as one of the items
of replacement for the large portraits of British royalty and aristocracy that
previously embellished the interiors of the building, which was once the
Viceroy’s residence. They were created by Mohamad Haneef, who was
renowned for portraiture, and presented by Munshi to the President of India,
Rajendra Prasad, in 1955. They are painted in brilliant gold and mounted on
wood, and the iconography of the kings is particularly striking as they all
look remarkably Hindu and valiant. The display aimed to evoke India’s
golden age of Hindu culture and Hindu patriotism.
The histories which continue to be written about the Golden Age of the
Gupta period disregard the scant historical evidence of the cultural
benefactions of the Gupta kings. As Partha Mitter has aptly noted, although
dynastic labels for the periodization of art and architecture might be useful,
‘the frequent equation of the “Gupta golden age” with artistic perfection is
problematic as we know very little about direct royal patronage’. The only
evidence of royal patronage to the arts is available tangentially through the
coins, and we may rightly assume that the rulers would have determined the
iconography of the gold coin types, which they introduced.
Altekar, the first scholar of the Lyricist Type, saw it as ‘among the finest
specimens of the Gupta art’. Such an evaluation of a coin as an object of art
is quite explicit in the displays of the coin plaques in the Rashtrapati
Bhavan. The descriptive studies that followed Altekar’s dwelt upon the look
of a coin, and developed his scholarship of regarding them as art objects. In
this, they overlooked the emphasis of India’s preeminent numismatist D.D.
Kosambi’s observation that coinage began with traders.
Kosambi, through the pioneering study of the punch-marked coins, had
brought question-oriented enquiries into the scholarship of numismatics in
India. Therefore, despite the errors of some of his theories, especially of
declining trade in the post-Gupta times, his analytical studies command
attention among the scholars of Ancient Indian coinage and currency today,
who aim at redefining the scope of the subject. Among the noteworthy
examples is the study of Susmita Basu Majumdar of the Gupta gold coins
found in the Kalighat hoard, which was discovered in Calcutta in 1783.
Basu Majumdar has demonstrated that the coins – more than 200 in number
and found inside a brass pot – were used extensively in Bengal for long-
distance trade and transactions of land. This research opens up new areas of
enquiries into the regional histories of tenurial rights and conveys the
pressing need for detailed studies of the life histories of coin hoards.
Plaque depicting Samudragupta through his lyricist coin type. One among the five Gupta gold-coin
types bearing the important Gupta rulers, on display at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, for
illustrating the Golden Age of Ancient India. Plaster of Paris, 1.1 m × 71.1 cm.

This Lyricist Type displayed in the National Museum belongs to the

Bayana hoard, the largest collection of Gupta gold coins found to date. The
hoard was recovered in 1946 by the villagers of Nagla Chhela in a field
nearby, not far from Bayana (then in Bharatpur State). It constituted a pot
full of gold coins of the rulers of the Gupta dynasty from Chandragupta I to
Skandagupta (last known date c. 467).
Ancient hoards have been extensively mined in the modern world by
their discoverers for profitable ventures. Their contents have also often been
thoughtlessly rifled through and dispersed for establishing private and
institutional collections. In the case of the Bayana hoard, Altekar noted that
‘about 285 coins were distributed among the villagers and or transformed
into ornaments’ and that the Bharatpur State authorities could ‘recover as
many as 1821 pieces’ of which some were distributed to six museums in
India. Noticeably, the National Museum received the largest number, and
displays select specimens as ‘the rarest of Gupta coinages’ that ‘added new
chapters of political, social, cultural, religious history, and glory of India’,
to quote the web version of the text panel.
Altekar published eight coins of the Lyricist Type from the Bayana hoard,
six of Samudragupta and two of Kumaragupta (r. c. 414–455). The
exhibition of a representative type as one of the rarest Gupta coins creates
the unique aesthetic value of the entire series. However, a coin type informs
us that all the coins of a particular series were struck with more or less
similar weights, and therefore, the scholarship of a coin type also demands
enquiries into the non-monetary valuations, or appraisals and esteem, of
that series at the time of its circulation by those who used the coins as
currencies. The display of a single coin of the Lyricist Type in the National
Museum prompts a reminder to initiate such historical enquiries which
would, enhance the commemorative valuation of the coin as an object of
Samudragupta’s imperial self fashioning.

ALTEKAR, V.S. (1954). Catalogue of the Gupta Gold Coins in the Bayana Hoard. The Numismatic
Society of India.
KOSAMBI, D.D. (1941). ‘On the Study and Metrology of Silver Punch-Marked Coins’. New Indian
Antiquary, 4(1–2), 1–76.
MAJUMDAR, S.M. (2014). Kalighat Hoard – The First Gupta Coin Hoard from India. Mira Bose.
AHUJA, N. (2016). ‘Designing a Public Inner World’. In P. Mitter and N. Ahuja (Eds), The Arts and
Interiors of Rashtrapati Bhavan: Lutyens and Beyond (pp. 54–91). Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, Government of India.
MITTER, P. (2001). Indian Art. Oxford University Press.
BHANDARKAR, D.R. (1981). ‘Allahabad Stone Pillar Inscription of Samudragupta’. In B. Chhabra
and G.S. Ghai (Eds), Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Vol. 3 (pp. 203–19). Archaeological
Survey of India.
WILLIAMS, J.G. (1982). The Art of Gupta India: Empire and Province. Princeton University Press.
18
COPIES OF AJANTA
Ajanta Caves, Aurangabad District, Maharashtra
c. 1st century BCE and 5th century

A LARGE PHOTOGRAPH OF ONE OF THE MAGNIFICENT MURALS OF Cave 1 at

Ajanta depicting a scene of the Mahajanaka Jataka, is an architectural
feature of the grand entrance hall of the Archaeological Survey of India’s
new building. It forms the exterior façade of the balcony on the first floor,
along with four other photographs from the same mural depicting scenes
from this Jataka story of the renunciation of King Mahajanaka. In looking
up at the panels, visitors experience a fleeting moment of thrill, of standing
at the threshold of a brilliantly illuminated ancient world – a time when
Buddhist monks lived and prayed inside this magnificent Ajanta cave, a
vihara where they contemplated the paintings and sculptures in the light of
glowing lamps.
In contrast to the monks’ views of the paintings, those who visit Ajanta
today can barely make out the Jataka scenes despite the artificial lights
flashed by the guards to illuminate the murals section by section. The
rapidly deteriorating and fragile environment of the rock-cut caves
enhances the value of the copies of Ajanta within the projects of preserving
this fabulous ancient site.
A grand display of Ajanta at the Archaeological Survey of India. Photograph, c. 2015, of a mural of
the Mahajanaka Jataka, Cave 1 (Ajanta).

The grand display of the modern photographs of Ajanta in the

Archaeological Survey’s headquarters remind us that copies of Ajanta
paintings have fashioned the imagery of the classical in Indian art, and of
the many herculean efforts that have been made, since the early nineteenth
century, to record the murals for posterity. The long history of preserving
Ajanta is also poignant within the annals of the archaeological restoration
projects as it has entailed significant losses of the copies. Therefore, all the
early paintings of the murals are now valued as antiquities that promise new
enquiries into the collecting, archiving, and displays of Ajanta in the
modern world.
The photographs exhibited in the Survey’s headquarters are made to look
like murals for the new building. They are of the twenty-first century and
emulate the attempts made from the 1930s of photographing the Ajanta
murals in natural light. The most successful examples date from 1991–92,
when photo-historian Benoy Behl undertook an ambitious documentation
project. Behl’s book, The Ajanta Caves: Ancient Paintings of Buddhist
India (1989), treats us to his extraordinary photographs that ‘allow the
caves to speak for themselves’, as Milo Cleveland Beach aptly noted in his
foreword. We see the murals in detail, and the one pictured here, on the
back wall of the main shrine in Cave 1, prominently shows the ritual bath of
Mahajanaka. The bath cleansed the king before he donned the saffron robe.
It signifies Mahajanaka’s final renunciation of the world. On seeing the
colour transparencies of Behl’s photographs, the then director general of
Archaeological Survey of India had exclaimed, ‘You have really conquered
the darkness!’ Behl’s photographs highlight the greens and the blues in the
paintings, which visitors of the caves fail to notice under the glare of the
artificial lights, and provide a means to distinguish the details and many
subtle nuances of the paintings which has not been possible before. Such
copies of Ajanta occasion reflections upon the fetish for the original. For,
despite the increasing scholarship of copies of antiquities made in antiquity,
copies made during modern times continue to remain largely overlooked by
academics. However, the myriad functions a copy performs in lieu of the
original, which we note through the plaster casts of the Sanchi Stupa’s
Eastern Torana (see ch. 10), demonstrate the importance of studying the
copies as unique objects.
The 31 caves in Ajanta constitute the Buddhist monastic complex at the
site, of prayer halls (chaityas) and living quarters (viharas). They are
excavated into the curved sweep of the Sahyadri hills, overlooking the
horseshoe-shaped gorge of the Waghora river and the cascading waterfalls
that plunge down the plateau. They were created in two phases: a few were
excavated during the first century BCE and the rest during the fifth century
(c. 475–500). According to Walter Spink, who studied the Ajanta complex
in great detail for over 50 years, 26 caves, including the principal painted
viharas, 1, 2, 16 and 17, and the beautifully sculpted chaityas, 19 and 26,
were created within a span of 16 to 18 years during the reign of the
Vakataka king Harisena (c. 462–477).
Irrespective of the different periods of building, the caves were probably
all decorated with paintings that offered grand views of the Buddha’s
teachings and the Buddhist cosmology. We see many Jataka stories, of the
Buddha’s previous births, including those of the Campeya, Mriga,
Chaddanta, Mahakapi, Visvantara, Sibi and Hamsa. Historians suggest that
the Buddhist rock-cut caves in the Western Ghats which predate those at
Ajanta, such as at Bhaja, Kanheri, Bedsa, Pitthalkhora and Karle were
possibly all painted. Therefore, Ajanta illustrates the genealogy of a
tradition of mural paintings that spanned from the second or first century
BCE and continued well after the tenth century. The Ajanta murals portray,
as Pia Brancaccio tells us,

[…] a prosperous and multicultural environment […] Even the

pigments used in the paintings indicate international trade
connections—the blue, for example, was obtained from lapis lazuli
imported from Iran or Afghanistan. Recognizable among the crowds
are many foreigners, easy to spot because of their different clothes,
hairdos, and in some cases even skin colors […] Foreign figures
appear so commonly in the murals that they must surely have been
part of the social scene at the time.

The art of Ajanta provides an occasion to see the extensive networks of

connections within the ancient world that fashioned cultures of
cosmopolitanism. Beach noted that ‘the style of painting at Ajanta travelled
with Buddhism into the Himalayan regions via the Silk Roads’. His
statement follows the declaration of Laurence Binyon (1869–1943), the
pioneering curator of Oriental Prints and Drawings at the British Museum
that ‘whoever studies the art of China and Japan, at whatever time he
begins, starts on a long road which will ultimately lead him to Ajanta’.
The caves were chanced upon in 1819 by a hunting party of the East
India Company, and the narratives of the British discovery are built upon
the certainty that after the Buddhist monks abandoned them, possibly
during the eighth century, they were forgotten by the locals. The British
accounts present the site as a wild jungle inhabited by menacing tigers and
the ‘most savage looking race’, referring to the local tribes living in the
area; the caves were barely visible as most were filled with vegetation,
earth, rubble and large boulders.
In 1843 the discovery of Ajanta was placed before the British antiquaries
in London by James Fergusson, the nineteenth-century architectural
historian, who numbered and dated the caves he saw. In his lecture to the
Royal Society, he emphasized the grave threat of the loss of the paintings at
the hands of the European visitors, who did not, he declared, ‘come away
without picking off one or two of the heads’. An example of this vandalism
survives in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the form
of an intact fragment of the mural from Cave 16 that depicts the conversion
of Prince Nanda to Buddhism. The piece was part of the collection inherited
by the heirs of a Company officer James Edwin Williams (d. 1885), and
was acquired by the Museum in 1921.
Fergusson’s concerns spurred the directors of the East India Company to
act and in 1844 Captain Robert Gill of the 44th Madras Native Infantry was
commissioned to make copies of the paintings. Gill was highly regarded as
a draughtsman, and the known history of copying Ajanta’s paintings begins
with his undertaking. The trying conditions under which Gill toiled can be
gauged from a dispatch of 1844 that forewarned him of what to expect.

Many of the caves are so dark as to render drawing impossible

without the aid of light which will require to be of considerable
brilliancy, others are so lofty that scaffolding will be required […]
some are full of water and mud and no ventilation—the atmosphere
is tainted and unwholesome, and swarming with bats and bees […]
and the drawings in many are so caked with dirt that much cleaning
will be necessary to render them extinguishable.

Since the treacherous journey to the caves from his house – 6 miles away
in the village of Ajintha – took him more than two hours on horseback, Gill
spent ten days at a stretch living and working at the site, in Cave 20. To buy
provisions and receive posts, he had to travel to Jalna or Aurangabad, which
were, respectively, 54 and 63 miles away.
Robert Gill copying the Ajanta frescoes, January 1862. Pencil and watercolour, William Simpson
(1823–99). Plate 102, Archer 1868.

Gill had to consistently hire men to blast away the rocks and remove the
earth from the cave interiors; the poor light in the caves made it difficult for
him and his assistants to see the murals. As the rocks and debris started
clearing, he saw more and more paintings. Copying them demanded
dangerous climbs and spending long hours lying on one’s back on scaffolds
at great heights. In addition, the oils in the canvases took two months to dry.
The large canvases had to be rolled and packed carefully into tin boxes
before being taken to Bombay, from where they were dispatched to Madras
and eventually shipped to London. The War of 1857 disrupted supplies and
transportation; in the 13 months when the War put a stop to his work of
copying, Gill taught himself to use the camera and subsequently published
the stereoscopic photographs of Ajanta and the nearby Ellora in his sole
publication The Rock-cut Temples of India (1864). They are the first
photographs of the two sites.
Gill had anticipated in 1844 that it would take him 18 months to
complete the task. Instead, it took him 18 years, and by the time he
considered the undertaking more or less completed, in July 1863, his health
had deteriorated. He was nearly blind and had run up a debt of ₹10,000 to
his best assistant copyist, Culianee. Gill copied 26 murals and made
detailed architectural drawings. The bulk of this first copy of Ajanta which
came intact to London, however, met a fateful end.
 Gill’s paintings were received at the India Office at Leadenhall Street and
displayed at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. In December 1866, a fire in
the Palace destroyed them all. Subsequently, five paintings were found in a
military store, though it is unlikely that Gill knew of their survival. Acting
upon the colossal loss, the colonial government approached him in 1868 to
report on the possibilities of re-copying. By then, however, he was an ill
and disheartened man and refused to meet the request.
The colonial government then appointed John Griffiths, a teacher at the
Bombay School of Art, to re-copy Ajanta. As the technology of
photography was not sufficiently advanced to photograph the paintings,
Griffiths and his students were forced to adopt Gill’s method of first making
transfers of the murals from the walls and then painting the copied image.
For 13 years, from 1872 to 1885, they worked under trying conditions
similar to those faced by Gill. The paintings were eventually housed at the
Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum, London. However, of the 335
canvases the Museum received, 170 were destroyed on 12 June 1885, when
a fire broke out in the stores. The copies of 17 narrative panels and all
ceiling panels were destroyed. Eventually, Griffiths published a selection of
the remaining paintings in 1896. His approach to copying was more
meticulous than that of Gill’s and included detailed sketch plans of the
walls and ceilings of the interiors, showing the sections that had been
painted and how the copies fit together.
Divia Patel, a senior curator of the Asian Collections at V&A, reminds us
that

The commissioning of Gill and Griffiths was a remarkable

foresighted initiative. The copying spanned a period of 30 years, cost
over £30,000 and utilized more than 166,888 sq. yards of canvas.
[…] Most went up in smoke. However, the surviving copies hold
invaluable information and details which has since disappeared from
the cave walls.
 The murals were copied again in 1910–11; the work was undertaken by
Mrs Heringham and a group of Indian artists, including Syed Khan and
three students of the emerging Neo-Bengal School – Nandalal Bose, Asit
Haldar and Samarendranath Gupta. This set of copies contributed greatly to
the development of an idiom of genuine Indian aesthetics and fashioned an
Ajanta-style that ‘constructed a notion of “classicism” in art’, as Tapati
Guha-Thakurta informs us. Notably, as early as 1911, Samarendranath
Gupta had declared that:

The nation that can sense the true and the beautiful in art is marked
out for greatness […] let us cultivate the aesthetic sense […] so that
the nation that will be ultimately evolved in India may be a nation
full of overflowing love for the Motherland, full of chastity, full of
the sublime sense of the beautiful in creative art.

Entrance Hall of the Archaeological Survey of India displaying Ajanta and the Garuda Chariot
(Hampi). Tilak Marg, New Delhi.

Following Independence, the Archaeological Survey of India took over

the care and upkeep of Ajanta in 1953. By then, the site was celebrated as
of national importance that represented ‘the best in the art tradition of
contemporary India’ and of ‘the kinship between sculpture and painting that
we find in India’ which is ‘altogether unique in the history of world art’ as
the Survey’s director general Amalananda Ghosh (1953–68) recalled.
The lavish photographic display of the Ajanta murals in the new building
of the Archaeological Survey at Tilak Marg (New Delhi), demonstrates the
continuities in the endeavours of nation-building through this Buddhist art.
The display enshrines a new nation’s glorious ancient past and also provides
an opportunity to see the uses of copies for presenting a better vantage point
of the original. The photographs beckon their viewers to see the caves in
detail and appear, thereby, as objects of history that allow encounters with
the ‘pristine’ Ajanta of Ancient India.

ARCHER, M. (1968). Visions of India: The Sketchbooks of William Simpson, 1859–1862. Phaidon.
BEHL, B. (1998). The Ajanta Caves: Ancient Paintings of Buddhist India. Thames and Hudson.
(1930). AJANTA: The Colour and Monochrome Reproductions of the Ajanta Frescoes based on
Photography. Oxford University Press.
BRANCACCIO, P. (2010). The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad: Transformations in Art and
Religion. Brill.
DEHEJIA, V. (1997). Discourse in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India. Munshiram
Manoharlal.
GHOSH, A. (Ed.) (1967). Ajanta Murals: An Album of Eighty-Five Reproductions in Colour.
Archaeological Survey of India.
GUHA-THAKURTA, T. (1992). The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and
Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920. Cambridge University Press.
PATEL, D. (2007). ‘Copying Ajanta: A Rediscovery of Some Nineteenth Century Paintings’. South
Asian Studies, 23, 39–62.
PATEL, D. (2010). ‘Addendum to ‘‘Copying Ajanta: A Rediscovery of Some Nineteenth Century
Paintings’’’. South Asian Studies, 24, 141–42.
SPINK, W. (2005). Arguments about Ajanta. Brill.
19
THE SARNATH BUDDHA
Sarnath Archaeological Site, Varanasi District, Uttar Pradesh
5th century
THE SEATED BUDDHA WITH HANDS IN THE DHARMACHAKRA mudra, turning the
wheel of the doctrine, guides us to notice the importance of antiquities as
performing objects. Since its discovery in 1905, it has been received as
symbolizing Sarnath, near Varanasi, which is deemed the historical
Rishipatana, or place of the sages, and Mrigadava or deer park/forest where
the Buddha gave his first sermon after the awakening. The reception of the
sculpture as the ‘Sarnath Buddha’ illuminates the unrevealed acts of place-
making that often inflect the methods of analysis within the subjects of
history and archaeology.
Expected, we do not find the name Sarnath in ancient Buddhist literature,
although one of the oldest Pali texts, the Dhammacakkappavattana-sutta of
c. third century BCE, mentions the venue of the First Sermon close to
Varanasi: ekam samayam bhagavā bārānasiyam viharati isipatane
migadāye (Sutta-nipāta, verse 420); that is, once the Lord was staying in
Varanasi at Rishipatana in the animal park. In this deer park, to quote
Rupert Gethin,
Seated Buddha in the dharmachakra mudra. Sandstone, ht. 1.37 m, width of base 82.3 cm, c. 475
CE. Archaeological Museum, Sarnath [old catalogue number B(b) 181].

the Buddha approached the five who had been his companions when
he practiced austerities and gave them instruction in the path to the
cessation of suffering that he had discovered […] ‘setting in motion’
or ‘turning the wheel of Dharma’ (dharma-cakra-
 pravartana/dhamm-cakka-ppavattana) […] For the Buddha this was
the beginning of a life of teaching that lasted some forty-five years.

Archaeologists have found Sarnath bereft of material evidence from the

Buddha’s time, c. fifth century BCE and note that the earliest habitational
deposits are from two centuries later, the third century BCE, the same period
as the textual reference. They illustrate the lavish patronage of the Mauryan
emperor Ashoka, the best example of which is the magnificent pillar with
the emperor’s edicts, bearing also a Schism Edict admonishing the Sangha,
or assembly of Buddhist monks and nuns, against factionalism. This is
perhaps the most well-known Ashokan pillar as its lion capital is the Indian
national emblem. In his detailed study of the histories of Sarnath Frederick
Asher had emphasized that ‘so deeply enmeshed is Ashoka with Sarnath
that a statue in the modern Vietnamese monastery [at the site] depicts [him]
holding his lion pillar’. Possibly, the Dharmarajika and Dhamekh stupas –
the two best-known stupas of Sarnath – were first built during Ashoka’s
reign, and Asher tells us that the emperor’s patronage certainly ‘constructed
permanence at a place that was previously […] just an unmarked spot’ and
made it into a marked pilgrimage with a residential monastery. For, we can
assume the presence of Buddhist nuns and monks within this terrain by then
through the Schism Edict that warned them not to factionalize.
From the accounts of the Buddhist Chinese pilgrims Faxian and
Xuanzang, who travelled within the Indian subcontinent during the fifth and
the seventh centuries respectively, we know that the Mrigadava near
Varanasi increasingly acquired a decidedly monumental Buddhist
geography during the first millennium. A long history of patronage
followed that of Ashoka’s: of the Kushan kings (first–second centuries),
during the Gupta period (third to sixth centuries), and of the Pala princes
(ninth to eleventh centuries), and the grand stupas, chaityas, viharas and
dwajas (pillars) added to the acts of memorializing a sacred geography.
Notably, Alexander Cunningham started his career in archaeology –
besides being in the military – by excavating at Sarnath in 1835–36, when
he dug into the Dhamekh stupa from top down in search of reliquaries. At
the time Cunningham, as also Francis Buchanan-Hamilton before him –
who visited Sarnath possibly in 1813 during the surveys of Bihar and
Bengal (1810–14) and knew of it as Buddha Kashi – was largely unaware
of the historical associations with the Buddha. The Chinese accounts had
not yet been translated into French (and subsequently into English), so the
history of early Buddhism in India was largely unknown to the West.
Sarnath was more or less abandoned during the twelfth century. The
Buddhist population increasingly felt the wrath of hostile Brahmins, and
Sarnath was eventually sacked in 1193 by the armies of Sultan Mohammad
of Ghori, following their march to Varanasi. The Mughal emperor
Humayun took refuge in Sarnath when fleeing from the battle of Chausa,
and his son Akbar built an octagonal tower on top of the Chaukhandi stupa
in c. 1589 to commemorate the visit, but Sarnath possibly remained a
desolate place. Asher recalled that

Sarnath never caught the care and imagination of non-Indian

Buddhists in the way that Bodhgaya, for example, came to be so
important to the Burmese and Sri Lankans. In fact, regular
pilgrimage to Bodhgaya is recorded almost without a break, even
when the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment largely fell to ruins. But
pilgrimage to Sarnath, however central it was to the formation of the
Buddhist sangha, failed to attract visitors […] until the very end of
the eighteenth century. There are, at least, no inscriptional records of
pilgrims during those six hundred years.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Sarnath began to attract the attention
of the officers of the East India Company stationed in Benares cantonment.
They heard of the wealth of antiquities, and some undertook sporadic
excavations, although the first large-scale excavations were undertaken in
1904–05 by Frederich Oertel of the Public Works Department through the
support of the Archaeological Survey of India. Oertel excavated the area of
the Main Shrine, in the vicinity of the Dharmarajika stupa, from where the
seated Buddha image and Ashokan pillar were both recovered. He claimed
the discovery of the sculpture as his, the first of the 476 objects brought to
light during the excavations, and hailed the discovery as ‘eminently
appropriate to the site’. The emblematic value of the Sarnath Buddha,
which Oertel immediately foresaw, has been carefully analysed throughout
the twentieth century with great precision and through erudite scholarship.
As John Huntington emphasizes:

While the product of a long stylistic development, its original

concept—that of the historical Buddha teaching his former ascetic
colleagues at the Mrigadava—is most eloquently stated. Nowhere in
the whole of the Buddhist art is there a more clearly and specifically
articulated vision of the event than this image.

The sculpture depicts the Great Teacher in the lotus position seated upon
an elaborate throne, the back rest of which is held by a pair of leogryphs
(winged lions), and under which is the dharmachakra, placed centrally
upon a pedestal and flanked by two antelopes and seven kneeling figures.
Of them, five are in monks’ garb, and they are the Buddha’s former
companions. The two others, possibly a woman and child, are donors or
devotees. The prominent halo of the Buddha is made up of bands of
concentric circles, of which the outer is a richly carved lotus creeper
flanked by two flying celestials. These, Susan Huntington directs us to note,
have no wings, but appear in flight because of ‘the curious position of their
legs’. Although uninscribed, the sculpture is dated by scholars with a
considerable measure of certainty to 475 CE when a remarkable surge of
activity, due to fresh influx of patronage stirred the production of a great
many seated Buddhas at Sarnath with hands in the dharmachakra mudra
sermon.
As John Huntington has shown, sculpture ‘can be read as easily as a text
if the interpreter takes the considerable time to learn the vocabulary of the
gestures and the symbolic content of the signs’. With respect to the seated
Buddha, he notes that the dharmachakra sits upon ‘the Mount Meru
platform’ in an ‘edge-on view’, which he states is the ‘graphic recognition
of the fact that the Dharma is to be set in motion’. Crucially, he attends to
the unique iconography of the mudra, of the left middle finger pointing to
the circle formed by the right hand, and recalls the Buddha sculptures in
which the dharmachakra pravartana mudra comprises the left forefinger
and not the middle. These, he informs us, allude to the c. fifth-century
Avatamasaka Sutra, which contributed to the cult of the Brihad, or colossal,
Buddhas, such as those at Bamyan, Afghanistan. Huntington is, therefore,
of the opinion that:

Given the assumed primacy of the teaching of the Avatamsaka, the

teaching at the Mrigadava became the second teaching, which is thus
indicated by the left middle (second) finger pointing to the circle
made by the right hand […] What is especially interesting at Sarnath
is that a transition takes place in the mid-5th century from the left
forefinger being used for the earthly teaching to the left middle finger
[…] providing a clear point (c. 460–70) of transition in belief and
teachings at a major Buddhist site.

The interpretation enshrines the sculpture as the Sarnath Buddha, and

demonstrates the retrospective embedding of historical memories into
recovered antiquities.
Immediately upon its discovery, the sculpture was valued for its
Buddhological message, and was also enthusiastically received as evidence
of Ancient India’s brilliant art-aesthetics and craftsmanship. It was dated to
the Gupta period during excavations at Sarnath by John Marshall and Sten
Konow (1906–08) at a time when the Indian scholarship of Ancient India
had begun to proclaim this period as the revival of a purely Indian
Civilization. Therefore, Daya Ram Sahni, who participated in the
excavations and subsequently catalogued the archaeological finds,
described the sculpture as displaying ‘a new and purely national
development’. Sahni’s description contributed to its addition into the
growing list of antiquities that were deemed as epitomizing the excellence
of India’s national art.
 By the time Sahni excavated at Sarnath in the years 1917 to 1922, a
fierce academic debate had begun regarding the origins of image-making
within the Indian subcontinent, pitting Western scholarship against native
authority. The debate related specifically to the image of the Buddha – then
considered India’s first icon – and the question asked was whether the
imagery was a foreign import or an indigenous development.
The Ceylonese-British scholar of Indian art, Anand Coomaraswamy
(1877–1947), embarked upon demonstrating the truth of the nativist theory.
Anchoring a history of indigenous development to philosophical moorings,
Coomaraswamy stated that the idols made in the Indian subcontinent
conveyed the sculptors’ mental abstractions. They therefore appeared
‘affirmative’ in comparison to the ‘listless’ sculptures made in the ‘foreign’
lands of Gandhara and the Northeast through observations of existing
artistic traditions. The contrast between the philosophical artistic traditions
of Ancient India and observational artistic traditions of Ancient Gandhara,
which Coomaraswamy historicized intuitively, provided theoretical spaces
for establishing a genre of the Indian Classical and the Sarnath Buddha
came to embody this new, ancient, and uniquely Indian canon.
The nationalist genre has been brilliantly documented throughout the
twentieth century through exhibitions of antiquities. The pioneering
exhibition of the Sculpture of India in the United States in 1985, echoed
Coomaraswamy in emphasizing the ‘classical phase of Indian art [as] a turn
away from the exultation of the mundane […] a movement toward the inner
realm of the spirit’. Notably, the guest curator Pramod Chandra, then
professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Harvard, labelled the ‘Sarnath
pieces’ as expressing an ‘ethereal statement’.
In demonstrating intellectual sensitivity to acts of interpretation, the
Sarnath Buddha also reminds us of the archaeological scholarship that
marginalizes histories of plural worship. For although Sarnath came to be
archaeologically constituted as a predominantly Buddhist site from the
nineteenth century, the Digambara Jain community built a temple in 1824
near Dhamek, the stupa which the Hindus – as John Ewen noted in his
handbook for visitors of Benares – worshipped by rubbing on its surface
pure gold leaves. Significantly, modern-day worshippers, who are all
Buddhists, are instructed explicitly by the Archaeological Survey of India
not to place gold foil on the Dhamek stupa, although the damaging potential
of the act on the stone remains questionable.
The place-making of the Sarnath Buddha presents the conflicts of
ownership and preservation today, mainly between the tourist-worshippers
and the Archaeological Survey that has no official authority over vast areas
of unexcavated monumental ruins. The variegated sacred geography of
Sarnath, in which the Jains and Hindus also once sought their religious
worlds, creates opportunities for analysing the modern-day heritage-making
processes which often obliterate the histories of the many uses of a religious
settlement and its monuments by many communities. Therefore, in recalling
Sarnath through one of its best-known antiquities we also begin to see the
merit of establishing inherently participatory preservation practices that
would promote cultural tourism of historical religious places.

ASHER, F.M. (2020). Sarnath: A Critical History of the Place Where Buddhism Began. Getty
Research Institute.
CHANDRA, P. (1985). The Sculpture of India: 3000 B.C. – 1300 A.D. Harvard University Press.
COOMARASWAMY, A.K. (1926). ‘The Indian Origin of the Buddha Image’. Journal of the
American Oriental Society, 46, 165–70.
EWEN, J. (1886). Benares: A Handbook for Visitors. Baptist Missionary Press.
GETHIN, R. (1998). The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford University Press.
HUNTINGTON, J.C. (2009). ‘Understanding the 5th Century Buddhas of Sarnath: A Newly
Identified Mudra and a New Comprehension of the Dharmachakra Mudra’. Orientations, 40(2),
84–93.
HUNTINGTON, S.L. (1985). The Art of Ancient India: Buddhist, Hindu, Jain. Weatherhill.
MANI, B.R. (2006). Sarnath: Archaeology, Art & Architecture. Archaeological Survey of India.
OERTEL, F.O. (1908). Excavations at Sarnath. Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India,
1904–5 (pp. 59–104). Superintendent Government Printing.
SAHNI, D.R. (1914). Catalogue of the Museum of Archaeology at Sarnath. Superintendent
Government Printing.
20
THE ‘GUPTA’ PLAQUE OF A
MAHABHARATA SCENE
Ahichchhatra, Bareilly District, Uttar Pradesh
c. 6th century

THE TERRACOTTA PLAQUE IS A PART OF SIX OTHERS FOUND affixed on the upper
terrace of an ancient and massive brick temple at Ahichchhatra, Uttar
Pradesh, during excavations at this historical town in 1940–44 by the
Archaeological Survey of India. The plaque is now prominently displayed
in the National Museum’s sculpture galleries and labelled as ‘Fight between
Yudhishthira and Jayadratha, Gupta, 6th century AD.’ The label ascribes the
object to the Gupta period, referring to the rule of the Gupta kings in
northern India between c. 320 AD and 467, when the epics Mahabharata
and Ramayana were possibly formalized and committed to writing. The
label identifies the iconography of this plaque with a battle scene in the
Mahabharata.
The Mahabharata is the longest epic of South Asia, and bears the same
name as the Great War, fought for 18 days by the Pandavas and Kauravas of
the Kuru clan. The five Pandava princes, together with their friend and ally
Krishna, a Yadava prince of Dwarka, fought against their cousins, the
hundred Kauravas, to claim their rightful ownership of the kingdom that
had been taken away from them through deceit. The epic sketches a vast
historical span and comprises many origin stories of clans and ruling
dynasties in the north and northwest. Its earliest layers probably date to the
eighth century BCE, if not before. Despite the plethora of events it recalls,
the narrative focuses on the Kuru clan’s doings, the events that led to the
Great War, and the aftermath of the Kaurava defeat.

Plaque, one of six, depicting possibly a Shaivite iconography, Ahichchhatra. Terracotta, ht. 711 mm,
NM: 62. 240.

The plaque provides an object lesson in classifying and labelling

antiquities. Its current label alludes to an incident in the Mahabharata
where Yuddhisthira, the eldest of the Pandava princes and the upholder of
truth and moral order, defeated and then pardoned Jayadratha, king of the
Sindhu region, an ally of the Kauravas and husband of the latters’ only
sister, Dushala. The identification of Jayadratha was derived through the
identification of his boar standard in the plaque by the art historian and
curator of archaeology at the National Museum, T.N. Ramachandran (d.
2021).
 Jayadratha was protected by a boon of restricted immortality – he could
not be killed during the day or in darkness, and whoever decapitated him
and caused his head to fall upon the ground would explode and die. Long
before the Great War, Jayadratha had tried to abduct Draupadi, the wife of
the five Pandavas. He was intercepted and humiliated by Yuddhisthira and
Bhima, although the former spared his life on principles of dharma and the
firm belief that his death would be an unjust calamity for Dushala, their
cousin. The plaque label alludes to Jayadratha’s defeat, upon which
Draupadi insisted that he serve her husbands as a slave all his life.
Yuddhisthira subsequently absolved him of lifelong servitude.
However, the best-known fight between the Pandavas and Jayadratha is
the one that involved Arjuna, the most skilful of archers among the Kuru
warriors. During the Great War, Jayadratha connived with the Kauravas in
killing Arjuna’s son, the young prince, Abhimanyu. When Abhimanyu
entered the chakravyuha, a unique battle formation, Jayadratha prevented
the Pandavas from following him, thus isolating the prince. Abhimanyu
knew how to enter the fierce and intricate formation but not how to safely
exit it. He, therefore, had to fight against the veteran and mighty Kuru
warriors alone and was killed in battle. On learning of Jayadratha’s role in
killing his son, Arjuna swore revenge. His charioteer Krishna invoked
extraordinary powers of magic, which created the grand illusion of a
strange light, so that Arjuna could decapitate Jayadratha when it was neither
light nor dark.
Arjuna also caused the head to fall into the lap of Jayadratha’s father,
who was performing penance. Each of the moves by Arjuna and Krishna to
kill Jayadratha are described in great detail in the Mahabharata, and the
description leaves an indelible image of the encounter upon listeners and
readers. By contrast, the description of the humiliation and defeat of the
lustful Jayadratha by Yuddhisthira and Bhima fails to conjure a similarly
powerful imagery.
The reason for recalling the two stories in the Mahabharata with respect
to the plaque is to gauge the correctness of the object label. The doubt arises
because an article in the journal Ancient India (1947–48) regarding the six
plaques found during the Ahichchhatra excavations informs us that one of
the members of the excavation team had viewed the iconography of the
plaque very differently.
Vasudeva Saran Agrawala, who participated in the excavations, affirmed
that the plaque was part of a ruined temple of the Gupta period. He stated
that the structural form of the temple resembled a description in the
Vishnudharmottara Purana, the sixth-century text on iconography, of an
eduka in three terraces (the bhadra pithas). He was of the opinion that the
colossal Shiva Linga on the surface of the temple proved that the temple
was dedicated to Shiva and identified the iconography of the six plaques as
representing the full-fledged development of the Shaivite mythology. He
saw the beautifully carved human figures on the plaques as: Shiva with his
ganas destroying the sacrifice of his father-in-law, Daksha Prajapati; Shiva
in his forms of Bhairava and Lakulisa; Shiva’s dalliances with his consort
Parvati; and Shiva’s reposeful form as the ascetic Dakshinamurti, the lord
of yoga and divine wisdom.
Agrawala, however, hesitated in affirming a specifically Shaivite
iconography to this particular plaque. He toyed with the possibility that the
small boar on the standard on the left and the crescent-topped standard on
the right were iconographic indices for the story of Kiratarjuniya, which
appears in both the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Shiva, in this story,
appears as a hunter and takes up arms against Arjuna for claiming his rights
to a boar. However, because the clothing of the combatants in the plaque is
of ‘two royal warriors’, Agrawala was keenly aware of the flaws in his
inference and tried to sort the issue by recalling an epigraphic reference to a
boar in an inscription of Vinayaditya Satyasraya (688–695), a Chalukya
ruler of Kalyani (western India). Vinayaditya had apparently ‘won a boar as
his decoration’ after subduing rulers in the north and south. Agrawala
suggested that the boar symbol might have been a part of the imperial crest
of the Chalukya kings and that the plaque depicted the warfare between
Vinayaditya’s grandfather, the powerful Pulakesin II (608–642) and his
equally powerful adversary, the Pushyabhukti king Harshavardhana, who
ruled from Thanesar (606–647), and in whose realm lay Ahichchhatra.
Agrawala concluded that the battle between Pulakesin II and
Harshavardhana had supplied the iconography of the plaque, created for the
Shiva temple after it had been architecturally extended and renovated in the
aftermath of the conflict. He also recalled that Harsha was a devotee of
Shiva and that the ruler’s court poet, Banabhatta, had declared that the
‘outstanding events’ of his patron’s life were made the subjects of popular
representations. Agrawala’s inferences add to histories of the enmeshing of
politics and religion in Ancient India and endow the plaque with a post-
Gupta chronology.
Irrespective of what the truth might be, the twin identities of Gupta Art
and a scene from the Mahabharata are now more or less fixed upon the
plaque through the label. The overall composition of this large and
intricately carved object draws our attention to the empty spaces, and we
may ask if they were intentionally left blank. The spaces speak of aesthetic
restraint and the superb design skills of the craftsmen.
By the first century Ahichchhatra produced some of the finest ‘terracotta
art’ in the Indian subcontinent. In designating the plaque to the Gupta
period, the curators of the National Museum make it representative of the
classical age in which powerful rulers, such as Chandragupta I,
Samudragupta, Chandragupta II and Kumaragupta, created vast empires
and made extensive patronage towards the Sanskritic culture. The cultural
achievements of the Gupta rulers have been aptly summarized by Partha
Mitter in the following statement

The Gupta court in the fifth century was adorned by the legendary
‘nine gems’, including the astronomer and mathematician
Arayabhatta […] and Kalidasa, ancient India’s great poet and
playwright. Another contemporary was Vatsyayana, who composed
the Kama Sutra […] Even more interesting is Yashodharman’s
commentary on Vatsyayana, the Sadanga (Six Limbs of Painting),
dealing with proportion, expression, representation, colour and other
aspects. […] Drama and lyrical poetry, written in courtly Sanskrit,
reached unprecedented heights. Indian ideas of beauty, especially of
 female beauty, received their canonical expression in literature and
subsequently influenced the visual arts.

However, Mitter reminds his readers that there is very little evidence of
royal patronage in the Gupta period. The so-called Gupta temples, such as
No. 17 at Sanchi, the brick temple at Bhitargaon and Dashavatara temple at
Deogarh, do not bear dedicatory inscriptions of the Gupta kings, and none
‘coincide with the lifespan of the dynasty’. Mitter, therefore, deems it more
useful to trace histories of the transmission of styles from known workshops
of previous centuries to those that emerged during the period of the rule of
Gupta kings.
The label of the plaque informs viewers that the object dates from the
sixth century. By then, the empire of the Gupta kings had virtually ceased to
exist, so the information merits a critique. However, considering that the
labelling of objects is foundational to curatorial practices, the Ahichchhatra
plaque provides an opportunity to reflect upon the taxing demands of an
object label, required to convey brevity and inclusion. Within the
constraints of a fixed word limit, usually no more than 30, they are also
required to provide a glimpse of the many inferences an object accrues
through its scholarship.
Since antiquities usually acquire meaning for the public through the
labels they carry, an introspection of object labels becomes rather important
for gauging the ways in which they establish, substantiate and disseminate
histories. In this respect, the Mahabharata–Gupta Plaque of Ahichchhatra
brings us to see the curatorial practices of the agency-making of antiquities.

AGRAWALA, V.S. (1948). ‘Terracotta Figurines of Ahichhatrā’, District Bareilly, U.P.’. Ancient
India, 4, 104–79.
GREAVES, L.R. (2020). ‘Śiva Daksināmūrti or Sage Nārāyana? Reconsidering an Early Terracotta
Panel from Ahichhatrā’. In E. Myrdal (Ed.), South Asian Archaeology and Art 2014: Papers
Presented at the Twenty-Second International Conference of the European Association for South
 Asian Archaeology and Art held at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities/National Museums of
World Culture, Stockholm (pp. 135–52). Dev.
MITTER, P. (2001). Indian Art. Oxford University Press.
RAMACHANDRAN, T.N. (1951). ‘An Interesting Terracotta Plaque from Ahichchhatra, U.P.’
Indian Historical Quarterly, 27, 304–11.
SAXENA, S. (2020, December 25). ‘A Unique Terracotta Plaque from Ahichchhatra’. Puratattva.
21
YOGINI VRISHANANA
Lokhari, Banda District, Uttar Pradesh
c. 10th century

INFORMED VIEWERS WHO SEE THE YOGINI VRISHANANA (literally, the ox-faced
yogini) in the National Museum are reminded of the sensational return of
this sculpture to the Indian nation. Together with nineteen other large yogini
sculptures in stone, it had graced the yogini temple near the village of
Lokhari in Banda district, Uttar Pradesh. The temple stands atop a hill,
away from habitation. The image was in situ well until the early 1980s,
when Vidya Dehejia saw it during her pioneering field research on yogini
worship. In her book, Yogini Cult and Temples (1986), Dehejia mentions
that the villagers had told her that ‘a number of images’ had been carted
away by ‘vandals in trucks in recent years’. In retrospect, Dehejia’s
statement appears anticipatory, as this sculpture too was ferreted from the
temple, possibly in the mid-1980s. It was taken to France by its collector
who, no doubt, acquired it illegally, and it may have never resurfaced in the
public domain had his widow not taken the initiative, in 2008, of handing it
over to the Indian embassy in Paris. Subsequently, a visiting minister of
culture for India spotted it in the embassy and directed the National
Museum to initiate proceedings to bring it back home.
A yogini sculpture of Lokhari Temple now on display at the National Museum. Sandstone, c. 10th
century, 1320 mm × 700 mm × 270 mm. NM: M. 13/20.

In August 2013, the Yogini Vrishanana of Lokhari came back to India

amid much fanfare and publicity. The National Museum organized an
exhibition which, according to the website, ‘celebrate[d] the return of a rare
heritage that was stolen from the country’. As the temple of Lokhari is an
unprotected site, the Yogini remained in the care of the Museum. In her
exhibition, she embodies the long and heinous practices of looting
antiquities. But as an exhibit, she also draws attention to collecting practices
which inevitably require the removal of objects from their situated places.
‘Collecting in one place means removing from another,’ notes Padma
Kaimal through her study of the disbursement of the sculptures of the
yogini temple at Kanchipuram.
The yogini cult, Dehejia tells us, ‘transformed and consolidated’ select
local village goddesses ‘into potent numerical groupings’. They became ‘a
band of goddesses’ who could bestow magical powers upon their
worshippers. The cult was ‘impelling and of vital significance’ from the
ninth to the twelfth centuries and emerged through the philosophies, rituals
and practices of Tantric Shaivism, primarily the kaula marga. It may have
declined thereafter, although a few yogini temples were built between the
fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Yogini worship imparted secret and hidden knowledge to the initiate. It
comprised magic rituals, sorcery and invocations of supernatural
phenomena, and the cult was highly esoteric. The yogini of the Tantric
tradition is the woman who participates with the initiate in the secret
practices of the cult, including a rite involving copulation, or maithuna. The
Tantra texts portray the yoginis as fearsome creatures who appear
intoxicated, practising witchcraft, human and animal sacrifice, feeding on
human flesh, roaming cemeteries, flying through the air, and indulging in
pleasures of the flesh, often with corpses. They are sorceresses, thirsty for
blood and gore. The tenth-century romance Yasastilaka, composed by
Somadevasuri (c. 959), a follower of the Tantric tradition, provides a
glimpse:

As abruptly as darkness descends at nightfall, even so, without

warning did the Mahayoginis appear out of the sky, the earth, the
depths of the nether region and the four corners of space. They
traversed the skies at tremendous speed causing their locks of hair to
come undone […] in their hands they held staffs topped with skulls
[…] the ornamental design on their cheeks were painted with blood
 which has been lapped up by the many snakes adorning their ears
[…] Sparks issuing from the third eye on their foreheads were fanned
into flames by the graspings of the helpless serpents ruthlessly
enmeshed in the tangled masses of their hair. The faces […] were
terrible to behold as they frowned with arrogance, uttering a
tremendous and terrifying phetkara sound.

The kaula texts list the forms the yoginis assumed, which were
supposedly seen by Shiva himself. The temple at Lokhari would have
provided a panoramic view of the animal-headed yoginis, including the
rarely seen Sasakanana (rabbit-headed). The ox-, goat-, cow-, horse-, bear-,
elephant-, snake-, deer-headed yoginis and others of the Lokhari temple
may appear plain in comparison to the bejewelled yoginis of the better-
known temples at Hirapur (Odisha) and Bherghat (Madhya Pradesh), but
they are brilliantly executed. They all have round or melon-shaped breasts,
round stomachs and narrow waists, and are shown seated in the lalitasana –
with one leg folded against a seat or mound and the other resting on the
ground. In their two hands they hold their lakshanas (identifying marks),
and some have a human corpse as their vahanas (mode of transport). The
‘simplified treatment of the images carved without haloes’ illustrates that
the Lokhari yoginis were some of the earliest icons of the yogini cult,
according to Dehejia, who dates them and the temple to the tenth century
when the area was ruled by the Pratihara kings. However, the absence of
inscriptions or other records regarding the yogini temples means that the
builder of this temple is unknown. Additionally, as Anamika Roy points out
through her study of the cult of the 64 yoginis, ‘the most intriguing aspect
of the problem of patronage is that despite the proclamation of the tantric
texts and other texts about an association of yoginis with kings, none of the
kings’ – be they of the Pratihara, Parmara, Chandela, Kalachuri, Chalukya
or the Pallava dynasties – ‘actually claimed the construction of the Yogini
temples’.
The temples are architecturally unique in that they are circular, open to
the sky and have no hidden or sacred area (sanctum sanctorum). The
images of the yoginis embellish the niches in the inner parts of the circular
wall, which encloses a central space, usually meant for an image of Shiva,
often as Bhairava – his fiercest form. The circular temples facilitated the
rituals of the yogini cult that involved the formation of a Yogini Chakra
(circle) by the initiates and their female partners, who represented the
earthly yoginis. A story in the Rajatarangini of the murder of the minister
Sandhimat, illustrates the potency of the Yogini Chakra and the fearsome
nature of the yoginis. Following the murder of Sandhimat, his bones were
placed in a cemetery on orders of his guru, Ishana, so that he could be
resurrected. The story recounts that:

On opening the window he [Ishana] then saw Yoginis (Yoginicakra)

standing inside a halo of light […] he saw hidden by a tree that the
skeleton, which had been placed recumbent in the centre of their
troupe, was being modelled with all limbs by the Yoginis. With the
rising tide of desire for sensual enjoyment with a lover, the Yoginis
drunk with liquor, having failed to find a virile man, had sought out
the skeleton and carried it away.

The secret Mahayaga rites of the kaula tradition, which were performed
within the enclosed sacred space of the Yogini Chakra, included libations of
wine, ritual oblations of flesh and blood of animals, offerings of headless
bodies and human heads, and most certainly maithuna (copulation).
Therefore, all yogini temples, including the one at Lokhari, were
constructed in carefully chosen and isolated areas, away from towns and
cities, to maintain the secrecy of the rituals and protect the cult against the
oppositions of the orthodoxy. The remote temples, mostly located in central,
eastern and southern India, have thus been particularly vulnerable to
looting, especially since the nineteenth century, with the increasing
explorations for antiquities.
In fact, a notable feature of almost all yogini temples is the targeted
vandalism they faced in the distant past when they were still worshipped.
Often, the yogini images were mutilated, possibly out of the fear and
anxieties that ‘the fierce and compelling goddesses’ aroused among people
who were unfamiliar with the yogini cult, as Kaimal suggests. Yet, this
destruction appears somewhat understandable when compared to the
present-day destruction of the temple sites. Notably, the yoginis of Lokhari
are all very heavy, weighing more than 400 kgs, and well over five feet tall.
Hence, we may assume that the theft of the Yogini Vrishanana was a time-
consuming operation.
Recent studies of heritage and conservation make us aware of the
increasing scale of looting antiquities and the destruction of archaeological
sites. This is despite the increasing attempts, since the 1970s, at policing
criminal activities through careful laws and severe deterrents. Looting
destroys contextual information on which historical and archaeological
inferences depend, and an example is the history of the disbursement
‘Kanchi Yoginis and their companions’ which is mapped by Kaimal. She
has shown that the removal was initiated by a well-known twentieth-
century scholar of Indian art, Gabriel Jouveau Dubreuil, and the acts –
which involved the participation of local people, well-known art dealers and
elite museums of the West – represent the complicity of scholars in shifting
antiquities from India to create collections of Indian art in the West. Of the
inaccurate scholarship that developed of the Kanchi Yoginis since their
distribution, Kaimal notes that ‘everyone who wrote about them in the 20th
century thought they represented matrikas which was a reasonable guess
[as] matrika was the only category most scholars knew of goddesses
gathered together in large number’.
The looting and trafficking of antiquities, thus, poses grave
epistemological concerns apart from ethical ones, because it destroys the
possibilities of finding evidence. As the archaeologist Alex Barker
emphasizes: ‘what we think about a looted object is often a projection of
what we think that object should be, based on existing understandings, so
that such objects reify preconceptions.’
The magnitude of the illicit trade in antiquities can be gauged from the
following figures: in 1999, the United Nations estimated the value of the
illegal antiquities trade to be at $7.8 billion, surpassed only by drugs and
arms trafficking. In 2008, scholars estimated that over 98 per cent of the
Buddha statues at Angkor Wat, Cambodia, were gone, and in 2013, more
than 220,000 tombs were looted worldwide. The growing human cost of
looting in the twenty-first century is stark. We recall the decapitation, in
August 2015, of Khaled al-Asaad, the eminent Syrian archaeologist and
custodian of the ancient city of Palmyra, following his refusal to tell his
captors the location of the antiquities he had evacuated from the city
museum. Yet, despite the fact that more lives are lost today in protecting
antiquities, the markets for undocumented and conflict antiquities remain
robust and growing, undermining the auto-regulatory impact of stricter
attention to provenance in sales and acquisitions. Art crime is the third or
fourth highest-grossing criminal enterprise.
The looting of the Lokhari Yogini Vrishanana may not be among the
most reprehensible art crimes. However, the theft implicates the sculpture’s
reception. Because, displayed in isolation from its companions, the
sculpture provides neither a sense of the numerical groupings through
which the iconography of a yogini can be identified nor of the uniqueness
of a temple with only the animal-headed ones.
Therefore, the heritagization of the Yogini by placing it in the National
Museum highlights a problematic response to looting. For, we may indeed
argue that the Yogini could have been returned to its ruined temple, placing
it among its peers and protecting the temple site. We could ask, as Kaimal
does through histories of the Kanchi Yoginis, whether museums ‘earn any
right to that art by rescuing it from deteriorating conditions in poorer
places’, and whether the ‘purpose of education’ justifies keeping art as a
museum exhibit. Keeping in mind the travails of the Didarganj yakshi (see
ch. 9), we could also ask what rights do nations have to create national
heritage through antiquities which predate them. Only in engaging with
such questions with an open mind can we effectively examine the ethics of
heritage-making that nationalizes a past bereft of nation states.
BARKER, A.W. (2018). ‘Looting, the Antiquities Trade, and Competing Valuations of the Past’.
Annual Review of Anthropology, 47, 455–74. www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-
anthro-102116-041320.
DEHEJIA, V. (1986). Yogini Cult and Temples. New Delhi: National Museum.
KAIMAL, P. (2012). Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis. Ann Arbor.
Kalhana’s Rajatarangini: or, Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir. (1900). M.A. Stein (Trans.).
Archibald Constable.
Press Information Bureau, 2013. ‘The Exhibition on “Return of the Yogini” Opens in New Delhi’.
Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India, 19 September. pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?
relid=99471.
ROY, A. (2015). Sixty-Four Yoginis: Cult, Icons and Goddesses. Primus Books.
‘Stolen Yogini Sculpture Returns from Paris’. (2013, September 18). The Hindu.
22
A COPY OF THE ASHTASAHASRIKA
PRAJNAPARAMITA
Nepal
c. 11th century

OBJECTS SHOW THINGS THAT OFTEN ESCAPE OUR ATTENTION. For example,
holding an ancient manuscript and leafing through it prompts us to see it as a
distinct artefact and not just an inert carrier of a text. We are led to regard
many details, such as the layout and binding, different handwritings and the
writing instruments used, and signs of wear and tear, which add to the
thinginess of the manuscript. Scholars of manuscripts today, therefore, build
upon the importance of reckoning with a manuscript’s materiality, or the
artefact which it is, and emphasize, to quote Jörg Quenzer, that

First, the manuscript is not to be read only as vehicle for information

conveyed mainly through text or images, but studied as a physical
object or artefact. […] Second, the social and cultural context of the
manuscript, as a material object, must be studied and reconstructed as
completely as possible.

Two folios of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. Palm Leaf, 540 mm × 525 mm, University Library
Cambridge, MS Add. 1643.
 Scholars also remind us that manuscript cultures are often very different
from regional or religious cultures which their texts inform of. And that the
texts often act in many ways upon the cultures and intellectual traditions
they convey. Therefore, the efficacy of the written word is experienced
through the practices of circulation, collection and curation of the
manuscripts which carry them, and which include making copies,
cataloguing and displaying. The palm-leaf manuscript of the Ashtasahasrika
Prajnaparamita offers a view of the complex social world of ancient
manuscripts which carried people and ideas through them. It informs of the
many relationships which manuscripts brokered and preserved between their
creators and consumers, which allowed them to actively accumulate
memories, histories and merit throughout their lives, even after being long
separated from the communities that produced them.
Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita means ‘Perfection of Wisdom in Eight
Thousand Lines’ (prajñā meaning wisdom and pāramitā, perfection) and
carries the oldest strata of the oldest sutras of Mahayana Buddhism.
Composed in Sanskrit between the first century BCE and first century as a
dialogue with the Buddha, the text continued to develop for about eight or
nine centuries. The texts of this tradition, namely, the paramitas, teach that
the six perfections of the Buddha can be fulfilled by focusing on perfecting
wisdom, usually defined as insight into the nature of reality. They fashioned
the central tenet of Mahayana Buddhism, and embody the shifting trends in
the Buddhist doctrinal emphases that led to the fashioning of this new form
by the mid-first century. As per tradition, the Ashta, although a written text,
had to be memorized. Its manuscripts were, therefore, also mnemonic
devices.
This palm-leaf Ashta is a rare composite object comprising three
codicological, or indivisible, units of which the last, the
Vajradhvajaparinamana, explains the virtues of reading the prajnaparamita
as the only ‘surviving witness of the Sanskrit original’, to quote Camillo
Formigatti, its research cataloguer. A colophon in the manuscript notes the
scribe, Sujatabhadra; year of composition, 1015 CE; and place the
‘ardharajya’ of Bhojadeva (c. 1009–1020), Rudradeva (c. 1007–1018) and
Laksmikamadeva (c. 1008–1020) in Hlam Vihara, which scholars suggest
may have either been near the present city of Patan, or Kathmandu, Nepal.
The information reveals a unique period of joint rule of kings in Nepal, who
we learn were patrons of the manuscript. Another colophon, added in 1139
by a certain Karunavajra, informs us that he rescued this prajnaparamita
from falling into the hands of non-believers.
The manuscript dates from the time of the emergence of the Newar form
of Vajrayana Buddhism in the lands of Nepal. Therefore, the nonbelievers
from which it ostensibly had to be rescued were possibly Brahmins, towards
whom Newar Buddhists were particularly hostile. Significantly, the
Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita, as the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism
(under the entry navadharma) tells us, ‘belongs to the nine books—a set of
Mahayana sutras that are the object of particular devotion in the Newar
Buddhist tradition of Nepal. […] These sutras of the nine dharmas are used
in the creation of the dharmamandala, a powerful ritual symbol in Newar
Buddhism’. Ritual venerations of books played, and still play, a central role
in Newar Buddhism, and we can be certain that the palm-leaf Ashta was
used more as an object of worship than for study. In fact, it carries traces of
material offerings smeared on the covers, of wood decorated with fine
paintings of the paramitas. The illustrations inside the text, of which there
are 85 of the possibly 88 that had once embellished the mint edition with all
pages intact, depict the emerging iconography of the Vajrayana worship. The
‘labels’ under the images of the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, other deities, stupas
and chaityas are the instructions of the scribe(s) of the text to the illustrators
regarding what to paint in the spaces left text-free. Although the paintings
mainly depict Buddhist holy places in eastern India, we come across
occasional references to those ‘far off’ through the labels under some of
them. Thus, for example, we note two miniatures on Folio 80 verso 6: a Tara
with eight female attendants on her left and right sides, with a note saying
candradvipe bhagavati tara, and Bodhisattva Jambhala (or Kubera) with two
attendants with the note sinhaladvipe jambalah. The latter denotes the island
of Sri Lanka.
 The size of the paintings – referred to in the scholarship of the text as
miniatures – documents innovations in the Buddhist imagery for fashioning
an art of the book. They are a radical departure from the earlier traditions of
large-scale paintings, made specifically for covering the walls of chaityas
and viharas, as at Ajanta.
Scholars tell us that palm leaves were the most common writing material
for manuscripts produced in South Asia. The leaves used were of the talipot
(Corypha umbraculifera), which grows wild today in southern India and Sri
Lanka. The palm was cultivated in ancient times, even up the west coast to
Konkan, and a flourishing trade in the large, glossy and fan-shaped leaves
existed from the early first millennium. The processing of the leaves for
manuscript production was laborious; it entailed boiling, drying, and
polishing the leaves before cutting them to required sizes. The ‘finished’
leaves were either written upon in ink, usually with a reed pen, as in the
North, or incised with a stylus, often of iron, as in the South. They were
strung together in the desired order with a cord, and the one used for the
Ashta is painted with ‘polychrome vajras’, which would have added to the
manuscript’s look as a ritual object and provided it magical protection.
Ancient manuscripts moved long distances during their early lives. Many
palm-leaf manuscripts which were produced in large quantities in eastern
India would have made long and dangerous journeys outside the
subcontinent, and across the Himalayas into Nepal, Tibet and beyond, during
the late-twelfth century when powerful and prestigious Buddhist monasteries
in the region, such as at Nalanda and Vikramashila were destroyed.
Construing a fictitious but highly plausible story of the loot and destruction
of the Jagaddala monastery in Varendra (Bangladesh) during this period,
Formigatti reminds us that such journeys meant going from one monastery
to another in search of suitable protection. He creates a narrative of a
Sanskrit manuscript that came from Vikramashila to Jagaddala with the
monk Vibhutichandra, who carried it while fleeing from his place of study to
his homeland, and then journeyed furtively to Kathmandu valley, Kashmir
and central Tibet. Copying the text during the journeys represented acts of
transmission whereby the local people and translating teams also learnt a
new language and script. Therefore, as Formigatti emphasizes, the
manuscript carried by a man also carried the man in carrying his culture.
Through the story, he draws our attention to the logic of regarding
manuscripts as an embodiment of places where different cultural traditions
met.
This Ashta is among the oldest palm-leaf manuscripts in the collection of
the University of Cambridge, and its provenance allows us to recall the
emergence of the scholarship of Buddhism in the West through the
colonization of South Asia. The pioneering collector of Buddhist
manuscripts from the Nepal hills was Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800–94),
an East India Company officer who began his career in 1820 as assistant
commissioner of the newly acquired British territory of Kumaon. Hodgson
stayed in the hills for over 20 years, becoming the first British Resident at
Kathmandu (1833–43), and the vast number of manuscripts he acquired and
donated to the Société Asiatique of Paris nurtured the nascent scholarship of
the history of Buddhism. Hodgson’s collections encouraged contemporary
Western scholars of Sanskrit and Pali to conduct extensive field searches for
ancient manuscripts within the Indian subcontinent.
Daniel Wright, who bought this palm-leaf Ashta in Kathmandu on 26
April 1876, was a surgeon at the British Residency in the city. His purchase,
however, was at a request by his brother William, professor of Arabic at
Cambridge, to acquire manuscripts of Ancient India for the University. The
request was on behalf of Edward Cowell (1867–1903), the first professor of
Sanskrit at Cambridge. Under Cowell’s guidance, his student and later
successor, Cecil Bendall, catalogued Wright’s collection. As is well known
among historians of Sanskrit studies, Bendall inspected the palm-leaf Ashta
and completed his study of the Wright collection with the publication of the
Catalogue of Buddhist Sanskrit MSS in the University Library of Cambridge
(1880). He followed this study with a field tour of Nepal and north India in
1884–85 to find and collect additional Sanskrit manuscripts for the
Cambridge University Library, and was able to acquire over 500
manuscripts. During the field survey, he ‘discovered’ scripts that were
unknown in the West, and a text in one provided information of the ruling
dynasties in Nepal, including the joint rule of three kings who were the
manuscript’s patrons. In 1898–99 Bendall made a second visit to Nepal, this
time with his wife on a honeymoon-cum-field trip, and acquired 90
manuscripts in Sanskrit. He then mastered the literature of Mahayana
Buddhism, which, to quote his student and successor Edward Rapson, ‘he
made specially his own, and for which such abundant materials collected in
no small degree by himself, exists in the University Library at Cambridge’.
The box in which the palm-leaf Ashta is kept bears a label that tells us that
the manuscript was displayed in 1947–48 at Burlington House, London, in
the premier international exhibition of The Art of India and Pakistan, which
was conceptualized and hosted by the Royal Academy. Its research
cataloguing in recent years facilitated its public display in Cambridge for the
first time, in 2015 at the MAA exhibition, Buddha’s Word. However, as
Formigatti notes, the manuscript’s last stop is no longer its place of
archiving, the Cambridge University Library. Cataloguing has created a
digital object, which ‘displayed in the virtual shrine of the Cambridge
Digital Library can be seen and read anywhere in the world where there is a
connection on the World Wide Web: the Dharma gone digital’.
Manuscript researchers often quote a verse that supposedly occurs at the
end of most Buddhist manuscripts which declares:

Save me from water protect me

from oil and from loose binding
and do not give me into the hands of fools!

Whether a lore or not, such a statement in the manuscripts appears to be a

fitting starting point for intervening into their wanton loot and destruction,
which continues unabated, as well as towards their careful scholarship.
Importantly, the verse directs our attention to the importance of engaging
with them through their life histories.
Catalogue Record: Sanskrit Manuscripts: Prajñāpāramitāstotra, Astasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā,
Vajradhvajaparināmanā (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01643/1).
BENDALL, C. (1883). Catalogue of the Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts in the University Library,
Cambridge. With Introductory Notices and Illustrations of the Palaeography and Chronology of
Nepal and Bengal. Cambridge University Press.
RAPSON, E.J. (1906). ‘Cecil Bendall’. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and
Ireland, 527–33.
FORMIGATTI, C. (2014). ‘Travelling Books’. In M. Elliott, H. Diemberger and M. Clemente (Eds),
Buddha’s Word. The Life of Books in Tibet and Beyond. University of Cambridge: Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology.
R.E. Buswell Jr. and D.S. Lopez Jr. (Eds) (2014). The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Princeton
University Press.
QUENZER, J.B. (2014). ‘Introduction’. In J. Quenzer, D. Bondarev and J. Sobisch (Eds), Manuscript
Cultures: Mapping the Field (pp. 1–8). De Gruyter.
WILLIAMS, P. (2005). Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations. Routledge.
23
THE NATARAJA OF
TIRUVALANGADU
Thiruvalangadu, Chennai District, Tamil Nadu
c. 11th century

ON SEEING A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE TIRUVALANGADU NATARAJA, given to him by

the Russian archaeologist Victor Goloubeff in 1911, the French sculptor
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) wrote a poetic text on the Dance of Shiva.
Declaring the form to be the perfect rhythmic movement, he exclaimed:

That suggestion of modelling! The mystic haze of Form! As in

something divinely regulated there is nothing in that form, rebellious
or jarring: one feels everything in its proper place.

Rodin saw the Nataraja as ‘the imperceptible movement of light, the

virtue of profundity of contrast, or airness, of power that counts’, and his
eulogy was influential in drawing the attention of the Western world to the
aesthetic value of the Chola bronzes as objects of high art. The exquisite
and unique Nataraja, which Rodin ‘set into motion in a work of poetry’, to
quote the dancer scholar Katia Lègret-Manochhaya, exemplifies the
standards of perfection that were reached during the rule of the imperial
Cholas (c. tenth to twelfth centuries) and reveals the promise of the
magnificence of a classical age.
Nataraja, Thiruvalangadu. Bronze, Govt. Museum Chennai, 236.

Idols of Nataraja in stone and bronze appear increasingly from the tenth
century, following instances of the commission of the remarkable Chola
queen Sembiyan Mahadevi (r. 941–1001), who is known for her piety and
extraordinary patronage. However, the form of the dancing Shiva was
praised in the Tamil country from long before, and during the ninth century,
the nayanmar saints hailed their lord as
Let us praise
the dancer
Who in good tillai’s hall
 Dances with fire

The Nataraja who dances the ananda tandava, or the dance of bliss,
holding fire in the palm of his right hand, is remarkably different from the
nrtta murtis, or the idols of Shiva in dance, which can be seen in the fifth-
to seventh-century temples of Badami, Aihole (Karnataka) and Sirpur
(Andhra Pradesh). However, as the poet, playwright and scholar of art H.S.
Shiva Prakash reminds us, the fifth-century Elephanta Caves (near
Mumbai) have a sculpture of a Nataraja, although heavily damaged, and the
eighth-century Kailasha temple at Ellora (near Aurangabad) houses another
example. The iconography of the Nataraja attained its perfect form in the
domain of the Chola kings when it became the tutelary deity, representing
the ascendance of the Shaiva Siddhanta sect.
The legendary origins of the Nataraja relate to an extraordinary spectacle
at Chidambaram – the sacred city of the Chola rulers and the place of their
coronation – of Shiva performing his most magnificent ananda tandava
after vanquishing, in succession, a tiger, a serpent and a dwarf (the
apsmara), who had all been created by a group of heretical rishis. The
creatures represent, respectively, an untamed mind, evil and ignorance, and
Shiva’s cosmic dance, mentioned as nadanta in the texts, brought forth his
grace. By destroying the inherent miseries of human nature, he gave
humankind the possibility of seeking release from the recurrent cycles of
rebirth.
The term Nataraja appears from the late twelfth century. Before that, as
Vidya Dehejia reminds us, this iconographic form was addressed through
Tamil epithets of dance and dancing. The icon comprises the four-armed
Shiva standing in majestic splendour with the left foot raised high across his
body and the right foot upon Mushalagan, the dwarf-like demon who brings
darkness. Shiva carries the drum (damaru) of creation and the fire of
destruction in two hands, adopts the abhaya mudra gesturing release with
the third, and gracefully extends the fourth in the gajahastha pose, offering
refuge to the human soul. In his matted hair, he wears his favourite wild
cassia flowers, a skull and serpents, and many bronzes show him bearing
the river Ganga, whom he gently lowered on to the parched earth. By
carefully mapping the stylistic developments in the Nataraja iconography,
Dehejia demonstrated that the bronzes which show Shiva holding fire in a
bowl and not in his hand, and Mushalagan looking up towards him in
devotion and not straight ahead, are the early icons. The Tiruvalangadu
Nataraja, which is dated on stylistic grounds to c. 1000 CE, is one among
them.
The bronze idol is of the Vataranyeshwarar temple, whose building began
during the rule of the Pallava dynasty (sixth to ninth centuries) and was
subsequently enlarged by the Chola rulers. Tiruvalangadu, near Chennai,
lies in Tondai-nadu, the Pallava heartland annexed by Aditya Chola (r. 870–
907 CE) after he defeated and killed his feudatory lord. The
Vataranyeshwarar temple, its historians tell us, was visited by all the
erstwhile nayanmars, such as Appar, Sambandar (seventh century) and
Sundarar (eighth century), and especially by Karaikallar Ammaiyar, the
oldest among them who attained moksha by sitting in rapt attention at the
feet of the Nataraja. Karaikallar Ammaiyar saw her Lord’s home as
Tiruvalangadu (the forest of the sacred banyan tree) and composed ten
verses which possibly date from the sixth century. Legend also tells us that
it was here that Kali lost to Shiva in a dance competition and, supposedly,
left for the tillai, or forest. Significantly, of the five pre-eminent Natarajas
within the Chola realm, the one at Tiruvalangadu was considered the ratna
sabhapati, or lord of the hall of gems.
The creation of idols in bronze proliferated from the time of Rajaraja I (r.
985–1014), who established the Chola Empire by vastly enlarging his
inheritance of lands around Tanjavur and Tiruchirappalli. He annexed the
territories of all his neighbours – the Pandya, Chera, Ganga, and Eastern
Chalukya kings – and broke their monopoly of trade with West Asia. To
further his economic gains, he sent his navies to the Maldives and Ilam
(northern Sri Lanka) and thereby acquired rights and concessions in the
maritime trade of the south and southeast and substantial wealth through
war booty, such as the loot of Anuradhapuram, Sri Lanka. He
commemorated his victories by building a magnificent Shiva temple in his
capital, Tanjavur, and the main icon of the temple – a massive linga, of over
28.5 feet in length – he enshrined in his name. Conceptualized as the
Dakshina Meru (axis of the universe in the south), the Rajarajesvara temple
housed 66 magnificent bronzes that were all royally endowed by the king,
his queens, his sisters and officers.
The Tiruvalangadu Nataraja is associated with a copper-plate inscription
that dates from the sixth regnal year of Rajaraja’s son Rajendra I (r. 1014–
1044). The inscription informs us of Rajendra’s campaigns in the north, in
which he defeated the Pala ruler, Mahipala (c. 995–1043), and assumed the
name Gangaikonda (the conquerors of the kingdoms near the Ganga) after
which his armies symbolically carried the water of the Ganga to consecrate
his new capital, which he aptly named Gangaikondacholapuram (near
Kumbhakonam). The Ganga water was poured into a lake there, built
sixteen miles long as a Liquid Pillar of Victory. Praising Rajendra’s
prowess, the inscription declared:

Mocking Bhagiratha who by the force of his austerities caused the

descent of Ganga, Rajendra, Light of the Solar race, set out to
sanctify his own land with the waters of that stream brought by the
strength of his arm.

The magnificent Nataraja possibly illuminates the majesty of the peerless

monarch. Even though it has lost the prabha (aureole of fire), its power and
vigour are palpable. In his study of the icon Ananda Coomaraswamy noted
‘a synthesis of science and religion and art […] the physical proportions
and the flowing contours are blended into a pose so amazing’. He praised
the sthapathis who created this ‘Shiva with flying hair’ as ‘rishi artists’, and
emphasized that even the back of the sculpture creates the experiential
feeling of the twists and turns of a body.
Devotion to the earthly sovereign through devotion to the sovereign Lord
was the core tenet of Chola imperialism. In facilitating the gods’ darshan to
all, the portable bronzes added to the public rituals of venerating
sovereignty. They nurtured Bhakti (devotion) of the sovereigns.
 The robed, bejewelled and garlanded bronze gods were taken out in
spectacular processions on palanquins and temple chariots on strategically
planned routes, where they could be seen and worshipped by all. Thus,
Naralokaviran, a devout minister of Kulottunga I (r. 1070–1118) and
Vikramachola (r. 1118–35), commissioned a road at Chidambaram from the
koyil (temple) to the seaside so that the Nataraja could enjoy the sea air. The
minister lined the road with freshwater tanks for the welfare of the
devotees, and notably, his public service to the gods coincided with the
rising fortunes of Chidambaram as a maritime port.
The Nataraja, like all Chola bronzes, is made through the lost wax
process, or cire perdue. The earliest reference to the technology within
southern India is an invocation to rain by Andal, a nayanmar (c. 800 CE),
who sings
O rain clouds
Seeming like dark clay outside
Liquid wax within
Rain down upon Venkatam
 Where the handsome lord dwells

As we know, the Dancing Girl of the Indus Civilization is among the first
examples of the lost wax method of bronze casting in South Asia (see ch.
4). The Chola bronzes document the technical perfection of the method
within the region. In looking at them anew, Dehejia suggests that since
‘there is no copper in granite-rich Tamil Nadu’, the island nation of Sri
Lanka was possibly the source of the copper. The solidly built bronzes
bespoke the total mastery of the metal. They required native-like, in-depth
knowledge of its properties, especially of cooling and heating, and the
incredibly high level of perfection in the craftsmanship of a ‘foreign’ metal
– if indeed it is – is a remarkable feat. Notably, twelfth-century Arabic texts
mention traders in Aden, on the Red Sea, shipping copperware to the
Coromandel coast for refashioning items into ewers, bowls and lamps.
The bronze craftsmen in the Chola realm knew that the idols they made
would be adorned with rich clothes and ornaments. Yet they created lithe,
youthful and highly sensual bodies, which met contemporary requirements
of veneration that built upon the enhancement of the senses. Shiva Prakash
reminds us that the Tiruvalangadu Nataraja not only ‘impacted Rodin’s own
creativity’ but also the poetic invocations of Karaikallar Ammaiyar, who in
seeing Shiva in his majestic urdhva tandava (left-leg-raised posture) longed
to belong to him. Both responses were intensely sensual and encourage
reflections on the increasingly puritan views today towards the depiction of
nudity and sensuality of the Brahmanical deities. The Nataraja beckons us
to see that we enslave our gods to our ordinary worlds when we take away
from their body their luminescent sexuality and its alluring power.

COOMARASWAMY, A.K. (1918). The Dance of Shiva. The Sunwise Turn.

DEHEJIA, V. (1990). Art of the Imperial Cholas. Columbia University Press.
DEHEJIA, V. (2009). The Body Adorned: Sacred and Profane in Indian Art. Columbia University
Press.
GLASBERG, E. (2016, June 29). ‘Art Historian Vidya Dehejia Illuminates Chola Indian Bronzes’.
Columbia News.
GRAVELEY, F.H. and T.N. Ramachandran. (1932). Catalogue of the South Indian Hindu Metal
Images in the Madras Government Museum. Bulletin of the Madras Government Museum
(N.S.) General Section, 1(2), 113.
GRAVELEY, F.H. and T.N. Ramachandran. (1932). Catalogue of the South Indian Hindu Metal
Images in the Madras Government Museum. Bulletin of the Madras Government Museum
(N.S.) General Section, 1(2), Pl XVIII (fig. 2). [Image].
LèGRET-MANOCHHAYA, K. (2016). ‘Introduction’. In K. Lègret-Manochhaya (Ed.), Rodin and
the Dance of Shiva (pp. 7–16). Niyogi Books.
SHIVA PRAKASH, H.S. (2016). ‘Through Each Other’s Eyes: Rodin and Nataraja’. In K. Lègret-
Manochhaya (Ed.), Rodin and the Dance of Shiva (pp. 131–40). Niyogi Books.
RODIN, A.M. (1921). ‘The Dance of Shiva’. Ars Asiatica III.
24
A ‘TEMPLE SARI’
Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu

THE DESCRIPTION OF THIS ‘KANJIVARAM SILK’, TO USE A colloquial expression,

as a temple sari informs us of the modern creations of the bespoke
traditional. Like many representational objects of traditions, such saris are
of relatively recent origin, although produced in one of the earliest known
weaving cities in south India. The sari demonstrates the ways in which the
discourse of tradition often fashions new tastes, and the histories it jogs us
to consider – of weaving, weavers, looms, designs, rituals, myths and
markets – allows us to see the ways in which cloth weaves the world and
clothes it with meaning.
The long history of weaving at Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu, can be
mapped with considerable accuracy from the tenth century when Uttama
Chola (r. 973–985) settled communities of Telegu-speaking Padma Saliyar
weavers from the Andhra region. By the twelfth century, Kanchipuram
weavers were a powerful force within the city’s political economy, and the
weaving communities of the city included, apart from the Padma Saliyar,
the Tamil-speaking Kaikkola Senguntar, Gujarati-speaking Saurashtrian
Iyer, and Kannada- speaking Senier and Devanga Chetty. Their lineages
survive in the city to this date. Since woven garments were an intrinsic part
of political diplomacy, the weavers were often required to accompany rulers
on military tours. Chola inscriptions inform us in detail of the military roles
of the Kaikkola community whose members served as commanders-in-chief
and provided the kings with perumpadai, or large armies. They also inform
us that the powerful temples of the city encouraged weaving communities
from elsewhere to settle on temple lands. An early inscriptional evidence is
a royal gift to the Ulagalanda Perumal temple in 1111, which mentions, to
quote a study by James Heitzman and S. Rajagopal, cloth merchants (caliya
nakarattar) cultivating the fallow temple lands through ‘the gracious
permission of the king’. The Chola mahanadu of Kanchipuram – once the
capital city of the Pallava kings (sixth to ninth centuries) and which
remained a powerful managaram, or big mercantile city, until the last
decades of the Vijayanagara Empire (mid-sixteenth century) – was the
centre of a powerful guild of weavers who had the authority to disburse
rights and privileges to weaving communities elsewhere.
Sari, silk with brocade, 19th century, Kanchipuram. CSMVS 2005.1/5.

The ‘oral tradition of silk’ in Tamil Nadu, as its historian Vijaya

Ramaswamy tells us, ‘refers to origins and antiquity [of silk] in China’, and
reminds us that the soft and lustrous Chinese silk was a much-prized import
commodity. There are increasing references from the twelfth century to silk
weaving communities in the Tondaimandalam, or the ancient Tamil lands of
which Kanchipuram was the headquarters, of whom the Devanga
community in Madurai were quite prominent. But despite the increasing
evidence of silk cloth and silk weavers from this period, the weavers of
Kanchipuram wove silk largely from the late nineteenth century, and
visitors to the city today are informed that there was little zarigai, or gold
thread, prior to the late 1930s. Thus, the nineteenth-century weavers of
Kanchipuram would have considered the ‘temple sari’ with woven design
and border in gold thread an innately modern product.
It is not known whether the sari was woven for a temple, and it lacks
some of the traditional designs of ritual symbolism, such as the rudraksham
and gopuram. The object catalogue mentions ‘this rich brocade sari with a
wide border’ as a variation of a Kornad sari. It is worth noting that the use
of kornadu cloth was once restricted to Tanjore Brahmins, though not when
this sari was produced. The rich red and gold sari has a ‘heavy pallu with
thirteen bands of floral designs and animal motifs, such as tigers, deer and
peacocks’, and the weaving of the complex panels of dense and complex
pattern was undertaken through the use of adai, which Ramaswamy
reminds us ‘is the loom at Kanchipuram’.
The adai is the patterned cord of a three-shuttle loom by which weavers
can lift a select set of warp ends and weave through the intricate and time-
consuming korvai technique of the interlocking weft. The saris created
through this technique were conceptualized with the drape of the garment in
mind. So, they were woven as three distinct elements – the body, border and
pallu, and, as the historian of ‘kanjivaram silk’ Aarti Kawlra reminds us,
through the ‘conjunction of opposed elements along three design
parameters – colour and texture and ornamentation.’ The border weaving
requires an extra third shuttle, and the pallu is linked to the body through a
special interlinking weave, the pitni, which, in the hands of skilled weavers,
appears a seamless join.
The three-shuttle loom which facilitates the korvai, requires two weavers
– one operating the threads from the central portion and the other at the
borders. The weavers install the looms in their houses as pit looms, which
are possibly the earliest looms in South Asia. A fifteenth-century loom song
of the Kaikkola Senguntar provides a glimpse of the transpositions within
the acts of weaving, worship and creation in the declaration that

Turning into yarn the lotus reed

Pulling the yarn tightly
Starching the yarn, marking the pricks
Stretching warp and woof on the loom
God Adisesha became the rope
Brahma the plank
The threads stretched out and
Held in place by weights
 Siva and Parvati are
the dividing stick of the weaving shed
(We are) weaving a silken cloth…

The Kaikkola, who bestowed upon themselves the suffix of Mudaliyar in

the same period as they composed the above song, are staunch Shaivites.
However, the yarn they wove, and which is used even today by them and by
all weaving communities, is the fibre of the lotus stem, which, according to
legend, emerged from Vishnu’s navel. The cosmic genealogies of the
weaving communities often illustrate the connected histories of Shiva and
Vishnu worship despite the growing hostilities between the two groups
from the tenth century. Additionally, many genealogical narratives convey
origin stories of the threads and dyes. Thus, we are told that in order to
prevent the rakshasas from stealing the lotus stalks which Devala gathered
from Vishnu, Shiva’s consort Parvati transformed herself as Chaudesvari
Amman and spread out her tongue to swallow their blood which ran out in
the colours of black, white, red, green, and yellow. Parvati then gave Devala
the colours to colour the cloth with which he clothed the gods and came to
be called Devanga. His lineage wove the devanga chiri, or brocaded silk, in
Madurai by the twelfth century.
The myths of weaving communities also narrate histories of how some
came to be weavers by falling down the social ladder such as the Brahmins
of Saurashtra. They were accursed to weaving after refusing to obey Indra
or, according to a different version, the sage Parashurama. This origin myth
illuminates the historical ancestry of the silk-weaving Saurashtra Iyer
community, or the Pattunulkarar, still dominant in Madurai today.
As it often is with the ‘stuff of tradition’, to quote Prasannan
Parthasarathi, the new korvai silk sari of Kanchipuram acquired its
traditional appeal far away from the pre-eminent weaving city. It was
valued and used as a tradtional textile in Kalakshetra, Chennai, the
international academy of Indian culture founded in 1936 by Rukmini Devi
Arundale (1904–86). Rukmini Devi famously resurrected from ignominy
the sadir attam, the solo dance of the devadasis, by choreographing a new
dance form, the Bharatanatyam, which she presented as India’s classical
dance. Kawlra tells us that the rebirth of the devadasi dance on stage at
Kalakshetra necessitated a new costume that could appeal to the aesthetics
and social sensibilities of the upper-caste dancers, such as Rukmini Devi
herself, as well as the audience. The costume was personally fashioned by
Rukmini Devi using the Kanchipuram korvai silk from the weaving units at
Kalakshetra, where she installed pit looms and brought skilled weaving
families from Kanchipuram to work them. She designed the new sari by
effecting subtle changes in the weaving techniques, such as the number of
threads per unit space, and by ‘grounding its design elements – texture,
motifs, colours and border widths’ so that the new dance muse appeared as
the ‘ancient temple dancer’. Rukmini Devi’s ‘experiments […] were
arbitrated by the notion of timeless appeal’, and as Bharatanatyam gained
popularity, the Kanchipuram korvai silks moved out of a region-specific
identity and ‘became the dress of the cultured and educated Indian woman’.
Rukmini Devi’s authorized versions of the look of a traditional sari thus
subsequently designed a new national identity for the ‘kanjivarams’, which
is now being re-fashioned anew through creations of ‘trendy traditional’
theme saris with screen images of Tamil Nadu’s ancient heritage.
In directing us to note the modernity of the Kanchipuram korvai silks, the
Temple Sari coaxes us to see some of the ways in which processes of
heritagization design a discourse of tradition. However, the social histories
of weaving, which it encourages a note of, also present the relentless
attempts of weaving families to conserve the traditions of practice. For
them, weaving is a way of life, which shapes their lived environment and
familial perspectives. It demands from them a high degree of workmanship
and directs them to nurture the next generation of weavers by building upon
inherited skills through the social processes of teaching. Many have now
left the profession because of dire circumstances, and most show great
reluctance to work in the looms of the weaving factories. Thus, as Kawlra
narrates, when wholesale merchants began to establish ‘factory-like
production sheds’ in Kanchipuram during the 1990s to meet the rising
demand for Tamil Nadu’s silk saris, they had to find loom workers from the
agricultural communities nearby.
The sari as a garment evokes an ancient culture in which, to quote the
well-known Indian textile historian Ṛta Kapur Chishti, ‘the woven and
textured-with-pattern; unpierced or intruded upon by the stitching needle;
was considered not only more appropriate in terms of aesthetics and
climate, but was also an act of greater purity and simplicity’. The
‘kanjivaram sari’ continues to weave the tie of tradition as a natal bond
through its use value. The Padma Saliyars, who consider themselves
specialist weavers of raasi or auspiciousness, strongly believe that ‘design
parameters […] and ethical exchange of these saris will augment well-being
and mitigate misfortune for the users of their products’. Once the sari is
taken off the loom, they ostensibly accrue malevolent influences if it is not
sold within a certain period. The Padma Saliyar cloth merchants, such as
Nalli Chinnaswami Chetti and his family, who now monopolize the global
sale of such ‘south silks’, are also known to not sell old korvai silk saris to
customers, lest the latter be soiled with harmful elements. The rituals of
auspiciousness woven into the ‘kanjivaram silks’ demonstrate continuities
of the centuries-long tradition of the transactional value of cloth, which
transfers value and honour, and also, as C.A. Bayly had pointed out long
ago, ‘pollution and dishonor’, in a way money does not. The ‘Temple Sari’,
as its catalogue entry reminds us, is ‘also worn at the time of wedding and
special occasion’. It would have been bought at an auspicious moment, and
even in today’s world would never be purchased at a discount sale.
The different kinds of saris that have historically been woven in different
parts of the Indian subcontinent for over a thousand years, if not more,
document the various ways in which textile weaving has entailed
experiments in the evolution of textiles. The sari continues to be the visual
marker of the quintessential Indian, and an anthropological study of recent
times notes that the wearers are as much a force as the producers, in adding
the tactile world of intimacy, sensuality and emotions to the lived garment.
In one of the early studies of the Kanchipuram weavers undertaken
during the 1970s, Yvonne Arterburn demonstrated in detail the politics and
benefits of the textile cooperatives that emerged with the organization of
India’s handicraft sector in 1952. She enthused that ‘co-operative activities
take the weaver from a little house crowded with looms in Kanchipuram out
to the All-Indian wider society in which he is participating’. Much has
changed for the weaving communities of India since then. A visit to
Kanchipuram today would show duplicate ‘kanjivarams’ being made on
power looms and many of the old weaving houses abandoned, with their pit
looms languishing as antique relics.
Yet, India seemingly makes 95 per cent of the world’s handmade textiles,
and the handloom sector today is the country’s second largest employment
industry after agriculture. Ironically, a count of the All India Handloom
Board in 2019–20 shows that there are 3.5 million handloom workers today,
which is half the number of the 6.5 million twenty years ago. Additionally,
those who have known, produced, designed and savoured handloom
products would also tell us that handcraftsmanship is evidently in decline.
Therefore, the most pressing need today, as Prachi Raniwala documents
through interviews with three brilliant handloom experts, is

urgent reforms and upgrades to ensure sustainability and longevity

for artisans at the grassroots level. More so, as the 28-year-old All
India Handloom Board, that was created in 1992 to advise the
government on the development of the sector and protect the interest
of weavers and SMEs, was disbanded in late July this year [2020].

The ‘temple sari’ in the holdings of a premier museum alerts us to the

increasing numbers of textile galleries being created in India today. The
grand public displays of the magnificent traditions of weaving, one hopes,
may also create the intellectual space for decolonizing tradition, thereby
enhancing the craft’s sustainability in the modern world.
ARTERBURN, Y.A. (1982). The Loom of Interdependence: Silkweaving Cooperatives in
Kanchipuram. Hindustan Publishing Corporation.
BAGCHI, S. (2019, 14 January). ‘The Sari Specialists’. The Mint.
BANERJEE, M. and D. Miller. (2003). The Sari. Berg.
BAYLY, C.A. (1986). ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society 1700–
1930’. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective
(pp. 285–322). Cambridge University Press.
HEITZMAN, J. and S. Rajagopal. (2004). ‘Urban Geography and Land Measurement in the Twelfth
Century: The Case of Kanchipuram’. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 41(3),
237–68.
KAPUR CHISHTI, R. and M. Singh. (2010). Saris of India: Tradition and Beyond. Roli Books.
KAWLRA, A. (2018). We Who Weave with Lotus Thread: Summoning Community in South India.
Orient BlackSwan.
KAWLRA, A. (2020). ‘Between Culture and Technology: Theme Saris and the Graphic
Representation of Heritage in Tamil Nadu, India’. In A. Nakatani (Ed.), Fashionable Traditions:
Asian Handmade Textiles in Motion (pp. 99–116). Lexington Books.
RAMASWAMY, V. (2013). The Song of the Loom: Weaver Folk Traditions in South India. Primus
Books.
RANIWALA, P. (2020, August). ‘3 experts on what the Indian handloom industry needs right now’.
Vogue.
ROW, V.T. (1883). A Manual of the District of Tanjore in the Madras Presidency. Lawrence Press.
25
KALHANA’S RAJATARANGINI
Kashmir
1148–50

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO HIS ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF Kalhana’s

Rajatarangini, the twelfth-century A Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir
(1900), Marc Aurel Stein provided a brief history of how he came to own
the copied manuscript. Stein stated that it was treasured as an ‘important
family heirloom’ by a Kashmiri Pandit, Kesavarama, and after his death, in
c. 1888, was physically divided among his heirs. He then successfully
negotiated the loan of the parts from the respective owners and in 1890 took
the entire manuscript, comprising ‘328 folia of age-old Kashmir paper’, to
England to work upon the translation during a year-long furlough. During
the journey, the container in which the manuscript was packed fell into the
sea at Ostende harbour, and Stein triumphantly recalled that he was able to
retrieve it with much difficulty. ‘The soaking in the sea-water’, Stein light-
heartedly commented, ‘left no perceptible traces on the folios’ for when the
owners ‘received back in 1892 their respective parts they had no inkling of
the abhisheka their household talisman had undergone’.
Perhaps we ought to read Stein’s story with suitable caveats since the
water-stained pages betray a splash of the abhisheka, and the reason why
the six folios of the manuscript remained in his personal collection – and
therefore are to be found in the Stein Collection at the Bodleian – we know
not.
A copy of the Rajatarangini, 16th century, Sarada script. Stein Collection, Bodleian Libraries MS
Or.d.31, fol. 3v 4r.

The Rajatarangini was composed between 1148 and 1150 by Kalhana, a

‘Cashmirian’ Brahmin – described as such by William Jones, the founding
figure of the Western scholarship of Ancient India. In eight tarangas (or
waves), often translated as cantos or sections, Kalhana narrated the entire
history of the kings of Kashmir, from antiquity to the rule of Jayasimha of
the Lohara dynasty (r. 1128–49), in whose kingdom he lived. Kalhana
presented himself as the kavi (poet) of the Rajatarangini and began the
treatise with the rule of Gonanda I and the declaration that

Eleven works of former scholars containing the chronicles of the

kings, I have inspected, as well as the [Purana containing the]
opinion of the sage Nila. By looking at the inscriptions regarding the
consecration of temples and grants by former kings, at the laudatory
inscriptions and at written works, the trouble arising from many
errors has been overcome.
 Clearly Kalhana sourced ancient texts, inscriptions, and antiquities, as he
informs us in his later verses, for writing about the kings who ruled
Kashmir, and the Orientalist scholarship of India during the eighteenth
century highlighted his efforts as emulations of the historical method.
However, Sanskritists who now revisit the long scholarship of the
Rajatarangini from Stein’s time, remind us that Kalhana’s endeavours
convey his intellectual milieu which, to quote Lawrence McCrea,
‘concerned itself with the problem of how narratives can be best selected,
arranged and restructured for maximum aesthetic effect’.
As Stein perceptively noted, Kalhana explicitly highlights the 150 years
near his lifetime as a dark period. This period spanned between the death of
Queen Didda (1003) and the rule of Jayasimha and was marked by dynastic
turmoil, bringing drastic changes in the lives of people in Kashmir.
Kalhana’s focus on the unrest inevitably fashioned the epic, which appears
as a chronicle of bad judgements, misrule and human folly. Thus in
summarizing his descriptions, McCrea emphasizes that

In a great many cases even kings who begin by ruling well eventually
fall into evil practices […] While there are exceptions to this general
pattern of moral decay among the many kings whose career Kalhaṇa
surveys, they are few and far between. In some cases, they are kings
whose reign is only very brief […] Far more typical are kings who
hang on to power as long as they possibly can, by any means
necessary. In many of the reigns […] there is a clear point at which
the king begins to go bad […] And this happens with some regularity
even to the best kings.

In many verses, Kalhana complains of ‘the burden of having to lower

himself to describe the kings’, and we note the plethora of pointed retorts
such as ‘those kings who have no eyes for things of great charm and cannot
judge what is sweet, what can they know but eating, just as blind oxen?’ Of
Didda (r. 980–1003), the only woman ruler he brings to light, he illustrates
the fallacy of believing in her characteristic goodness by pitting her against
the nature of objects through the declaration that:

wood even without burning may relieve the cold of monkeys; water
and fire may serve to clean the skin of antelopes, which purify
themselves in the flames. Things serve the object of each being
according to its ways; they never possess in reality an innate nature.

And of Harsha (r. 1089–1101), served by his father Champaka, Kalhana

presents in vicarious detail the propensity of the ruler’s cruelties and greed.
These include his relentless persecution of the damaras (landed gentry), his
rapaciousness and the promiscuous behaviour that led to his murder.
However, as David Shulman reminds us, the grand epic of the relentless
moral decline of all its principal characters can also be read as Kalhana
chastising his ‘hero-villains for their criminal stupidity; [for] he seems to
think they had a choice’. The transformation of Lalitaditya (c. 724–760)
from a handsome and adventurous prince to an immoral king and the
characterization of Harsha as an ‘essentially insentient object worked over
by the corrupt and immoral parasites that surrounded him’ are two
examples that, Shulman suggests, illustrate the stylistic treatment through
which Kalhana conveys the fallibility of human nature.
The Rajatarangini, as all its scholars tell us, conveys the ‘full story of the
Kashmiri kings, warts and all’. The Orientalists therefore deemed the text
historical and famously ordained this to be the only history within the entire
corpus of Sanskrit literature. William Jones set the terms of the reception of
the text with the statement that ‘no Hindu nation, but the Cashmirians, have
left us regular histories in their ancient [read Sanskrit] language’. The
assessment equipped British historians of the Indian subcontinent with the
historical fact that the natives had no sense of history as they had been
unmindful of documenting their past throughout Ancient India.
The understanding that the Rajatarangini was Ancient India’s only
history book also prompted translations of the existing Sanskrit copies into
English and French from the early nineteenth century for facilitating India’s
historical scholarship. Stein’s translation of the codex archetypus – a
seventeenth-century text annotated by Ratnakantha and discovered in
Kashmir by Georg Bühler, his teacher – established the definitive
understanding that

the interest of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini for Indian history generally

lies in the fact that it represents a class of Sanskrit composition which
comes nearest in character to the chronicles of Medieval Europe and
of the Muhammadan East. Together with the later Kashmir
Chronicles which continue Kalhana’s narrative, it is practically the
sole extant specimen of this class.

The view above, which prevailed more or less intact within histories of
India until the end of the twentieth century, inscribes the anomaly that
notions of proper history which emerged during the time of the European
enlightenment can be used for making assessments of ancient texts, and
judging these as either histories or fables. The anomaly continues to
nurture, as Whitney Cox emphasizes, a ‘false dilemma’ regarding the
assessment of the Rajatarangini as history, or poetry (mahakavya)
following Kalhana’s self-reference as a kavi. Cox has convincingly
presented the text as the ‘culmination of a Kashmir-specific literary genre’,
the crowning achievement of the ‘Kashmiri slokakatha’, comprising a
‘mode of historical consciousness in which knowledge of the past is
concerned with neither a full understanding of its causal structures nor with
the presentation of redemptive trajectory’.
The critical rereading of the Rajatarangini today regards the shifting
political geographies which have constituted Kashmir throughout history. In
fact, by exploring the references to the Turushkas, or Turks, in the text,
Finbarr Flood tells us that

One of the problems in conceptualising the relationship between

these contiguous realms [Ghaznavid sultanate and Himalayan
kingdoms] has been an anachronistic tendency to envisage them as
 possessed of boundaries analogous to those of the modern nation.
The rhetorical posturing of the medieval Arabic and Persian histories
has tended to affirm this impression by reifying cultural and religious
difference, depicting the boundaries between the eastern sultanates of
Dar al-Islam and the neighbouring kingdoms of al-Hind as a kind of
medieval iron curtain. By contrast the Rajatarangini suggests that the
cultural, ethnic and religious boundaries between these realms were
quite porous, permeable enough to permit the employment of a non-
Hindu Turk in the embellishment of a royal Shiva temple.

Flood documents the ‘mobility of metalworking techniques between India

and Iran’ during the eleventh century and the trans-regional circulations of
goods and ideas. He emphasizes that the evidence of a migrant Turushka in
Kashmir is ‘a reminder that the value placed on unusual technical skills
could cut across ethnic, geographic and sectarian boundaries’.
The Rajatarangini thus draws our attention to histories of connections
that also remind us that the first commissioned translation of the text was
into Persian and was undertaken during the reign of Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin
(r. 1420–70). The translation established a new tradition of ‘Persian literary
culture’, as Chitralekha Zutshi has demonstrated, and the ‘dialogical
undertaking’ informs of the reciprocal relationships between ‘native’ and
‘foreign’ literary traditions. The British carefully ignored the Persian copies
while historicizing the Rajatarangini, although the copies provide glimpses
of the complex philological scholarship of pre-colonial South Asia, which
aimed at creating proximal texts.
While dwelling upon the fragility of the moral world, the Rajatarangini
brilliantly evokes the majestic splendour of Kashmir, and we note Kalhana’s
deep empathy with his homeland in the first Taranga, where he declares:

That country may be conquered by the force of spiritual merits but

not by forces of soldiers. Hence, its inhabitants are afraid only of the
world beyond.
 There the rivers are free from dangers and aquatic monsters,
provided with warm bath-houses for the winter, and furnished with
comfortable embankments [for descending] into the water.
Out of respect, as it were, the sun does not burn fiercely, during
summer even in the [country] which has been created by his father
(Kasyapa), as he knows that it ought not to be tormented.
Learning, lofty houses, saffron, icy water and grapes: things that
even in heaven are difficult to find are common.

The visual imagery of twelfth-century Kashmir touches the Kashmiriyat

of today. Notably, the sense of belonging which the imagery nurtures led to
the appropriation of the Rajatarangini by two eminent Kashmiris who made
significant contributions to Indian independence. One was Ranjit Pandit,
who set upon translating the text into English, and finished the undertaking
inside Bareilly Jail in 1933. The other was Jawaharlal Nehru, his brother-in-
law, from whom he had requested a preface for his book, and who stated
that

As I write this my vision is limited by high walls that seem to close

in upon me and envelop me and the heat of the plains oppresses me.
But Kalhana has enabled me to overstep these high walls and forget
the summer heat, and to visit that land of Sun god […]

The encounters of the Rajatarangini with different historiographies and

perspectives of viewing have certainly endowed the text with many
meanings apart from those by Kalhana. In this respect, Stein’s biography of
the sixteenth-century copy in the Sarada script adds to the many spaces –
private, institutional, intellectual and commercial – through which the
manuscript has travelled. The original Rajatarangini from Kalahana’s time
does not exist, and Stein possibly modified his own judgement about the
codex archetypus in 1895, with his own discoveries of a fragmentary
manuscript in Lahore.
 Copies of the non-existing original Rajatarangini caution us against the
fetishizing of parent objects. They coax us instead to see why new
meanings of the original are always in the making.

COX, W. (2013). ‘Literary Register and Historical Consciousness in Kalhana: A Hypothesis’. The
Indian Economic and Social History Review, 50(2), 131–60.
FLOOD, F.B. (2012). ‘Gilding, Inlay and the Mobility of Metallurgy: A Case of Fraud in Medieval
Kashmir’. In V. Porter and M. Rosser-Owen (Eds), Metalwork and Material Culture in the
Islamic World: Art, Craft and Text, Essays Presented to James W. Allan (pp. 131–42). I.B.
Tauris.
JONES, W. (1798). ‘On Asiatic History, Civil and Natural’. [Lecture]. Asiatick Researches, 4, i–xx.
MCCREA, L. (2013). ‘Santarasa in the Rajatarangini: History, Epic and Moral Decay’. The Indian
Economic and Social History Review, 50(2), 179–99.
PANDIT, R.S. (Trans.) (1935). Rajatarangini: The Saga of the Kings of Kashmir. Sahitya Akademi.
SHULMAN, D. (2013). ‘Preface: Kalahana’s Rajatarangini. What is it?’ The Indian Economic and
Social History Review, 50(2), 127–30.
STEIN, M.A. (Trans.) (1900). Kalhana’s Rajatarangini: or, Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir.
Archibald Constable.
ZUTSHI, C. (2013). ‘Past as tradition, past as history: The Rajatarangini Narratives in Kashmir’s
Persian Historical Tradition’. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 50(2), 201–19.
26
ELLENBOROUGH’S ‘SOMANATHA
GATES’
Somanatha, Gujarat
c. 11th century

THE MASSIVE GATES ARE TWO-DOOR PANELS AND WEIGH OVER half a tonne.
They were carted from Ghazni, Afghanistan, to India at the command of
Governor General Lord Ellenborough (1842–44) by the army of the British
East India Company, as it returned defeated and routed from the First
Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42). In his dispatch to the commander-in-charge
of the forces in Afghanistan, Ellenborough wrote:

You will bring away from the tomb of Mahmoud of Ghuznee his
club, which hangs over it; and you will bring away the Gates of his
tomb, which are the gates of the temple of Somnauth. These will be
the just trophies of your successful march.

The club or durbash of Mahmud Subuktigin, the ruler of Ghazni from

998 to 1030 could not be found. However, the Somanatha Gates were
carried, in 1842, by the troops led by William Nott. They uprooted from the
dilapidated tomb of the Sultan a pair of doors with Arabic inscriptions in
Kufic style. In her history of the gates, Maya Jasanoff informs us that a
British cleric in Nott’s brigade noted that ‘the numerous fakeers attending
the tomb wept at their removal, as they accounted them their most valuable
treasure’. It is easy to guess why Ellenborough believed in the existence of
a club with which Mahmud supposedly smashed the idol of Shiva in the
Somanatha Temple during his raid of this thriving commercial town in
1025/26. The object appears in a sixteenth-century account of Mahmud’s
conquests by Ferishta, the sixteenth-century Persian historian who travelled
within Hindustan. And the English translation of this account appeared in
print just before the Anglo-Afghan War. But what of the gates?
A set of doors from the tomb of Mahmud of Ghazni in Agra Fort. Deodar Wood, 16.5 ft. × 13.5 ft.

Historians today believe that Ellenborough was possibly trying to outdo

Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780–1839), the ruler of Punjab, who had
demanded the Somanatha gates from the deposed Sultan of Afghanistan
when the latter sought shelter at his court. However, considering that neither
the contemporary sources of Mahmud’s raids into the Indian subcontinent
between 1000–1025/26 nor subsequent texts mention the Sultan looting the
gates of the Somanatha Temple, Ranjit Singh’s demands, if the story is true,
were based on pure hearsay. In effect, Ellenborough’s command to rob
Mahmud’s tomb of its gates spoke of his aims towards ‘a ritual presentation
to the Hindu populace for the restoration of a temple that no longer existed’,
as Finbarr Flood aptly articulates the act.
Notably, the gesture faced censure in the British Parliament in 1843. The
vehement opposition, especially of the liberal MP Thomas Babington
Macaulay – of the (in)famous Minute on Indian Education (1835) – was
based upon observations that Ellenborough was supporting one of the ‘false
religions of the East’ (namely, Hinduism), which would make the Muslims
– considered to be believers of yet another false religion – indignant.
Instead, the opposition demanded that Britain ought to stand impartial and
give the ‘millions of natives’ of India a kind of life ‘they would have never
had before their [British] conquest’. By then, the gates had reached Agra,
and the Parliament forbade Ellenborough to move them any further. So they
were left there, in storage inside the Agra Fort, and the historical memory
they accrued, albeit within a very short span during the nineteenth century,
as genuine elements of the temple of Somanatha remained unrefuted in the
public sphere.
‘The Supposed Gates of “Somnauth”’, The Illustrated London News, 3 January 1872.

Around the time of their removal from Mahmud’s tomb, Britain’s

pioneering architectural historian of the East, James Fergusson (1808–86),
lamented upon the fact that no single British officer was ‘able or willing to
appreciate’ the ruins of Ghazni, of which nothing was known when they
‘passed and re-passed’ through the area. Fergusson described the gates to be

of deodar pine, and the carved ornaments on them are so similar to

those found at Cairo, on the mosque of Ibn Tulun and other buildings
of that age, as not only to prove that they are of the same date, but
also to show how similar were the modes of decoration at these two
extremities of the Muslim empire at the time of their execution.

Additionally, Fergusson remarked that ‘there is nothing in their

ornamentation that resembles anything found in any Hindu temple, either of
that age or any other time’. And therefore, he declared that ‘there is, in fact
no reason for doubting that these gates were made for the place where they
were found’.
During the renovations of the Agra Fort in 1905 by the Archaeological
Survey of India, the gates were kept in a makeshift enclosed area near Shah
Jahan’s private apartments. The notice outside the room, added during the
1980s, mentions that the then director general of the Survey, Sir John
Marshall (1902–28), had placed a board next to the doors that described the
‘whole event’ of their removal and that these doors are now ‘lying here
either as a war trophy of the British campaign of 1842, or a sad reminder of
the historic lies of the East India Company’. Although labelled as ‘Ghaznin
Gate (1030 AD)’, another small stone plaque carries the epithet ‘Somnath
Gate’, the name by which the gates were committed to public memory at
the time of their removal from Ghazni.
The present-day notice boards of the Archaeological Survey inform
visitors of the follies and lies of the East India Company. However, the
information appears less significant than what the doors have achieved in
recent years through the memories of communalization, which they
continue to evoke. As all careful historians of Mahmud and Somanatha
have shown, the memory of Hindu trauma because of Mahmud’s raid of
Somanatha and the supposed desecration of the Shiva Temple by destroying
the linga was established by the British and stoked through debates in the
Parliament following Ellenborough’s resolution to rectify the ‘historic
wrong’. Through their study of various Turko-Persian texts that are near
contemporary of the Ghazni raid, historians have also demonstrated the
need for understanding the milieu and historical contexts these describe.

A label, in stone, mentioning the doors as the Somanatha Gate placed by Archaeological Survey of
India, Agra Fort.
 In fact, Richard Davis notes that the Turko-Persian chronicles ‘acted as
[…] theological and political rhetoric’. They ‘dramatized the confrontation
of Mahmud and Somanatha’ and elevated the latter as the foremost cultic
centre of Hinduism. Some link Mahmud’s expedition against the temple
with that of Prophet Muhammad against the Ka’ba, where he destroyed the
idols of pagan gods. Others tell us that the idol Mahmud supposedly
destroyed was the pre-Islamic goddess Manat, who was ferreted away to
India from Iran when Islam was born in the region in the eighth century.
The chronicles seem to suggest that ‘by destroying Somanatha, Mahmud
not only reenacted Muhammad’s destruction of the Ka’ba idols, but also
carried out the Prophet’s direct order, left incomplete by Ali, to destroy
Manat and thereby complete Muhammad’s mission to remove all idols in
the world’. In celebrating the raid by Mahmud, they formally legitimize him
as the ruler of the new Islamic world in the East. Notably, Mahmud’s claims
of Islamic conquests in the Indian subcontinent enabled him to secure the
title of the ‘Refuge of the State and of Islam’ from the Caliph of Baghdad,
who was the supreme authority of the Islamic world in the West.
The Sanskrit and Jaina texts convey no memory of Mahmud’s raid, as
Romila Thapar reminds us through her in-depth study of the histories of the
Somanatha Temple. Instead, the former document the reverence towards the
temple as Second Kailash until the late fifteenth century, as long as the
town remained important for trade. The temple was rebuilt twice by the
Solanki rulers of Gujarat (c. 950–1300) who claimed Chalukya descent, and
some of the Sanskrit texts record the second foundation stone, in the twelfth
century, as an act of Shiva, who ordered the construction of the ‘repository
for all virtues’. The grand rebuilding was ostensibly undertaken by Shiva’s
earthly incarnation, Bhava Brahaspati. As both Thapar and Davis point out,
the god’s desire to have his temple rebuilt coincided with the Solanki king
Kumarapala’s ‘wish to give form to his imperial status’. Although the texts
mention the deterioration of the Shiva temple, they are decidedly silent
about Mahmud’s raid, which is curious considering that many were written
just decades after the event.
 The Jaina texts convey the conflicts between the worshippers of
Mahavira and Shiva and inform of a Chalukya king who found the temple
in disrepair. However, they emphasize that the cause of the poor condition
was because Shiva left his icon, whereas the nearby Jaina temples remained
intact because Mahavira continued to reside within the icon. Some mention
that the local rajas looted the pilgrims but failed to keep the temple in good
repair, and others talk of the rakshasas, daityas and ashuras destroying the
Shiva temple and disturbing the rishis and brahmins. Notably, none mention
the Turushkas (Turks) as one of the destroyers. Local textual sources, thus,
provide no evidence of the Hindu trauma because of the Muslim destruction
of the Somanatha Temple.
Historians have yet to map the different religious and ethnic groups
residing within the eleventh-century Somanatha, and their encounters.
However, a 1264 Sanskrit and Persian inscription from the town provides a
glimpse of what we may expect. It is a legal document that mentions a
Khoja trader from Hormuz who acquired land from a local raja on the
outskirts of the town for building a mosque. His request was approved by
two local bodies, of which one was headed by a purohita of the Shaiva
pasupata sect. Both were composed of dignitaries of the town who were
functionaries of the estates of the Shiva Temple. Significantly, the endowed
land included two large measures of temple properties from adjoining
temples. The inscription is notable as it shows that different ethnic groups
of the Islamic faith frequented Somanatha during the thirteenth century
when it was an important centre for the horse trade between West Asia and
the Indian subcontinent. The Muslim traders and merchants legally bought
properties within the town, often from Hindu owners, and also at times the
lands owned by the temples.
The communalization of Somanatha can therefore be lodged within the
nineteenth-century British politics that established the erroneous historical
fact that the Hindus and Muslims were inherently antagonistic towards each
other. In fact, Ellenborough’s proclamation and its censorship in the British
Parliament are the earliest references to the ‘memory of the gates preserved
by the Hindus as a painful memorial of the most devastating invasions that
had ever desolated Hindustan’. The anomalous reference subsequently
invaded the Indian histories of the Somanatha Temple and, during the
twentieth century, constituted the premise of the book Somanatha: The
Shrine Eternal (1951), which details the ‘Muslim destructions of the
Somanatha Temple, by Mahmud and subsequently by the Khilji ruler Ala-
ud-din, during the 14th century’. K.M. Munshi, the author, had written the
book when lobbying for the rebuilding of the Somanatha Temple, and the
publication date marked the installation ceremony of the Shiva linga in the
garba griha of the new edifice. The Government of India wisely demurred
from financing the project, undertaken by the private Somnath Trust in
1951. However, the spurious British histories of Muslims desecrating Hindu
shrines was to remain firmly etched into the psyche of independent India.
The spectacular Rath Yatra of 1990, which started from Somanatha and
reached Ayodhya, ostensibly mapping the sacred terrain of the Hindus, is
one example of the manner in which this has served Indian politics.
The opprobrium of the Somanatha Gate in the nineteenth century is a
stark example of the ways in which the British historicized hostility
between the natives for their own political ends. The opponents of
Ellenborough, including Macaulay, were fearful of inciting the Muslims of
India after the humiliating defeat of the British in Afghanistan. So they
skilfully couched their opposition as enshrining Britain’s civilizing mission.
However, they used the occasion to press their demands of recalling
Ellenborough from the post of governor general. In fact, Macaulay’s
derision of Ellenborough’s calls for undoing a supposedly historic wrong as
‘neither English nor oriental [but] an imitation of those trashy rants […]
from the proconsuls of France’ smacks of party politics.
Fortunately, Ellenborough’s Somanatha Gates are intact today, still within
the Agra Fort. Because they remind us of the increasing perpetuation of the
colonialist histories of India within India today by the country’s erstwhile
political rulers for systematically fashioning it as an exclusive, xenophobic,
Hindu national terrain.
DAVIS, R.H. (1999). Lives of Indian Images. Princeton University Press.
FERGUSSON, J. (1910). The History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, Vol. II. John Murray.
FLOOD, F.B. (2007). ‘Lost in Translation: Architecture, Taxonomy and the Eastern “Turks”’.
Muqarnas, 24, 79–115.
GARCIN DE TASSY, J., and Earl of Law.(1845). Proclamation de lord Ellenborough, gouverneur-
général de l’Inde, au sujet des portes du temple de Somnath. France: Imprimerie Royale.
JASANOFF, M. (2006). Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–1850. Harper
Perennial.
MUNSHI, K.M. (1952). Somanatha: The Shrine Eternal. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.
THAPAR, R. (2005). Somanatha: The Many Voices of A History. Verso.
27
THE IRON PILLAR
Mehrauli, New Delhi
known in situ date: 14th century

BRITISH AND EUROPEAN SURVEYORS OF THE NINETEENTH century reported it as

a ‘brazen’ or ‘high black pillar of cast metal’ although the locals were more
accurate in their naming, the loha-ka-lat (iron pillar). But all spoke of the
prophecy-making and wish-fulfilling properties of the Iron Pillar at
Mehrauli, which stands prominently in the centre of the courtyard of the
thirteenth-century Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, flanking the maqsura, or
monumental screen, near the entrance and seemingly aligned with the
mihrab, the directional marker of prayer. The Pillar appears awe-inspiring:
a delicately modelled massive shaft of wrought iron, weighing over 61,000
kg, gleaming like a newly made object as if rust-free. Before the
Archaeological Survey of India placed a protective railing around it in
1997, visitors would often stand with their backs against its smooth surface
and try encircling it with arms outstretched, believing that doing so would
grant their wishes. The wonder and folklore of the Iron Pillar, therefore,
nudge us to look beyond histories of its origins, and explore it as a
perceptual, sensory, object. The question is, can we write a more informed
history for it if we do so?
Iron Pillar, 23.5 ft in the courtyard of the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, Qutub Complex, Mehrauli, New
Delhi.

The long scholarship of the Pillar provides us with much information.

And scholars increasingly believe that it may have been brought at the
command of Sultan Shams al-Din Iltutmish (r. 1210–36) from Udayagiri
(near Sanchi) after his decisive conquests of this region, in Vidisha, in 1233.
The non-Islamic pillar prominently embellishes an Islamic topography.
‘Crowned with a fluted bell capital and a molding consisting of three
superimposed amalakas’ or bulbous-shaped finials, the Iron Pillar, as
Finbarr Flood aptly describes, has accrued the public persona of a ‘Hindu
stambh’ to be viewed against the ‘Islamic minar’. Significantly, the Qutub
Minar – less than 20 metres away from the pillar – bears a Nagari
inscription near the entrance jamb, mentioning it as a stambhi, which
demonstrates the interchangeability of the words stambh and minar for
describing the same object. Yet this evidence escapes the common lore of
the ‘religious pillars’.
Similar to the Allahabad Pillar, the Iron Pillar too bears a history of re-
inscriptions. The earliest, in Sanskrit and the Gupta Brahmi script, is a
posthumous eulogy of a king, Chandra, possibly the Gupta ruler
Chandragupta II (r. 375–413/14 CE), the son and successor of
Samudragupta. He is lauded as the one ‘on whose arm fame was inscribed
by the sword […] who carried a beauty of countenance like (the beauty of)
the full moon – having in faith fixed his mind upon (the god) Vishnu, this
lofty standard of the divine Vishnu was set up on the hill (called)
Vishnupada’. The inscription, translated by John Faithfull Fleet, suggests
that the Iron Pillar was raised on a hill as a dwaja (standard) to Vishnu, and
scholars date it to the late fifth or sixth century.
Fleet wondered whether the Pillar, like that at Allahabad, was ‘brought to
where it now stands from another place’. However, on seeing ‘the
underground supports of the column […] “like bits of bar iron”’ he
ascertained that it stands close to its original installation place because the
metal pieces ‘would probably have been overlooked, and left behind, in the
process of transfer’. Fleet’s ruminations have lead to inferences that the
Pillar fronted a nearby Vishnu temple of the Gupta period upon whose ruins
were built the Hindu and Jaina temples that were subsequently demolished
during the building of the Jami Masjid, better known as the Quwwat-ul-
Islam mosque, in 1192 CE. As is well known, the Masjid comprises temple
architectural elements, and with its construction began the architectural
development of the Qutub complex – to use the name of the area today – as
the capital of the Delhi Sultanate, which was established by Iltutmish’s
predecessor, Qutub al-Din Aibek (r. 1206–10).
Although legends associate the Iron Pillar with Delhi, scholars note the
Gupta inscription, and some seek its origins in Udayagiri and see it as a
Vaishnava dwaja. They suggest that its empty pedestal was once crowned
with Vishnu’s discus or his vahana, Garuda, and that it was enshrined in the
Vishnu temples on the Udayagiri hills in the Vidisha region (near Sanchi),
of which one contains the earliest iconography of Vishnu’s varaha avatara,
the boar.
Udayagiri, they also tell us, emerged as an important religious centre
during the reign of Chandragupta II because of its location on the Tropic of
Cancer. Significantly, inscriptional finds of Chandragupta II demonstrate
this to be the ‘only place in India known to have enjoyed the royal presence
of that Gupta king’, to quote Michael Willis, who historicizes the place as
‘the ancient centre for astronomical observation […] where the sun and
moon were observed and where the year was charted and calendar made’.
Willis suggests that the Iron Pillar constituted ‘the toponym’ and
emphasizes the finds of another pillar of iron at nearby Dhar that possibly
dates to the Gupta period. He thereby postulates that iron was mined within
the Udayagiri–Dhar region during the fourth and fifth centuries.
The Udayagiri Pillar at Mehrauli would have constituted Iltutmish’s war
trophy. However, despite the force of the arguments of its historians, there
is no evidence to prove that the Pillar was a dwaja of the Vishnu temples,
and that it was transported by Iltutmish from Udayagiri to Delhi. In fact, the
perception of the Pillar as a war trophy is spectacularly lacking in its only
near contemporary account, by Ibn Battuta, the traveller from Morocco who
stayed in Delhi for seven years serving as a judge in the court of Iltutmish’s
distant successor Muhammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325–51). Wonder and
enchantment inform Ibn Battuta’s description, and he reported that:

In the centre of the mosque is the awe-inspiring column of which [it

is said] nobody knows of what metal it is constructed. One of their
learned men told me that it is called Haft Jush, which means ‘seven
metals’ [sic], and that it is composed of these seven. A part of this
column, of a finger’s length, has been polished, and this polished part
gives out a brilliant gleam. Iron makes no impression on it. It is thirty
cubits high, and we rolled a turban round it, and the portion which
encircled it measured eight cubits.
 The Gupta inscriptions on the pillar precede those of the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries, of which some are in Persian but most in Nagari. They
are all brief and were duly dismissed as being ‘of no value’ by officers of
the Archaeological Survey of India during the first formal restorations of
the Qutub complex during the 1910s. One mentions Dhilli, Samvat 1109 (or
1052), and Anangapala. The latter is known to history as the last Tomar
ruler of Delhi and his grandson Prithviraj, the Chauhan ruler of Ajmer, was
defeated by Qutub al-Din Aibek in 1192 at Tarain, approximately 120
kilometres away. Another commemorates the lineage of a Bundela chief,
Durgarjan Singh, who possibly saw the pillar in 1710, and recalls him as a
Maharajadhiraja whose ‘salutations may reach any Raja that may visit the
place’. This second inscription demonstrates that the Iron Pillar served
commemorative functions as late as the eighteenth century, as the memorial
of Anangapala and of a narrative in the sixteenth-century Prithviraj Raso,
the Dilli Killi Katha.
The Katha recounts the unwise move of the son-less and old Anangapala,
who tried to uproot a legendary stone pillar that his distant ancestor placed
at the spot where the latter had witnessed a curious incident of a rabbit
confronting a dog. By planting the stone pillar, this ancestor secured the site
for his Tomar dynasty, and the area around the Pillar grew into the thriving
city of Dilli from which his successors ruled. An insightful brahmin
forewarned Anangapala that if he uprooted the Pillar, then ‘first the Tomar,
then the Chauhan and afterwards the Turks would prevail in Delhi’, as
Cynthia Talbot narrates, informing us that the legend of the stone pillar
‘shares motifs with other legends about the founding of medieval political
centres’.
Notably, the legend leaves physical traces upon the Pillar in the
inscription mentioning Anangapala, although the associated Samvat 1109 is
patently ‘anachronistic’. Because numismatic evidence demonstrates that
such a king ruled between 1130 and 1145 in nearby areas known today as
Lal Kot and Rai Pithora, near Mehrauli.
Like the historical association with Udayagiri, the association of the Iron
Pillar with Delhi and a Tomar king and through him with Prithviraj
Chauhan is non-existent in terms of material evidence. The Prithviraj Raso
– a late-sixteenth century epic poem in Braj bhasha on the life of Prithviraj
Chauhan for the Rajput elites of Mughal India – may have built upon a
legend of the twelfth century, whose memorialization in the epic increased
its prophetic qualities. Thus, when Alexander Cunningham undertook his
first investigations of the Qutub Complex in 1853, the local people told him
that as long as the Pillar stood, the Tomars ruled Delhi. Where the Pillar had
stood, however, remained unsaid. Notably, as Herbert Fanshawe recorded
fifty years later, the locals also recalled that the Pillar was placed upon the
head of ‘the great world serpent’.
Irrespective of uncertain histories, the legends accrued by the Iron Pillar
and the awe it inspired as a historical relic would have guided its relocation
within the foundational imperial architecture of the Delhi Sultanate. Flood
reminds us that such pillars with complex genealogies were incorporated by
different rulers at different times into the concerns of state formation, since
their distinguished political lineages and their epic pasts allowed instant
incorporations of victorious traditions.
Returning to Iltutmish, who in all probability placed the Iron Pillar in the
architectural scheme of his capital city, the Sultan decisively incorporated
into his empire-building enterprise ‘the building campaign initiated by
Aibek’, as Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot tell us. Iltutmish, who
turned ‘a motely collection of recently occupied towns into the most
powerful state in north India’, commanded the grand architectural
development of the Qutub Complex. He tripled the size of the Quwwat-ul-
Islam mosque and built a magnificent screen in front. He also completed the
Qutub Minar, which was begun by Aibek, making it the tallest minaret in
the world. He constructed his own grand tomb within the complex, and
helmed a few civic projects, including excavations of large tanks for
ensuring adequate water supply for the inhabitants of his capital city. Such
projects remind us of the sultan’s patronage for the construction of a
stepwell at Uruwahi near Gwalior after his conquests in Vidisha, which is
mentioned in the essay on Baburnama (see ch. 34).
 Iltutmish strove to make Delhi the grandest of all capitals of the Islamic
world, and his courtiers, as Asher and Talbot recount, recalled his Jami
mosque and the Minar as the aja’ib, or wonder, of his ‘Ka‘ba in India’. The
panegyrics is analysed by Santhi Kavuri-Bauer who tells us that:

In Iltutmish’s day, an incorruptible, 800-year-old iron pillar would

most certainly have fit into the aesthetic and philosophical category
of aja’ib, a category that, as Awfi’s text shows us, also framed his
patron’s other great project, the Qutb Minar. […] Given Iltutmish’s
well-documented propensity for rational thought and enlightened
rule, the placement of the pillar within the mosque was hardly a
demonstration of Muslim ascendancy but rather the assembly of two
wondrous constructions to be admired and pondered, one Islamic,
one not – but both part of God’s cosmic order and reflecting the
wisdom and authority of the ruler.

In the ostensibly ‘rational’ British histories of Medieval India, the Iron

Pillar was seen with wonder because it existed – it had not been melted
down in the past – and because the citizens of the most industrialized nation
marvelled at the possibility of such a production. As Vincent Smith noted in
his history, ‘it is not many years since the production of such a pillar would
have been an impossibility in the largest foundries of the world’. Present-
day studies of the chemical composition of the Pillar have shown that
contrary to popular belief, it is not rust-free. It appears corrosion-resistant
because of the passive film of misawite on its surface, which formed,
apparently, within three years of its manufacture. The thin film of rust
prevented the pillar from rusting further, and the iron phosphates in the
composition radiate a bronze-like golden hue. Hence, the descriptions of it
as the brazen pillar.
In drawing our attention to the possibilities of the cultural histories of
wonder, the legendary pillar cajoles us to explore the historicity of its
memories as a wish-fulfilling object. We wonder whether such qualities of
the Pillar embed the narratives of the omnipresent Sufi and jinn-saints of
Delhi, whose barakat, or blessings, sustained the inhabitants of the city. The
saints competed with the sultans for power, albeit of the transcendental and
unearthly kinds, and as the Sultanate waned, the stories of their amazing
feats became prolific. Significantly, the jinn-saints are still sought after by
the local populace of Delhi, as a recent ethnography of Jinnealogy (2017)
illustrates.
The resonance of enchantment which constitutes the memories of the
Iron Pillar is an occasion to reflect upon the connected histories of power,
sacrality and ecology, which guided the ethical imperatives of the societies
that lived under its shadow. The histories contribute to the histories of the
memorialization of the Pillar, and thereby add to its immemorial value also
as an object of testimony of the ethic-bound civic societies of Sultanate
India.

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FANSHAWE, H.C. (1902). Delhi: Past and Present. John Murray.
FLEET, J.F. (1888). ‘Mehrauli Posthumous Pillar Inscription of Chandra’. In J.F. Fleet (Ed.), Corpus
Inscriptionum Inidicarum, Vol. 3 (pp. 139–42). Superintendent of Government Printing.
FLOOD, F.B. (2003). ‘Pillars, Palimpsests and Princely Practices: Translating the Past in Sultanate
Delhi’. Res, 43, 95–116.
KAVURI-BAUER, S. (2017). ‘The Wisdom to Wonder: Aja’ib and the Pillars of Islamic India’.
International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 6(2), 285–310. DOI: 10.1386/ijia.6.2.285_1.
KUMAR, S. (2018, December 6). ‘Political Elites and Sufis: 13th and 14th Century Delhi Sultanate’.
Sahapedia.
SMITH, V.A. (1897). ‘The Iron Pillar of Delhi (Mihraulī) and the Emperor Candra (Chandra)’. The
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 29(1), 1–18.
doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X00024205.
TALBOT, C. (2016). The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200–2000.
Cambridge University Press.
TANEJA, A.V. (2017). Jinnealogy: Time, Islam and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of
Delhi. Stanford University Press.
WILLIS, M. (2009). The Archaeology of Hindu Ritual: Temples and the Establishment of Gods.
Cambridge University Press.
28
JAGANNATHA’S RATHA
Puri, Odisha
First known date: 14th century

PURUSHOTTAMA JAGANNATHA IS THE RASHTRA DEVATA OF Odisha, and his

monumental temple in the coastal town of Puri, founded in c. 1135 by
Anantavarman Chodaganga (1078–1152) of the Ganga dynasty, attracts the
largest number of worshippers and tourists among all temples of eastern
India. Puri, variously known as Purushottam kshetra, Nilachala and
through other names of Jagannatha, is one of the four dhams of the Hindus
in which one may see the divine. The unique history of the ‘veritable
temple city’, to quote Hermann Kulke, beckons us to regard the making of
Jagannatha as a state deity.
This on-the-spot sketch, possibly the first formal field documentation, is
of the ratha yatra, when in the month of Asadha (June/July), together with
his brother Balabhadra and sister Subhadra, Jagannatha goes on his annual
summer holiday to Gundicha, a temple 3 kilometre away. The massive
rathas, one for each deity, are constructed anew every year, and this ratha
yatra remains ‘India’s car festival par excellence’. James Fergusson, the
nineteenth-century British architectural historian, was able to draw the
event leisurely – and as he insisted, with precision – through a camera
obscura, as Jagannatha’s ratha, the main object of the festival, was ‘stuck
fast in the mud’ that year on the second day of the journey.
‘ Temple and Car of Juganath, Puri’, Engraving (publisher J. Hogarth). Drawing by James Fergusson,
c. 1837–42. Plate 2, Fergusson 1848.

Fergusson’s view of the veneration of the ‘national’ god of Ancient

Kalinga – sometime between 1837 and 1842 during his field surveys of
India’s historical architecture – would have shown him the enduring region-
formation processes of precolonial India, which were at work even during
British rule. They were built upon the ‘multiplicity in the experience of
Oneness’, as B.D. Chattopadhyaya had historicized. Fergusson’s field
record of the festival through the sketch, however, brings home to us how
little the British saw this historical phenomenon.
Jagannatha’s ratha yatra held great fascination for Europeans, and the
first-hand accounts from the fourteenth century perpetuated rumours about
the merciless crushing and wilful self-immolation of scores of devotees
under the giant wheels. The imagined horror of the spectacle was famously
immortalized by Robert Southey in his epic poem The Curse of Kehama
(1810):
 On Jaga-Naut they call,
The ponderous car rolls on, and crushes all,
Through flesh and bones it ploughs its dreadful path.
Groans rise unheard; the dying cry.
And death, and agony
Are trodden under foot by yon mad thong,
Who follow close and thrust deadly wheels along.

The European viewing of the festival of ‘Juggernaut’, to follow the

English pronunciation, established the ‘standing metaphor’ explained in the
Hobson-Jobson dictionary as those carried away by the fervour of faith and
ruthlessly sacrificed for it. Fergusson spoke of ‘juggernauted to death’ and
‘courting juggernautal fate’. However, he admitted in the description of the
sketch that he ‘was most agreeably disappointed to find the pilgrims
hurrying on the spot, talking and laughing like people going to a fair in
England, which in fact it is’. The sketch appeared as a lithograph in his first
publication, Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient Architecture of Hindostan
(1848), which initiated his professional career as a pioneering architectural
historian. Having left the notoriously cruel, and lucrative, indigo business in
the early 1830s when it started failing, Fergusson set upon establishing the
histories of Indian and Eastern architecture. His erroneous slotting of
monuments into mutually exclusive religious categories – of Hindu,
Buddhist, Jaina and Mohammedan – directed the ways in which India’s
historical landscape was to be seen and historicized well until the end of the
twentieth century. In reminding us that he saw the Jagannatha Temple, into
which he was forbidden entry, through the ratha yatra, the sketch cautions
against the arrogance of his methodological emphasis of ‘seeing the field’.
Where the Garuda Chariot represented the acts of enhancing imperial
power, by the kings of Vijayanagara (see ch. 31), the Jagannatha ratha
directs a note of the authority of ‘kings without empire’, to quote Kulke.
For, the Khurda rajas, who presided over Jagannatha’s ratha yatra, one of
the holiest religious festivals of eastern India, were just that since the East
India Company ruled over much of Orissa from around 1809.
 In his endeavour to provide an accurate view, Fergusson geared his
narrative of the ratha yatra to show the ‘herculean tasks’ involved of
placing Jagannatha on his ratha. And he described the event as follows:

The image […] is a single block of wood about six feet in length […]
As long his progress is down the steps of the temple, all goes on
smoothly, but as the block is of some weight, it is no such easy matter
to get him through the deep mud of the level street […] the attendants
swing him backwards and forwards till the oscillatory motion is
deemed sufficient; when those in front, who have hold of the rope
tied around his waist, give a pull, those behind a push […] then
another swing and pull, a shove and shout […] till he is dragged up
the inclined plane into his car.

Woodcut reproduction of Fergusson’s sketch of Jagannatha for illustrating the herculean task of
placing the heavy and massive idol on the ratha. Fergusson 1848.

The ratha yatra enshrined the cult of Jagannatha. By the twelfth century,
the god was locally worshipped as a form of Vishnu. His subsequent
appropriation for a state religion in the next century followed his sovereign
status as the ruler of lands, of which the earliest evidence is the declaration
of Anangabhimadeva III (c. 1211–38), a distant successor of Chodaganga,
as ruling as the king’s rautta (viceroy), under the king’s adesha (advice)
and samrajya (authority). The successive Gajapati rulers enhanced
Jagannatha’s sovereignty by ordaining that attacks against the king
constituted droha, or treason, against the deity. The increasing imperial
dictates of divine rule established new histories of sacred geographies
which were nurtured through the building of Jagannatha temples, and
bhakti, or devotion, to the god through one of the upcoming Vishnu
avataras at the time, Krishna. Therefore, the Gitagovinda, composed by
Jayadeva in the twelfth century, which recalls the love of Krishna and
Radha, constitutes Jagannatha’s liturgy.
However, Jagannatha, as Kulke reminds us, comprises ‘a tribal
substratum’, which is why the Daitapati priests who command the rituals of
the ratha yatra are the Sabara people, and the Bhuiyan and Juang people,
who make the ropes for the ratha, are given the privilege to drag it. Inside
the Jagannatha temple, however, only the high-ranking Brahmins serve the
deity and his siblings. Jagannatha’s predominance illustrates, as Bhairabi
Prasad Sahu reminded us, that

the transformation of the tribal chiefs to institutionalized rajas was

synchronous with the gradual universalization of the local deities
[…] With the passage of time, the deities were raised to a higher
level of ritual elaboration […] However, their tribal priests and the
basic hymns (mantras) and rituals were retained, while introducing
and superimposing brahmanas and Brahmanic rituals […] the
coexistence of the popular and Brahmanic forms helped in shaping
[…] the king’s legitimacy both downwards and sidewise.

Jagannatha’s tribal history illuminates his iconography, and Rajendralal

Mitra, the nineteenth-century Indian antiquary (1824–91) who undertook an
extensive field survey of ‘Orissan Temples’ in 1868–69, confirmed that the
dark wooden post that denotes the god is made of the neem tree. It is
rounded at the top for his ‘shield-shaped head’ and painted to show his
fierce-looking disc-shaped eyes and curved lips. Mitra noted that the arms
and legs are attached to the post when the god is taken out in his ratha and
that the bodies of Balabhadra and Subhadra, also wooden posts, are made of
a different wood.
 In recalling Mitra’s detailed field account of Jagannatha, we are reminded
of Fergusson’s vicious public attack against Mitra in 1880 for failing to see,
even through a field survey, the ‘real’ history of the origins of architecture
in India. Yet, despite his own exhibitions of his accurate fieldwork,
Fergusson failed to note the performative value of the Jagannatha ratha in
displaying the imperial and ancient Kalinga to the modern world.
By the eighteenth century, as Fergusson would have known, many
capitals of the ascendant principalities of Orissa comprised a Jagannatha
temple next to the palace with a bada danda (or the main road) leading to a
Gundicha temple, as at Puri. The rathas, albeit smaller in size, were made
to look like the Puri ones, and the ratha yatras came to constitute the most
important event in the realms. By appropriating Jagannatha, the local rulers
sought legitimacy from past imperial traditions, which British observers of
Odisha chose to overlook, even while carefully recording the intensely
public nature of the festival. Jagannatha, in his ratha, presided over the
world through his public darshan, which contravened injunctions of his
worship within the temple that permitted his view only to caste Hindus.
The massive Puri rathas are unique among the temple cars of India as
they are built anew each year. They require vast quantities of wood, iron
and ropes, which the Khurda rajas – who emerged during the late sixteenth
century as the ‘first servitors of Jagannatha’, according to the contemporary
chronicle Madala Panaji – sought from their feudatories in lieu of tribute.
Through ‘royal letters’, they rewarded the latter special privileges in the
Jagannatha cult, and these letters were honoured even by the British East
India Company, as we see in the treaty signed in 1804 with the raja of
Daspalla, who provided the wood. The ‘personified god-king’, to quote
Kulke, kept securing the rights of the local rajas irrespective of British rule.
Although the Khurda rajas had no territory by the eighteenth century,
their ancestral right to serve Jagannatha prevailed. Even today, as Kulke
tells us, the ratha yatra ‘cannot start before the raja or his representative
(mudarasta) has sprinkled water (chera) and cleaned (pahamra) them with
a broom’. Significantly, the rajas ‘succeeded in compensating the loss of
their political power by building up a religious state through the
superintendence’ of the Lord of the Universe.
Jagannatha’s ratha is the Nandigosha with 16 wheels, and the modern
versions are usually 45 feet tall. It is a ‘mobile architecture’ that extends the
ritual and sacred sphere of his temple into the city of Puri, enshrining the
dham. The tall pyramidal roofs of the rathas represent regional architectural
traditions of the rekha deul and are decorated with swathes of brightly
coloured cloths. Jagannatha’s ratha is covered with yellow and red cloth
that carry as motifs two chhatras (umbrellas) and two trasas (standards),
which mark his royal status. Balabhadra’s ratha, the Taladhvaja with 14
wheels, is decorated with red and green cloth, and Subhadra’s Darpadalana
with 12 wheels is covered with red and black. The wheels of all three rathas
have spokes like those of the Sun Temple at Konark. Such wheels were
possibly first made at Puri.
The rituals of the ratha yatra enhance the uniqueness of the spectacle.
Before they board their respective rathas, Jagannatha, Balabhadra and
Subhadra bathe in the ocean and recuperate from the cold in a secret
chamber for 15 days. Notably, this is the period when the icons of wood are
repainted. The restored gods then begin their journey to Gundicha, which,
as the architectural historian O.M. Starza observes is

viewed by all and greeted by crowds with intense popular fervour

[…] the Lord of the World is treated with disconcerting familiarity.
Vulgar jokes are made about his sexual appetite, and his massive bulk
and weight due to his consumption of large quantities of food.
Everyone joins in the festival, both the Vaishnavas and Saivas, the
high castes and low, even the untouchables.

The spectacle of the ratha yatra adds to the personification of

Jagannatha. Moreover, the ‘oneness of plurality’, to borrow a phrase of
Chattopadhyaya, which the deity and his worship convey, mediates ‘the
assimilation of ideas, symbols and rituals’ in creating region-specific, Oriya
identities ‘from within’. Hence the enduring power of this ‘regional cult’,
whose daily service at Puri is met by thousands of temple employees.
Irrespective of the increasing devotees, largely through members of
ISKCON and the Hare Krishna movement, the Jagannatha temple of Puri
remains firmly out of bounds for non-ethnic Hindus and converts. The
powerful Puri temple trust has offered online darshan since the beginning
of the twenty-first century, which all can avail. But with the firm belief that
the essence of the god cannot enter a replicated image. The ratha thus
remains the seminal object for viewing Jagannatha and for his lordship’s
viewing of the world. Notably, it illustrates the powerful pull of material
presence in matters related to spiritual concerns, which seems to increase
with the growing ease of virtual worship. As the priests of the Puri
Jagannatha Temple say, ‘We are thinking that people will not come here
because they are sitting in their room and seeing the festival through their
TVs, but actually there are more people.’

CHATTOPADHYAYA, B.D. (2012). The Making of Early Medieval India [Second ed.]. Oxford
University Press.
ESCHMANN, A., H. Kulke, and G.C. Tripathi. (Eds) (1978). The Cult of Jagannath and the
Regional Tradition of Orissa. South Asia Interdisciplinary Programme: Orissa Research
Project. Manohar.
FERGUSSON, J. (1876). A History of Architecture in All Countries, From the Earliest Times to the
Present Day: History of Indian and Eastern Architecture. John Murray.
FERGUSSON, J. (1848). Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient Architecture in Hindostan. J. Hogarth.
GHOSH, U. (2016). ‘Pilgrimage, Politics and Surveillance: The Temple of Jagannath and the
colonial state in early 19th century Orissa’. International Journal of Religious Tourism and
Pilgrimage, 4(6), 23–32.
KULKE, H. (1979). ‘Rathas and Rajas: The Car Festival at Puri’. Art and Archaeological Research
Papers on Mobile Architecture in Asia: Ceremonial Chariots, Floats and Carriages, 26, 19–26.
KULKE, H. and B. Schenepel. (Eds) (2001). Jagannath Revisited: Studying Society, Religion and
State in Orissa. Manohar.
MITRA, R.L. (1875). The Antiquities of Orissa, Vol. I. Wyman & Co.
SAHU, B.P. (2019). ‘From Kingdoms to Transregional States: Exploring the Dynamics of State
Formation in Pre-Modern Orissa’. Studies in History, 35(1), 1–19.
SCHEIFINGER, H. (2009). ‘The Jagannath Temple and Online Darshan’. Journal of Contemporary
Religion, 24(3), 277–90.
SOUTHEY, R. (1810). The Curse of Kehama. Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme & Brown.
STARZA, O.M. (1993). The Jagannatha Temple at Puri: Its Architecture, Art, Cult. Brill.
YULE, H. and A.C. Burnell. (1903). ‘Juggernaut’. In Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial
Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical,
Geographical and Discursive (pp. 466–68). John Murray.
29
A HERO STONE
Akluj, Sholapur District, Maharashtra
c. 12th–14th century

EVERY SOCIETY COMMEMORATES ITS HEROES, AND IN ALL worlds, be it Western

or Eastern, or ancient and modern, the term ‘hero’ has often denoted ‘a
continued existence and power after death’, to borrow a phrase from the
study of heroes in the ancient world by Christopher Jones. In the
Harshacharita, composed by Banabhatta during the seventh century, a hero
is described through the following epithet:

Wise men do not put any faith or attachment in this fragile body,
which soon disappears like a dream; they regard abiding fame itself
as their lasting body.

Heroization, as Jones tells us, constitutes ‘not making someone a hero,

but recognizing him as such by cultic acts’. The memorials created for
commemorating a hero represent such acts, and this hero stone is a great
example. However, it also commands a unique value through its imagery
for directing our attention to the shifts within local practices of religion,
subsistence and occupation, and the transformations of local landscapes.
The Hero Stone as it is today; embedded in the outer wall of Akluj Fort.

Depicting the hero and his death, the Hero Stone of Akluj Fort shown upright.

Hero stones usually bear a figure of a hero in relief upon a slab of stone,
and the iconography shows the manner in which the hero courted his death.
They are the most ubiquitous of all the hero-memorials in India and are
found all over Maharashtra, in many parts of Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh,
Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and the Northeast, and also in specific
areas within other Indian states. Although most are placed in the open for
all to see, they remain underrepresented as historical sources. Therefore,
Gunther Sontheimer, one of the foremost scholars of the hero stones of
Maharashtra emphasized that

their sheer multitude, a certain uniformity and at the same time a

remarkable variety in detail […] make them an urgent case for study.
This urgency is also enhanced by the fact that, more than other
archaeological remains, they are in danger of destruction because of
road-building, wall-building, simple neglect.

This particular hero stone at Akluj, Maharashtra, demonstrates the

importance of Sontheimer’s call for careful research of such ‘local’
memorials.
Known as viragals in Maharashtra, Karnataka and most of southern
India, hero stones are usually free-standing tablets. However, the one at
Akluj, now placed inside the main wall of the local fort, is unique within
Maharashtra for its considerable size and the detailed imagery of a battle
scene that shows the careful depiction of how the hero died. The elaborate
commemorative tablet therefore conveys the possibility that the hero
commanded a high standing within his society.
The hero stones of Maharashtra are bereft of any texts, unlike the hero
stones of nearby Karnataka, which carry inscriptions. Iconography and
location of the hero stones are therefore two important features through
which inferences can be derived regarding who and what they memorialize.
Most comprise three to five carved panels, which fashion the visual
narrative of the hero’s acts and his afterlife. Usually, the middle panel, such
as the one in the Akluj hero stone, depicts the immortal hero being escorted
by apsaras (celestial nymphs) to the Kailash mountain (the abode of Shiva)
in a celestial palki (palanquin) with or without his wife. The top panel
shows the hero’s presence near Shiva, who is often depicted in the form of a
linga attended to by a priest, and images of the sun and moon, that represent
the hero’s eternal memory; the bottom panel shows the dead hero lying
prostrate, often with apsaras descending upon him with garlands. He is
shown either with his wife seated nearby, or with heads of cattle bent over
him. The Akluj hero stone, however, to quote Sontheimer,

actually forgoes the normal partition of panels to save space […] one
large square [depicting] a battle, the subsequent attack on the fort,
and the carrying away of the ‘dead’ hero in a palanquin […] The next
panel with the hero, his wife (a sati?), apsaras and saluting elephants
is very small and so is the topmost panel where the hero has joined
Siva.

Historians are of the view that the early memorials to the cult of the hero
date from c. eighth to ninth centuries, when a new genre of literature –
known as the vira rasa – emerged, which was different from the
contemporary bhakti rasa. Chivalry from then on ‘was carefully and
assiduously nurtured by kings, chieftains, parents and consorts’ as S. Settar
and M.M. Kalaburgi note. The poems and ballads of vira rasa tell us that
mothers and wives longed to partake in the hero’s chivalry. Thus, in the
Vikramarjuna Vijayam, a tenth-century text by the Jaina poet Pampa, a
mother craves that her womanhood be judged by the heroic traits of her son,
and a wife declares that:

Tomorrow he will unite with the celestial nymphs leaving me all

alone here […] Am I such a great fool as to remain here alone? Nay, I
shall hasten ahead and welcome him in heaven. Oh, I shall never
allow him to unite with the heavenly damsels.

The wife’s declaration illustrates the perceptions at the time of the hero’s
eternal reward, namely, savouring the ‘warmth of the arms of the heavenly
damsels’. The perception, as we may gauge, encouraged heroism among
men, and propagated the sentiment that is described by the contemporary
quip: ‘how can one be afraid of war?’
 It is worth noting that the imagery of the hero’s paradise is remarkably
similar to that of paradise in Islam, where heavenly nymphs await men who
court heroic deaths. The similarity provides reasons for reflecting upon the
common themes within the practices and philosophies of very different
religions.
Like the Akluj hero stone, many others depict the wife as placed
‘somewhat awkwardly and artificially’ beside the hero and apsaras and also
show her on the top panel worshipping the linga with the hero. Many
scholars have viewed the imagery as representing the ignominious practice
of sati that accompanied the hero cult, in which widows chose to court
death by voluntary immolation. Although the increasing spread of sati
nurtured the iconography of the hero stones, the depiction of the wife on the
Akluj stone does not necessarily imply that sati was committed. The Akluj
hero stone does not bear the ‘signature’ that subsequently came to denote
the practice of sati, namely, the iconography of the palm of the hand with
bangles, and is dated by historians to the twelfth and fourteenth centuries
when the Yadava dynasty ruled in the Deccan, and the practice of sati in the
region was confined to members of the royal family and nobility. Stray
references of sati within the literature of the period, such as in the
Jnanesvari – a twelfth-century commentary in Marathi on the Bhagavad
Gita composed by the Bhakti saint and poet Jnyaneshwar – are possible
‘similes’ that were established at the time for ‘denoting the devotion of a
hero’s wife to court peril in celebrating his nobility and greatness’, as
Sontheimer stated. Notably, all modern hero stones in and around Akluj
depict the wife, and their researchers suggest that they convey that even if
the wife remarries, she will be united in death with her first husband. This
inference can perhaps be used as an ethnographic reference for suggesting
that the depiction of the wife on hero stones that date between the eighth
and the fourteenth centuries did not denote the practice of sati.
Compared to most hero stones with battle scenes, the carving on the
Akluj hero stone is very finely executed, drawing the viewer to appreciate
the precision of the remarkable workmanship. The object arrests the eye,
and directs us to note the views of military historian Randolf Cooper that
‘ancient hero stones’ constitute ‘recorded evidence’ of the sophistication of
warfare within pre-colonial South Asia. Cooper states that ‘the carvings
clearly show the disciplined ranks of well-drilled troops moving in tactical
linear formations’, and reminds us that

the Akluj stone is particularly noteworthy because it demonstrates the

use of combined operations with disciplined infantry and two types
of mounted troops. The fort’s defenders are shown as having
launched an attempt to break the siege ring tightening around them.
The breakout force features a vanguard of lancers flanked to the left
by tightly packed infantry […] Behind the line of shields, archers
were waiting to unleash their arrows. To thwart this effort the
besieging force countered the defenders’ infantry line.

To Cooper, the imagery in the Akluj hero stone offers ‘every bit […] proof
of drill and disciplined formation as in the frescoes and friezes of Ancient
Rome, Greece, Assyria, and Mesopotamia’. They provide precisely the type
of visual evidence Western historians – who declare that Europeans had
introduced military drill and discipline to India – tend to overlook.
The Akluj hero stone dates to when Akluj developed as a nodal town on
the route to the Konkan coast through the Western Ghats. By the fourteenth
century, the town was a thriving cattle market, and must have catered to the
dominant local economy of cattle pastoralism. Akluj is also located in the
rain shadow area of the Western Ghats, a semi-arid region and is near
Pandharpur – the iconic cult centre of the god Viththal, whose origin is
linked to pastoralist communities.
In his studies of pastoralist groups in the Deccan, Ajay Dandekar has
documented many hero stones in and around Akluj which depict cattle
raids, and of them one is unique in showing a cattle stampede. Dandekar
notes that the provenance of hero stones with images of cattle is quite
specifically within regions with long histories of pastoralism. His
observation allows us to ask whether the hero of Akluj, who died in the
battle to save the fort, was a cattle pastoralist. For, pastoralism as an
economy and cultural activity must have greatly influenced the local
politics of Akluj between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries.
The ubiquity of hero stones within the modern pastoral landscape of
Maharashtra shows us the importance of reckoning with histories of
ecology in writing the histories of regions. The hero stones remind us that
landscapes, seasons, soil types, rainfall patterns and flora and fauna bring
changes to regional politics, economies, religions and cults and thereby
within the political and cultural practices and myths of societies. The Akluj
hero stone recalls a regional ecosystem whose forests, scrublands and
pastoralists transformed over time, into a sedentary ecosystem. The
transformations created new and different landscapes which we study today
for exploring the histories of agriculture and towns of the region. In
reminding us of what once was, this hero stone provides a stark reminder of
the brutally rapid pace of destruction of the new ecologies that have
followed since.

COOPER, R.G.S. (2003). The Anglo-Maratha Campaigns and the Contest for India: The Struggle
for Control of the South Asian Military Economy. Cambridge University Press.
DANDEKAR, A. (2003). ‘In the Name of Pastoralism: The Early Medieval Maharashtra’. In R.C.
Heredia and S. Ratnagar (Eds), Mobile and Marginalised Peoples: Perspectives from the Past
(pp. 65–88). Manohar.
JONES, C.P. (2006). New Heroes of Antiquity: From Achilles to Antinoos. Harvard University Press.
SETTAR, S. and M.M. Kalaburgi. (1982). ‘The Hero Cult: A Study of Kannada Literature from the
9th to 13th century’. In S. Settar and G.D. Sontheimer (Eds), Memorial Stones: A Study of Their
Origin, Significance and Variety (pp. 17–36). Karnataka University.
SONTHEIMER, G.D. (1982). ‘Hero and Sati Stones of Maharashtra’. In S. Settar and G.D.
Sontheimer (Eds), Memorial Stones: A Study of Their Origin, Significance and Variety (pp.
261–81). Karnataka University.
TRINCO, L. (2014). ‘Heroes Beyond the Text: Sacrifice, Death and Afterlife in the Iconography of
Southern Maharashtra’s Hero-Stones’. Indologica Taurensia, 40, 341–63.
30
PABUJI’S PHAD
Jodhpur District, Rajasthan
First kown date: c. 14th century

THE EPIC OF THE HEROIC PABUJI, WHICH CLAIMS HIM AS A Rathor rajput,
originated with the rising cult of a local hero of the same name who lived
during the fourteenth century in Rajasthan, in the village of Kolu near
Jodhpur. The legend presents the complex social histories of community-
making and group identities. Curiously, such histories find rare mention
within the textbooks of Indian history.
The epic of Pabuji is an oral tradition, which is recited and sung
overnight in front of his phad. As John D. Smith, the foremost scholar of
the epic, tells us, the phad is a ‘cloth temple’. It is a large and magnificent
textile of burnished cotton, usually about 15 feet in length and 4–5 feet in
width, vividly painted in bold colours of red, blue, green, white, yellow, and
black with images of people, animals and architectural features that convey
Pabuji’s life. It is best seen as Pabuji’s ‘temple visiting the worshippers’.
The paintings are

organised according to a strict logic which has more in common with

a road map than with a comic strip […] The primary characteristic
defining a scene is not when, but where. If different events are
depicted next to one another it is not because they happened in rapid
succession but because they happened in close proximity. […] The
 protagonists are depicted repeatedly; and there are no formal frames
dividing scene from scene. […] The paṛ [phad] is a representation of
the epic geography, a sort of epic map. In and between the places
shown on it, the events of the epic can be seen happening.

A Pabuji phad on display at Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge. Cloth, 4780 mm × 1320 mm.

Pabuji, as the epic tells us, is the son of a Rathor, Dhadal, and a celestial
nymph who flew away during his childhood. However, she promised her
young son that she would return to him during his adolescent years as a
mare. When he grew up, Pabuji fought with the neighbouring Khicis to
claim a fine black mare, Kesar Kalami. Unknown to him, this mare was his
birth mother.
Pabuji’s origin story informs us of the ‘processes of Rajputization’ which
were historicized by B.D. Chattopadhyaya more than 40 years ago. The
Rajput clans, as Chattopadhyaya meticulously documented, are not linked
by descent – indigenous or foreign. Rather they represent new social groups
which emerged during the seventh century, and the origin stories tell us
more about clan ‘attempts to get away rather than reveal original ancestry’.
The lineages of the ‘rajaputra’ comprise communities of diverse ethnic and
geographical backgrounds, including Hunas, who fought on horseback. The
recurring references to the horse Kesar Kalami in the Pabuji epic – Pabuji
longs for it, fights with his enemies over it, wins battles riding it, and keeps
company with his mates in its presence – informs us that the Rathor Rajputs
shared one of the lineage narratives.
Pabuji’s exploits and the revenge of his death at the hands of Jindrav
Khici by his nephew Rupnath, are performed in front of a phad. The phads
are bought at exorbitant prices by the bhopos, the poor singer-priests from
the Nayak Bhil community. The bhopos look after the worship of Pabuji
and venerate and value the painted cloth as their prized possession.
The phad constitutes the storytelling methods which bear similarities to
the kaavads, and the murals upon the walls and ceilings of many havelis in
northeast Rajasthan, especially Shekhavati. Smith notes that the phads
made at Parasrampura look like the figures depicted upon the dome of the
chhatri (cenotaph) of Sardul Singh that dates from 1750, and that

the courts of rulers, complete with pillars, domes and pavilions; the
rows of turbaned and moustachioed courtiers; the clear movement
[…] of the innumerable busy figures; the filling by those figures of
all available space, the manner of rendering certain details, such as
the harness of horses; the occurrence of iconographic items known
otherwise only from the work of paṛ painters—all these together
 place it beyond doubt that the mural and the paṛs of Pabuji […] have
a common origin.

The oldest surviving phad dates from 1867, although those who paint the
phads today assert that the tradition of phad-making is older by scores of
decades. One of the earliest known English descriptions of the phad is by
James Tod (1783–1835), the first British Political Resident of Rajasthan,
who reported in 1829:

Pabooji, mounted on his famous charger ‘Black Caesar’ (Kesar Kali),

whose exploits are the theme of the itinerant bard and showman, who
annually goes his round, exhibiting in pictorial delineations, while he
recites in rhyme, the deeds of this warrior to the gossiping villagers
in the desert.

‘Parbū bhopo sings, plays the rāvanhattho fiddle and dances as he performs the epic of Pābūji in front
of his par (sacred narrative cloth painting)’. Photograph, John D. Smith, 1989. Frontispiece, Smith
1991.
 The bard songs of Pabuji’s exploits may appear contradictory. We are
told, for example, that Pabuji married the Sodhi princess Phulvanti and yet
remained celibate and derived his physical powers from sexual continence.
The contradictions of the heroic Pabuji, as Smith tells us, are ‘clearly
expressive of tensions that members of society feel about themselves’.
Significantly, the epic is built through texts, and the closest version to what
may have been the ‘original’ narrative is possibly the seventh-century
khyata (chronicle) of Nainsi. However, the texts tell us little about the
commemorated Pabuji, who was possibly a local chief or brigand who lived
‘by his wits and his weapons’. He captured herds, largely camels, rode
horses in battles, and travelled great distances from his village Kolu, such
as to Patan and Sindh, in pursuit of exploits. The ballad of Pabuji evokes ‘a
noble bandit who […] achieves status as an avatar’. Such ballads of heroic
brigandage abound all over the world; an example is Robin Hood of
Sherwood. They continue to be created, lauded and commemorated as rare
feats of moral bravery.
Pabuji’s bravery and spectacular successes in raids, which his bhopo
sings to his phad, represent the skirmishes and blood feuds of a local hero
who seeks a political and higher social identity. He was ‘the junior son of a
junior son’ of a village head, and his itinerant bhopos are even today
derogatorily called thoris by caste Rajputs. The epic emerged when the
Rathor clan was establishing a ruling dynasty in Marwar, and their claims of
descent possibly represent the efforts of a heterogeneous local group to
create historical memories of a singular communitarian political
inheritance.
The phad accrues sacrality through rituals. The bhopo finds a suitable
site for the phad, sweeps the ground on which he displays it, and then puts
it in position by fastening the rope that runs through the top end of the cloth
to two wooden props that frame the two broadsides. He performs aarti in
front of it and invites the gathering to make cash offerings to the centrally
placed deity, Pabuji. The wealthy devotee donors occasionally record their
donations by inscribing their names upon an unpainted section on the cloth
and, as Smith records, ‘the bhopo blows a conch shell, one blast for each
rupee’.
Along with his wife, the bhopi, who holds an oil lamp to illuminate the
painted figures on the phad, the bhopo sings the liturgy of Pabuji with a
ravanhattha, a homemade spike-fiddle. His long red tunic swirls as he
dances, and the bells around his ankles jiggle during the gav (singing). He
intersperses his singing with arthav, or to quote Smith, a ‘declamatory
spoken account of the events of the story [when] he uses the bow to point to
the relevant details of the painting stretched out behind him’.
During the performance, the bhopo often cracks jokes about the actions
of Pabuji and his friends and foes and makes many deliberate mistakes in
recalling the sequences of events or a particular action of the deity or his
cohorts, for which he is suitably chaffed and chastised by the listeners. The
‘reading’ of the phad, or pabuji ri paṛ vacno, as the bhopo calls his
performance in Rajasthani, is thus as much an occasion of entertainment as
it is of religiosity.
The phad, according to tradition, cannot be unfolded during the day, and
the epic is therefore performed only at night. The bhopos can therefore also
tell the story of Pabuji within a maximum time duration of twelve hours,
between sunset and sunrise. However, during the performance, they are
required to provide leisure breaks for tea, rest, tobacco, etc., and the epic of
Pabuji is never conveyed in its entirety during one sitting. This is one
reason why the epic is recalled by the bhopos as a collection of episodes,
and pabuji ra paṛvara, the performance of the epic, constitutes, as Kavita
Singh tells us, a non-linear storytelling tradition similar to that through the
kaavad.
Heroic ballads are disseminated through songs and recitations in front of
carefully painted objects, including pattachitras (painted scrolls) in eastern
India. However, the phad remains unique in the pattern of its discard.
Because the bhopos buy their phad at a great price, they use it until it
begins to disintegrate. However, they do not just throw away the phads after
they are too far gone for use. As Smith recounts, they ‘cool’ them first in
the lake of Pushkar (Ajmer), which they venerate. The disposal rituals,
changing today through the uses of local wells, perpetuate the sacral nature
of the phads in afterlife.
The origin and enchantment of the Pabuji epic were possibly due to the
increasing performances of the Ramayana from the late fourteenth century
in the Rajputana lands. Notably, the Ramayana enters the Pabuji story
through the plunder of she-camels from Ravan’s Lanka for Pabuji’s niece
Kelam. Additionally, Pabuji is considered Lakshman’s avatar, his sworn
enemy, Jindrav Khici, is Ravan’s avatar, while his bride is the latter’s sister
Surpanakha’s avatar. Smith and scholars of South Asian epics tell us that
the Pabuji epic draws upon the unfinished business in the Ramayana,
namely, Ravan’s quarrel with Lakshman, who cut off Surpanakha’s nose. In
the Kaliyuga, Ravan as Jindrav Kichi is finally allowed to kill Lakshman, or
Pabuji, although this does not go unavenged.
Pabuji’s phad appears rather prominently in the film Shonar Kella (1971)
by Satyajit Ray, which features the golden fortress of the Bhatti Rajput in
Jaisalmer, of yellow sandstone. The film evokes a magical night: the
lingering drone of the ravanhattha and the high-pitched singing of the
bhopo echoing into the vast emptiness of a star-studded desert sky. The shot
of the phad presents a glimpse of the power of rhythm in establishing a
memory of the epic, which Smith also conveys through the metrical
translation:

[Pabuji’s] knees were Ganesa’s, his waist Kalika’s, his chest

Hanuman’s, his throat a gokhala, his face the land of Marwar; and
the
Monarch’s lock of hair was that of a king.
Peacocks and cataka birds sported, and the moon and the sun both
shone.
Half the sun shone on Lord Pabuji, half the sun shone upon the land.

The photograph of Parbu bhopo’s invocation to the phad attunes us to the

materiality of sound within acts of memorialization. It reminds us that the
preservation of oral tradition demands careful archiving of the intonations.
This is often overlooked within the creations of their heritage values
through the ritual objects of the bards.

CHATTOPADHYAYA, B.D. (1976–77). ‘Origin of the Rajputs: The Political, Economic and Social
Processes in Early Rajasthan’. Indian Historical Review, 3(1), 59–82.
KOTHIYAL, T. (2017). Nomadic Narratives: A History of Mobility and Identity in the Great Indian
Desert. Cambridge University Press.
SINGH, K. (2012). ‘Transfixed by the Arrow of Time: Phad Paintings of Rajasthan’. In A.L.
Dallapiccola (Ed.), Indian Painting: The Lesser Known Traditions (pp. 108–25). Niyogi Books.
SMITH, J.D. (1991). The Epic of Pabuji: A Study, Transcription and Translation. Cambridge
University Press.
TOD, James. (1829–32). Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan: Or the Central and Western Rajpoot
States of India, Vol. 1. Smith Elder.
31
GARUDA CHARIOT
Hampi, Karnataka
Early 16th century

THE MASSIVE AND MAGNIFICENT GARUDA CHARIOT IS A UNIQUE ancillary shrine

of a powerful temple – variously known as the Viththal, Vijaya Viththal and
Viththalswami – in Hampi, the once grand city of Vijayanagara, the capital
of a mighty empire of the same name (c. 1335/36–1565). It is a ratha
vimana (chariot shrine), and is aligned strategically with the mahamandapa
(main shrine), for creating the impression that ‘the god is approached by his
vahana to be taken out in procession’, to quote Gerd Mevissen, one of the
foremost historians of the south Indian temple chariots. The stone chariots
symbolically performed the same function as the wooden chariots, such as
the Jagannatha ratha (see ch. 28), of taking deities to their worshippers for
darshan. However, they also carry historical information about statecraft
and city building, and the spectacular Garuda Chariot of a great empire
provides a clear view of their potential as multifaceted antiquities.
The chariot is dedicated to Garuda, Vishnu’s vahana (mode of transport).
The bird-headed figure appears in one of the central niches of the sanctum
with two other incarnations of Vishnu, Balakrishna and Narasimha, and in a
variety of votive postures on the exterior surfaces. The shrine is placed
upon four wheels which are detached circles of stone with complete axle
shafts. The ornamental wheels – with delicate lotus petals, jewels and
creepers – are, therefore, theoretically moveable, even though their creators
would have known that they would be useless in moving a massive granite
building. Unfortunately, they are now firmly fixed: cemented to the plinth
during one of the restoration projects. The moveable wheels symbolize time
and, as Mevissen tells us, ‘the ever-moving luminaries, the sun and the
moon’. They were ‘pulled’ by horses, whose broken forms in leaping
postures jut out from the lower surface of the vimana. The pair of granite
elephants we see near the wheels today are modern additions, placed during
one of the restorations.

Stone chariot dedicated to Garuda, a subsidiary shrine of the Vitthal temple, Hampi.

The horses and wheels of the Garuda Chariot – and all ratha vimanas –
allude to Surya, the sun god, who travels across the sky on his horse-driven
chariot, and whose divine presence was architecturally perfected on Earth at
his temple in Konark, Odisha. However, the architectural form of the
temple on wheels is possibly indigenous to south India, as the earliest
examples appear as a series carved upon the Nataraja temple of
Chidambaram, which, we know from the essay on Shiva Nataraja, was the
pre-eminent temple of the Chola kings (see ch. 23). The architectural stone
chariots were developed from the chariot motifs seen in the royal temples of
the Pallava kings at Kanchipuram and Mahabalipuram. The temples are
associated with the legend of the Tripurantaka, or the warrior Shiva, and
therefore also display the might of the patron rulers. Of the 40 known
examples, 16 are in the Kumbakonam area, which was the hub of the
Pallava and Chola empires.
The earliest known ratha vimana is of the Rajarajesvara, or
Airavateswara, temple built by Rajaraja Chola II (r. 1146–73) at Darasuram.
Unlike the free-standing Garuda Chariot, it is attached to the mahamandapa
and comprises a hall with many pillars. The wheels and horses prominently
flank the entrance. Architecturally it displays, as Mevissen suggests,

perhaps a last great effort of the weakened dynasty to regain control

over the three southern enemies, the Pandyas, the Ceras and the
Sinhalas, by invoking the help of the destroyer of the tripuras […]
However, history tells us that the great Mahadeva obviously refused
to mount this marvelous chariot, since the steady decline of the Cola
power could not be stopped.

The legends associated with the Darasuram ratha vimana inform us of

the histories of collaboration between the worshippers of Shiva and Vishnu,
which are usually overlooked in the mapping of the two sectarian traditions
that are better known for their bitter rivalries. As Mevissen informs us,
legend has it that ‘when Siva mounted the chariot, it threatened to sink. [So]
Vishnu assumed the form of a white bull, raised it up and stabilized it.’ The
Vaishnava Garuda Chariot, undoubtedly, carries the origin histories of the
ratha vimanas in the Shiva temples and thereby displays the fluid
boundaries of sectarian identities and affiliations.
Viththal, according to his pre-eminent scholar R.C. Dhere, is
Mahasamanvay, or the great convergence, whose origins may be in a
pastoralist god. He brings together folk and elite forms of worship, displays
in his person the iconography of Shiva and Vishnu and has significant
connections with Buddhist, Jainas, goddess worship, and Vedic traditions.
Viththal, as Dhere also tells us, was Shaivized and Vaishnavized at Hampi,
often at the same time. Thus, ‘the king of Vijayanagar […] raised the status
of Vitthal Birappa at Lepakshi by making him into Virabhadra and bringing
about his Saivization […] after Vitthal had attained Vaishnava status […]
and while his fame continued to be proclaimed by his magnificent temple at
Vijayanagar’.
The king would have been of the Tuluva dynasty, which ruled
Vijayanagara in the sixteenth century (c. 1505–65). Although there are no
foundational inscriptions of the Viththal Temple, architectural historians of
Vijayanagara, such as George Michell, infer its establishment by the Tuluva
ruler Vira Narasimha (r. 1505–09). The Temple came into prominence
during the reign of Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509–29), possibly the best-known
Vijayanagara ruler, who established its regal and institutional status by
commemorating it with all his military successes through grand
endowments. He created the vast temple complex that spawned
Viththalpura, and which, to quote the historian Anila Verghese, ‘became the
hub of [Vijayanagara’s] religious activities and festivals’.
Krishnadeva’s two queens bequeathed two gopuras, or towering
gateways, to the temple. They were novel architectural imports from the
Tamil country, which the monarch had subdued by 1513. Following his
grand military success against the Gajapati of Orissa, he bequeathed the
temple with a magnificent maharangamandapa that constituted a massive
hall of hundred pillars. The mandapa was the first of its kind in the
Vijayanagara Empire and possibly the Indian subcontinent, and inscriptions
inform us of the great pride which Krishnadeva took in its innovative
design. It served him even in posterity by staging his literary compositions,
especially Jambavati-kalyanam, for which he gained renown as a
playwright. Krishnadeva’s commemorative patronage explains the
colloquial name of the temple – Vijaya Viththal, the victorious lord,
Viththal.
 Krishnadeva’s successors added to the temple complex. The last grant to
the temple in 1564, and the two unfinished gopuras, provide ample
evidence of the ‘tremendous spurt of building activity that was taking place
in this sacred suburb’ until 1565, as Verghese informs us, when the city was
sacked by the victorious armies of the sultans of the Deccan. Of the many
unknowns regarding the Viththal Temple, which, paradoxically, has the
largest corpus of inscriptions, one is the missing icon, so we do not know
what it looked like. Dhere suggested that the Viththal of Vijayanagara
resembled the Venkatesh of Tirumalai, in Venkatagiri, and had drawn
attention to the samkirtan (song) of a Telugu Vaishnava poet Tallapakam
Annamacarya (c. 1408–1503), one of which states that ‘Vitthal and
Rukmini who came from Venkatachal are living in the temple of
Vijayanagara’. Another mentions ‘the temple of Vitthal Vijayanagar, the
god’s great bathing festival, the great chariot festival, and the festival of
feasting in the wilderness’. These songs provide evidence of the existence
of the Viththal Temple before Krishnadeva’s rule. However, the poet’s
mention of a chariot festival probably has no bearing upon the construction
date of the Garuda Chariot, which also remains unknown.
Vijayanagara became a wealthy cosmopolitan city in the mid-fifteenth
century. Its rising fortunes are evident in the declarations of Abdur Razzak,
an envoy from Herat who was received by the Saluva ruler Devaraya II (r.c.
1442–46). He affirmed that ‘the city of Bidjanagar is such that the pupil of
the eye has never seen a place like it, and the ear of intelligence has never
been informed that there existed anything to equal it in the world’.
The city emerged within the geography of an ancient tirtha, or sacred
grounds, of the local goddess Pampa Devi – hence the name Hampi. The
goddess was absorbed into the Shaiva fold as the consort of Virupaksha, the
tutelary deity of the Vijayanagara kings. By the time Krishnadeva ascended
to the throne the population of the city was over 250,000. Contemporary
European and Asian visitors compared it to the grandest cities they knew,
and the Portuguese merchant Domingo Paes, after climbing a hill to see the
expanse of the city, enthused that it was as ‘large as Rome, and very
beautiful to the sight’. Paes declared it ‘the best provided city in the world’.
 Krishnadeva’s extensive conquests brought Vijayanagara into global
networks of trade. His lavish patronage of the Viththal Temple illustrates his
political project to create a mega temple-matha that could be deployed for
administering his lands, as Valerie Stoker has shown. She notes that

when sectarian institutions irrigated land and arranged for village

produce to be dispatched to remote temples, when they filled temple
coffers with cash and distributed donations of prasad to various
publics, and when they commissioned goods and services for
conducting elaborate festivals and celebrations they […] had
significant impact upon people’s daily lives including the kinds of
crops they planted, the food they ate, the ways in which they
manouvered space, how they organized themselves into groups and
the manner in which they paid their taxes.

The Vaishnava matha, which the Viththal Temple complex came to

constitute by the 1520s, aided the integration of ‘the recently conquered and
rebellious territories more firmly into the empire’, to quote Stoker, through
various economic – including agrarian – undertakings. Its growing stature
during Krishnadeva’s lifetime can be gauged by the replacement of
Virupaksha by Viththal as the divine signatory of all royal inscriptions. We
may postulate, correctly, that Viththal worship contributed to the creation of
an institutional public space that, notionally at least, exhibited the patronage
of ‘a shared religious culture’. The many identities of Viththal cross-cut
differences of occupation and sect and allowed his worshippers ‘to free him
from the increasing dominance of the elites and to cause him to meet openly
with men and women of any and every caste’, as Dhere emphasized. The
Garuda Chariot would have enhanced Viththal’s populous appeal by
illuminating his Shiva and Vishnu forms. Its architectural form, we may
assume, was carefully planned.
The history of the patronage of ‘the Brahmin sectarian institutions’ by the
kings of Vijayanagara, to follow Stoker, does not detract from the histories
of the latter’s eclectic cultural practices. The Vijayanagara rulers borrowed
elements from the northern sultanate for imperial self-fashioning. They
adopted the Islamic honorific hinduraja-suratrana, or sultan among Hindu
kings, and the court etiquette of appearing in the Islamic dress of long-
sleeved tunic, kabayi, and high conical brocade cap, kullayi. Their lavish
patronage was never purely religious; it resonated with the utility value of
administering the far-flung and inner recesses of their kingdoms.
The tall shikhara, tower, of the Garuda Chariot, curiously dismantled in
the early 1880s at the orders of a collector of Bellary, would have added to
its lustre as the conveyor of Viththal’s grace on Vijayanagara. Alexander
Greenlaw of the East India Company, who photographed the Chariot in
1856 with its shikhara intact, declared, possibly much to his own surprise,
that ‘if we turn our eyes to India, China, Egypt and Greece […] we shall
find […] that howsoever proud we may be of our progress in all arts and
sciences, we were equaled, and in some instances surpassed, by those
primitive nations’.
The magnificence of the Garuda Chariot is best situated in its grand
display of the sophisticated statecraft of an Eastern empire, the possibility
of which Greenlaw and Company officials would not have vested upon the
creative capacities of the ‘primitive’ nation which they set out to colonize.

DHERE, R.C. (2010). The Rise of a Folk God: Vitthal of Pandharpur. A. Feldhaus (Trans.). Oxford
University Press.
GORDON, S. (2008). ‘Greenlaw and His Successors’. In G. Michell (Ed.), Vijayanagara: Splendour
in Ruins (pp. 153–86). Alkazi Collection of Photography and Mapin.
MAJOR, R.H. (1857). ‘Narrative of the Journey of Abd-er-Razzak, Ambassador from Shah Rukh
A.H. 845, A.D. 1442’. In R.H. Major (Ed.), India in the Fifteenth Century Being a Collection of
Narratives of Voyages to India in the Century Preceding the Portuguese Discovery of the Cape
of Good Hope, from Latin, Persian, Russian, and Italian Sources. Haklyut Society.
MEVISSEN, G.J.R. (1993). ‘Mythology Meets Architecture: The Stone Chariot at Darasuram’. In
A.J. Gail and G.J.R. Mevissen (Eds), South Asian Archaeology 1991 (pp. 539–60). Franz Steiner
Verlag.
MICHELL, G. (1984). ‘A Never Forgotten City’. In M.S. Nagaraja Rao (Ed.), Vijayanagara
Progress Research, 1983–1984 (pp. 152–63). Mysore: Directorate of Archaeology and
Museums.
MICHELL, G. and P.B. Wagoner. (2001). ‘Vitthala Temple Complex’. In G. Michell and P.B.
Wagoner (Eds), Vijayanagara: Architectural Inventory of the Sacred Centre, Vol. 1, Texts and
Maps (pp. 217–29). Manohar and American Institute of Indian Studies.
STOKER, V. (2016). Polemics and Patronage in the City of Victory: Vyasatirtha, Hindu Sectarianism
and the Sixteenth-Century Vijayanagara Court. University of California Press.
VERGHESE, A. (2000). Archaeology, Art and Religion: New Perspectives on Vijayanagara. Oxford
University Press.
32
THE JAALI OF ‘PALM AND
PARASITE’
Ahmedabad, Gujarat
1572–73

THIS MAGNIFICENT JAALI IS ONE OF THE TWO UNIQUE LATTICED, or perforated,

stone screens of the Sidi Sayyid Mosque at Ahmedabad, of which there are
no comparable samples within India. It flanks one of the arches of the
central aisle. Usually, such stone jaalis are smaller, square or rectangular,
with geometric patterns. This jaali and an adjacent one, with an
‘intertwining’ tree, are massive slabs and possibly the best examples of the
goldsmith-like delicate craftsmanship of the stone carvers of pre-colonial
Gujarat.
The Sidi Sayyid Mosque, known locally as Sidi Sayyid ni jaali, ‘is
composed entirely of the arcades of arches’, and the jaalis which screen the
arches provide, as Percy Brown emphasized, ‘this small and almost
insignificant building a world-wide reputation’. Brown wrote admiringly of
the exquisite tracery of this jaali, describing it as that of the ‘palm and the
parasite’, and stated that the ‘artist was forthcoming with exceptional vision
who put aside all conventions and proceeded to treat these stone
tympanums as finely meshed surface on which he could freely express in
ornamental form what was in his mind’.
An intricately carved latticed window, depicting a tree, possibly the baobab. Stone, Sidi Sayyid
Mosque, Ahmedabad.

The jaalis would have stoked the visual presence of the mosque in pre-
colonial and colonial Ahmedabadi landscapes, for the building suffered
from ‘lack of patronage and upkeep’ under Maratha rule of the city and
‘was converted into a Mamlatdar (revenue collector) office’ by the British,
as Behroz Shroff and Sonal Mehta remind us. While it was returned for
worship in the early twentieth century after refurbishments by the
Archaeological Survey, the jaalis were seemingly ‘secularized’ for
showcasing Ahmedabad’s extraordinary architectural heritage.
The jaali of the ‘palm and parasite’ was to inspire the logo of one of
India’s premier business schools, the Indian Institute of Management, which
was set up in Ahmedabad in 1960. It has accrued a long history of
souveniring since then, which includes reproductions as silver mementos
for the visiting dignitaries of Ahmedabad and its many internationally
reputed institutes of art, design, research and entrepreneurship.
Significantly, the logo and the souveniring memorialize the jaali as the Tree
of Life.
The Kalpavriksh, or wish-fulfilling Tree of Life, finds increasing mention
within the Jaina texts of the medieval period. They possibly denoted, as
Selina Sen reminds us, the majestic deciduous baobab tree, a native of
Africa. Plant scientists tell us that the evidence of genetic results shows
‘multiple introductions of African baobabs to the Indian subcontinent […]
The Swahili-Arab trade and cultural networks around the western Indian
Ocean from the tenth until the seventeenth centuries matches with evidence
of […] sources in the Indian clusters.’ Of the multiple introductions, one
was through the trafficking of captive Africans within the trade networks of
the Portuguese, English, Dutch and French East India Companies, which
lends to the possibilities that the jaali depicts the monumental baobab, and
with its festooning branches declares the patronage of the building it
enshrines, allowing us to see the Sidi history of the mosque explicitly.
For, the mosque was built by a powerful court official of the last sultan of
Gujarat, who was a Sidi and therefore, had a genealogical history of descent
from Africa. The British and Europeans might have erroneously recorded
the branches as a parasite vine, and Brown’s description replicates the
errors of viewing.
Jaalis are quintessential to Gujarati architecture, and one of the oldest
surviving examples is in a sixth-century Vishnu temple near Prabhas Patan.
By the eleventh century, they were seminal elements of an emerging Maru–
Gurjara architectural style that was soon adapted to the necessities of
worship in Islam by local builders and craftsmen. The ‘expansion’ of this
style within the Islamic kingdoms in Gujarat, as Alka Patel tells us,
demonstrates the continuation of building practices firmly rooted in the
region. The style conveys ‘a fluidity among building types […] from
Gujarat’s temple architecture to mosques, stepwells and urban gateways of
the sultanate’. Therefore, mosques were often mentioned as rahamana
prasada (abode of the merciful) within the Gujarati architectural texts. The
word is a compound of Arabic and Sanskrit and points to the morphological
connections between the shrines of Islam and Hinduism, illustrating the
practices of craftspeople who drew from ‘their own experience[s] for the
construction of new building types’.
Patel shows us why architectural fabric does not always lend to clear-cut
classification schemes, including of the sacred and profane. The jaali of the
‘baobab and palm’, were we to rename it, substantiates her observation. For,
although in a mosque and bearing a design that may have been an ‘Islamic
device’of the arabesque, if we follow the views of John Burton-Page, as an
architectural object the jaali is not limited to its Islamic influences; rather it
informs us of the long history of confluences of design elements. They
include motifs from local Hindu and Jaina buildings, Islamic architecture in
places such as Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, and embroidered and painted
motifs from the rich textiles of Gujarat.
Notably, Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth emphasize that ‘the jaalis of
Ahmedabad’s Sultanate period buildings are the most exquisite expression
of a long tradition of synthesis and symbiosis between religions, cultures
and crafts’. This tradition imbues the ‘homes, mosques, churches, step-
wells and even mundane features […] giving the city a visual unity that rose
above the social, political and cultural friction caused by encounters
between differing world views’. Therefore, the jaali also appears in the
churches of colonial Gujarat, and expectedly an imitation of the baobab and
palm is in one of the oldest churches of Ahmedabad, the Irish Presbyterian
Mission Church near Ellisbridge.
The Sidi patron of the mosque, who was honoured as a Sayyid, was
possibly a descendant of Hapshy, or Habshi, slaves who were traded from
the east coast of Africa since the ninth century, if not earlier. Until the end
of the eighteenth century, we hear of Sidi battalions in the armies of the
nizams and nawabs of the Indian subcontinent. However, the appellation
Sidi, as Amrita Shodhan reminds us, denotes many communities with traces
of slave descent of Africa, who have lived in various places along the
Arabian coast, from the Makran and Sindh to the west coast of India for
more than a millennium. Therefore, to search for the origins of a Sidi
community today is ahistorical, as this leads to fixing a homogenizing
identity of false racial geography – African – upon people who see
themselves, variously, as Indians, Muslims, Gujaratis and Adivasis, among
other identities.
Slavery was banned in the British–Indian territories from 1843. However,
many native princes chose to turn a blind eye to the slave-trading practices
within their realms, and this recent history of trafficking remains largely
unknown.
The jaali of the baobab and palm demands scholarship of the slave trade
in India and the participation of the ‘natives’ in this barbaric and lucrative
trade. Instead, the jaali’s increasing public celebration in the twenty-first
century resurrects a forgotten mosque as a ‘sublime ode in stone to the
extraordinary architectural legacy of the African diaspora in India’, as we
may note from a ‘definitive guide of India’s hidden wonders’, the Atlas
Obscura.
The flaunting of ‘Sidi Ahmedabad’ and its Indo-Islamic and Indo-African
culture has contributed to the enlistment of modern Ahmedabad as a
UNESCO World Heritage City – significantly, at a time when Ahmedabad’s
civic landscape gained international notoriety as one of the prime venues of
some of the fiercest anti-Muslim communal violence in India. Although the
beguiling uses of the jaali have proved to be politically prudent, the
exuberant object grandly displaying the African baobab demands us to look
critically at the renegotiations of the past within the expedient heritagizing
schemes.

‘Sidi Saiyyed Mosque: Ahmedabad, India’ (2019). Atlas Obscura.

BELL, K.L., H. Rangan, C.A. Kull and D.J. Murphy. (2015). ‘The History of Introduction of the
African Baobab (Adansonia digitate, Malvaceae: Bombacoideae) in the Indian Subcontinent’.
Royal Society Open Science, 2(150370). dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150370.
BROWN, P. (1943). Indian Architecture (The Islamic Period), Vol. 2. D.B. Taraporevala & Sons.
PATEL, A. (2004). Building Communities in Gujarat: Architecture and Society during the Twelfth
through Fourteenth Centuries. Brill.
PATEL, A. (2006). ‘From Province to Sultanate: The Architecture of Gujarat during the 12th through
16th Centuries’. In A.N. Lambah and A. Patel (Eds), The Architecture of the Indian Sultanates
(pp. 68–79). Marg.
SEN, S. (2017, June 30). ‘A Green Suggestion for India’s Political Leaders: Plant Baobabs instead of
Building Statues’. Scroll.in.
SHODHAN, A. (2015). ‘The Sidi Badshah of Western India: The Politics of Naming’. Journal of
African Diaspora, Archaeology & Heritage, 4(1), 34–49.
SHROFF, B. and S. Mehta. (2020). ‘Sidi Voices and the Sidi Sayyid Mosque: Narratives of Space
and Belonging’. South Asian History and Culture, 11(4), 407–20. DOI:
10.1080/19472498.2020.1827596.
YAGNIK, A. and S. Sheth. (2011). Ahmedabad: From Royal City to Megacity. Penguin Books.
33
A YASNA SADEH
Gujarat
16th century
THIS FOLIO IS THE FIRST PAGE OF THE OLDEST KNOWN manuscript of the Yasna
Sadeh. It was written in Gujarat when the new settler Parsi community
began to systematically collate their rituals and traditions to safeguard the
perpetuity of their ancient religion and communitarian identity. The didactic
text, without any commentaries, provides instructions on the Yasna rituals,
which are the most important in Zoroastrianism, and which all dasturs, or
Parsi priests, are required to perform daily. The opening verse of the folio,
to quote a translation by Almut Hintze, declares that ‘Ahura Mazda’s good
forces, such as Good Thought, will defeat the evil ones, such as Bad
Thought, and finally the originator of the Daevas [demons] Angra Mainu
will withdraw powerless.’ The verse is of the Gathas, 17 hymns of an
ancient tradition of wisdom poetry that forms the oldest kernel of
Zoroastrianism. They date at least from the early second millennium BCE,
and later tradition in the Young Avesta regards them as the first occasion
when Ahura Mazda revealed the Mazdayasnian religion to Zarathustra.
Scholars define the Gathas as representing a prehistoric Indo-Iranian
religion as many common words, and thereby concepts, occur in the Gathic
and Rig Vedic verses.
Copy of the oldest known manuscript of the Yasna Sadeh. 1556, copied in India by Herbad Ardashir
Mobed Jiva. Ritual directions given in Gujarati written upside down. Ink on paper, The British
Library, MSS Avestan 17, ff. 127v–128r. Published in The Everlasting Flame (2013, pg. facing 83).

Notably, this earliest manuscript of the Yasna Sadeh embodies two well-
known, connected histories of Ancient Iran and India that are more or less
2,000 years apart. The first is of the second millennium BCE when the
Gathic and Vedic worlds appear to be members of a common cultural
ecumene, and the second is of the second millennium CE, when the
migration of the followers of Zoroastrianism into the Indian subcontinent
culminated. The manuscript provides an occasion to revisit both histories
and illustrates the powerful tool that writing has proved to be for
conservation practices. For it reminds us that to preserve their religion and
its Everlasting Flame in an alien land, the Zoroastrians, known today as
Parsis, made the prescient move of writing down their oral traditions, which
endowed material visibility to the prescriptive practices. Inevitably, this
oldest Zoroastrian manuscript evokes the extraordinary history of the Parsi
community and their invaluable contributions to their adopted homeland.
The Zoroastrian religion developed ‘as a descendant and new branch of
the ancient religion which the Iranian tribe had once shared with northern
India’, as its historians, such as Philip Kreyenbroek, recount. The Yasna and
the attendant rituals inform us of the shared ancestry. The Yasna showers
blessings upon the patron, who performs the rituals and the soul of the
departed, and preserves the cosmic order by maintaining a balance between
the spiritual (menog) and material (getig) worlds. The rituals include all
good creations, such as fire, water, plant life and animal products, and
enshrine the cult of the temple fire, which emerged from the daily practices
of tending the hearth-fire. The Yasna rituals entail the making and offering
of hom (from the haoma plant) to the fire and are therefore similar to the
practices of the Vedic yajnas which required offering of homa (of the soma
plant) to the sacrificial fire. The centrality of the Yasna to Zoroastrianism
mirrors that of the yajna to the followers of the religion of the Vedas.
The Zoroastrian religion flourished in Persia throughout the ancient
imperial period, which spanned the Achaemenid (c. 559–330 BCE), Parthian
(c. 247 BCE–224 CE) and Sassanian (c. 224–651 CE) dynasties. However, the
Arab conquest of Persia during the mid-seventh century, which brought
Islam into the region, forced the worshippers of Ahura Mazda to leave their
homeland. By the mid-ninth century, the seminal fire temples in Persia were
all transformed into mosques. The Qesseh-ye-Sanjan (The Story of Sanjan),
a sixteenth-century text detailing the historic exodus of Zoroastrians,
declares that when the Zoroastrian people set sail from their hiding place in
Hormuz,

They were all blessed in their adversity

by fortunes of victorious Bahram’s fire.
The very moment when their cry was heard
God gave them succour in difficulty.
A fair wind blew, there was glorious light,
The hostile wind disappeared from there […]
All dasturs and all laymen tied the kusti
The boat was then propelled upon the sea
And after that it was the law of Fate
That everyone of them arrived at Sanjan.
 Sanjan (Valsad, Gujarat) grew to become an important commercial centre
of trade with West Asia from the mid-eighth century. The rise of this town,
on the banks of the river Varoli and close to the Arabian Sea, coincides with
the first arrival of the Parsi people into the Indian subcontinent. Notably, at
Sanjan, archaeologists have excavated a tenth- or eleventh-century dakhma
(which today means a tower of silence, but once referred to a structure, not
necessarily a tower, where the dead were placed) of brick and mortar, which
they identify as the first Zoroastrian building in India.
The Qesseh details the ‘story of Muslim persecution in Iran and the
ensuing emigration that followed’, as Romila Thapar reminds us. However,
as Thapar also notes, the ‘Iranians had spread eastwards, along well-
established trade routes, well before the advent of Islam’. During the ninth
century, Arab officers who worked for the Rashtrakuta kings, of the
Deccan, were administrators of Sanjan, and considering that the
Zoroastrians were fleeing from the Arabs, it is likely that ‘some of the
migration to India may have been linked to pursuing commercial interests
rather than solely avoiding religious persecution’. It is known that the city
of Sanjan in Khorasan, northeast Iran, inspired the naming of the town,
Sanjan, in Gujarat by its Parsi settlers. Significantly, the Qesseh announces
that the believers of Zarathustra brought with them their ritual implements
from Khorasan. Therefore, scholars suggest that the textual reference
constitutes historical evidence of migratory routes also through land ‘since
a sacred fire could not, by religious law, have been transported by sea’.
The possibilities of other histories of the arrival of Zoroastrianism into
India show us the limitations of sourcing the past through prescriptive texts.
The Qesseh was written in Gujarat in c. 1599, around 40 years after this
Yasna Sadeh, and it comprises 430 verse couplets in Persian. As one of its
foremost historians Alan Williams emphasizes, the text was ‘composed on
the basis of oral traditions handed down from living memory to the writer,
who records his name as Bahman Key Qobad, a dastur, of the Sanjana
priestly lineage of the town of Navsari [Gujarat]’. It is, thus, a ‘religious
and not historical […] heroic and romanticized poem, which atones the loss
of leaving Iran, and illuminates the consolation of having […] in India, the
everlasting flame of the new king, the Iran Shah’.
Such texts, were ‘compiled, mainly with the purpose of reinforcing
doctrine and belief while at the same time discouraging people from
converting to Islam’, as Sarah Stewart reminds us. The Qesseh gained
authority as a document of Parsi history because of the ostensible lack of
other historical sources. However, rather like this Yasna Sadeh, it
documents not only religious practices but also the moves of a severely
diminished community to nurture their distinct communitarian identity in an
alien cultural milieu. Both texts, therefore, encapsulate the politics of
identity- and legacy-making.
By the early 1600s, many coastal towns in Gujarat, such as Navsari,
Broach, Cambay and Surat, emerged as important commercial centres. They
comprised a substantial resident Parsi population who contributed
extensively to their commercial wealth. Unlike the other long-time resident
merchants in these towns, prominently the Jains, the Parsis actively
engaged with the foreign trading companies that established factories in and
near these towns from the seventeenth century. An early example is the
factory at Surat that was set up in 1619 by the British East India Company –
its first in the Indian subcontinent. Within two centuries, however, the bulk
of the Parsi community in Gujarat had migrated to Bombay, as severe
droughts and repeated Maratha incursions ravaged food supplies, disrupted
trade and caused many port towns to perish. By the mid-nineteenth century,
the community helmed Bombay’s ascendancy as an international port, and
began to make important contributions to the economy of European
mercantilism.
The Parsi trade ventures with Britain, Western Europe and North
America are well known, and their innovative entrepreneurship fuelled
Bombay’s rapid growth from the 1840s as the premier commercial capital
of the East. Possibly less known are their equally important business
ventures in the highly lucrative and notorious opium trade between India
and China, which was carefully initiated and controlled by the British.
Among the Parsi merchants, Jamshetji Jejeebhoy (1783–1859), Framji
Pestonji Patuk (1800–40), and Nusserwanji Tata (1822–86) created large
and highly successful commercial firms in Canton, Shanghai, Macao and
Hong Kong.
The Parsi mercantilism in the East fostered a resplendent and hybrid
Indo-Chinese consumer culture in Bombay. This was most apparent in the
Chinese-style décor in the rich mansions of the city, the fine and translucent
Chinese silk, or gara, saris which Parsi women wore and the Chinese
motifs on the jhablas (smock-like dress) and ijars (loose pyjamas) which
their children wore, especially during festivals and religious ceremonies.
The most spectacular example of the enduring materiality of this culture is
the fabric tanchoi, which remains widely coveted in India today. The word
is, supposedly, an amalgam. Three – tran in Gujarati – Parsi brothers from
Surat learnt the art of weaving this brocade silk from their Chinese master,
Chhoi. Thus, Parsi businesses, which founded Bombay’s shipping and
textile industries, also created a sophisticated and cosmopolitan lifestyle,
albeit of the elite, that nurtured a unique local aesthetic of high fashion.
Inevitably, Zoroastrianism influenced Bombay’s cultural geography and
architecture. New domestic and religious buildings emerged in the city, of
which the fire temples were the most prominent. The Qesseh informs us
that ‘in Iran the Zoroastrians had lost their royal patron Yazdegird III, but
now in India they will have their own invincible monarch with them, the
[eternal] Iran Shah fire’. The agiaries, or the Parsi fire temples, have stoked
the Iran Shah for close to 2,000 years, and a count in 2010 revealed 100 in
India, of which 50 are in Mumbai. Since only 27 are known outside India,
Mumbai appears to have the largest number of fire temples in the world.
The oldest fire temple in Mumbai, Maneckji Sett, built during the
nineteenth century, presents another stratum of Indo-Iranian connections the
city fostered, namely, the competitive European archaeology of the Near
East. The building was designed to evoke the architectural elements at the
Sassanian site of Taq-e Bostan in Kermanshah, and the entrance is flanked
by two large sculptures of human-headed winged bulls. They depict the
powerful influence of the first public display of the antiquities of Ancient
Assyria in Bombay in 1846–47. The antiquities were discovered during the
sensational excavations at Nimrud (Iraq) in 1845–47, undertaken by the
British diplomat and excavator Austen Henry Layard (1817–94). The
exhibition of Nineveh in Bombay, as noted in Artefacts of History (2015),
was facilitated by the eminent Parsi antiquaries of the city who successfully
lobbied for the display of Layard’s cargo that arrived at the docks, en route
London. The histories of this exhibition inform us of the recollections of the
connected histories of Ancient Iran and Ancient India within nineteenth-
century Bombay, and residents also recalled the city plans of Nineveh to
demand better civic amenities in their city.
The early cultural connections between Sassania and India are largely
traced through the Kushan dynasty (c. first–third century) and often through
the iconography of the Buddhist art of Afghanistan, such as the figure of
god Mitra in the now destroyed complex of the Buddhas at Bamiyan. With
the incursions of the Hunas into northern India in the fifth century,
historians trace another wave of Sassanian influence in the art of Kashmir,
and a third wave through the paintings of the medieval period in some of
the Buddhist monasteries in Ladakh. The relatively modern agiaries with
Sassanian-like façades remind us that perhaps the most enduring presence
of the Sassanian cultural influences in India are yet to be mapped, namely
through the histories of the migration of Zoroastrianism.
Therefore, this copy of the Yasna Sadeh evokes many unknown facets of
the Indo-Iranian connections. Furthermore, in telling the story of the
preservation of the Everlasting Flame of Iran Shah on Indian soil, it coaxes
reflections upon the extraordinary contributions of a migrant community in
fashioning some of the seminal aspects of Modern India.

GUHA, S. (2015). Artefacts of History: Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts. Sage
Publications.
HINTZE, A. (2013). ‘Words Without Context: The Gathas between Two Worlds’. In S. Stewart (Ed.),
The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination (pp. 2–9). I.B. Tauris.
KREYENBROEK, P.G. (2013). ‘Zoroastrianism as an Imperial Religion’. In S. Stewart (Ed.), The
Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination (pp. 10–17). I.B. Tauris.
SIMS-WILLIAMS, U. (2013). ‘The Judeo-Christian World’. In S. Stewart (Ed.), The Everlasting
Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination (pp. 104–05). I.B. Tauris.
STEWART, S. (2013). ‘Life and Afterlife’. In S. Stewart (Ed.), The Everlasting Flame:
Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination (pp. 34–41). I.B. Tauris.
THAPAR, R. (2002). Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin UK.
WILLIAMS, A. (2013). ‘Looking Back to See the Present: The Persian Qesseh-ye Sanjan as Living
Memory’. In S. Stewart (Ed.), The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and
Imagination (pp. 50–7). I.B. Tauris.
34
THE BABURNAMA
Early 16th century

ON SEEING THE GWALIOR FORT IN 1528, ZAHIRUDDIN MUHAMMAD Babur (1483–

1530), the founder of the Mughal dynasty, wrote in his memoir, the
Baburnama: ‘The buildings are strange. In addition to being higgledy-
piggledy and inharmonious, they are all carved of stone. Of all the rajah’s
edifices, Man Singh’s are most beautiful and the best.’
Babur’s army conquered Gwalior in 1528 – wresting the fort from the
Afghan Tatar Khan, who in turn had occupied it in 1526, after the Tomar
king of the region was killed at Panipat. Babur arrived in the city in the
month of Muharram 935 AH (September 1528) and described his sojourn in
some detail in the Baburnama. The painting provides an occasion to recall
this unique memoir, which is a rare example of a first-person narrative in
the early sixteenth century. It evokes ‘universally recognisable human
emotions’, as one of Babur’s foremost historians, Stephen Dale, tells us.
Significantly, the Baburnama was carefully fashioned into an object of
historical heritage by Babur’s successors, and it ‘opens up new vistas on the
cultural processes that simultaneously produced […] the book of kings and
the selves of kings’, as the historian Azfar Moin explains. The emerging
scholarship of the consumption and heritagization of the Baburnama
demonstrates the importance of critical engagements with the exclusionary
politics of category-making.
‘ Babur Inspecting Gwalior Fort’. Painting on paper, c. 1598, attributed to Bhura, 270 mm × 170 mm,
NM: 50.336/340.

Babur wrote his memoirs in Chaghatay, the spoken language of the

Turko-Mongol world. However, no manuscript survives from his time, and
the earliest known text of the Baburnama in Chaghatay dates about a
hundred years after his death. This second Chaghatay Baburnama is a copy
of the Persian translation of Babur’s manuscript that was commissioned by
Akbar, his grandson (r. 1556–1605). Thus, as Moin tells us: ‘Although
Babur’s original text was in Turkish, among the surviving manuscripts the
Persian translation predates the Turkish versions.’ Abdul-Rahim
Khankhanan, one of the few nobles in Akbar’s court who was fluent in
Chaghatay, Persian and Hindavi, completed the Persian translation in 1589
and presented it to Akbar in November that year after the latter returned
from a visit to his grandfather’s grave in Kabul. At least five illustrated
copies of the Baburnama in Persian were produced during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries in the ‘royal House of Books’, as a description of a
painting in the Victoria and Albert Museum – of Babur Supervising the
Garden of Fidelity (c. 1590) – informs us. This painting by Bhura was in
one of the copies. The Persian Baburnamas were all ‘beautifully
illustrated’, although Wheeler Thackston, the master translator of the
Baburnama into English, points out that ‘they have the disadvantage of
showing figures as contemporary Mughals in contemporary Indian settings
and thus illustrate later generations’ conceptions of Babur more than they
illustrate Babur himself’.
However, the historical value of the imagery can perhaps be located
precisely in the above representations that document the new art of the
book, which was fashioned by Akbar quite specifically for exhibiting his
grand imperial vision. Through commissions of the Tutinama (c. 1560)
(Ramayana in Persian 1584–89), Razmnama (Mahabharata in Persian, c.
1582–86), and Baburnama, among many others, Akbar deftly intertwined
aspects of the political and literary cultures of Central Asia and northern
India in an effort to lay the ideological foundations of a Timurid empire in
India.
The painting invokes Babur’s conquest of vast territories in northern
India within a span of three years, following his victory at Panipat. Born a
prince of Fergana in Transoxiana (Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) and related to
the two greatest warriors of Central Asia, Amir Timur (1336–1405) and
Chengiz Khan (c. 1162–1227), Babur was proclaimed ruler at Khodzhent in
1494, at the age of twelve. However, he soon found himself driven out of
his ancestral lands and spent the next decade trying to survive the military
disasters that followed his attempts to take Samarqand, the capital of his
great-great-grandfather, Timur. As Dale narrates,

Under their leader Shaibani Khan, Uzbeks executed his Timurid kin
and later his Chaghatai Mongol relatives, who in 1502 had belatedly
come to his aid from their homeland in Mughulistan […]. Fleeing
Ferghanah […] Babur was able to seize Kabul in December 1504.
Long a Timurid outpost, and last held by his other paternal uncle
Ulugh Beg Kabuli until his death in 1502, Kabul provided Babur
with a relatively secure base.

From Kabul, Babur made repeated attempts to recapture Samarqand,

failing which he decisively turned his attention southwards. The victory
against the Lodhi sultan at Panipat gave him the realms of Delhi and Agra.
He then defeated a Rajput confederacy led by Rana Sangha at Khanua in
March 1527, captured Chanderi, launched an attack on Mandu and the
Raisen area, and extended his conquests in central India by taking Gwalior.
The painting provides a view of the majestic fort of the Tomar rulers, which
stands upon a massive outcrop of sandstone, with numerous turrets capped
with gilded domes looking over the valley of Urawahi. Notably, its artist
Bhura, who worked on the lavish volumes of Akbar’s Razmnama, was well-
known by then for his paintings of architectural details.
The Gwalior fortress was substantially enlarged and embellished by the
indomitable Man Singh Tomar (r. 1486–1516/17), and Babur, who defeated
his son Vikramaditya at Panipat, was impressed with what he saw. He noted
that:

Man Singh’s palace is towards the east, and this side is more
elaborate than the others. […] On the side of the palace are five
domes […] to the tops have been attached plates of gilded copper.
The outside of the walls are covered all around with green glazed
tiles, which depict plantain trees. In the tower on the eastern side is
the Hathi Pol. At the exit to the gate is a statue of an elephant with
 two keepers on its back. Since it has been made in the exact likeness
of the animal, it is called Hathi Pol.

The painting highlights the distinctive curvilinear architecture of the

Gwalior Fort, whose ramparts enter Babur’s narrative in the Baburnama as
he goes in and out of the city during his many tours of the countryside.
Babur tells us that he ‘made a tour of Gwalior’s temples [and] having
examined the edifices […] went out through the west gate […] around the
south side of the fortress, and dismounted back at the charbagh that
Rahimdad had made in front of the Hathi Pol’.
Babur’s commandant Rahimdad, who successfully besieged Gwalior,
celebrated the arrival of his master with a lavish feast in the garden where
he ‘served excellent food’ and handed Babur the war booty that included
‘cash worth four lacs’.
The tank in the painting either depicts Rahimdad’s garden or one of the
reservoirs built by the Sultan of Delhi, Shamsuddin Iltutmish (r. 1210–
36/37), a Turk who conquered Malwa, including the regions near Gwalior,
in 630 AH (1232–33). Babur traced and documented the Turkish sultan’s
conquest through the careful discovery of a carved stone near a stepwell in
Urawahi, bearing Iltutmish’s name and the year of conquest. The
illustrations of Babur’s tour of Urawahi in the Persian Baburnamas
prominently show, hewn into the rock face, the ‘stark naked idols with all
their private parts exposed’, which Babur found so offensive that he ordered
them to be destroyed. Yet, Babur’s description of Gwalior is notably bereft
of sentiments of iconoclasm. He left the temples and palaces intact even
though he found them architecturally wanting, including the ‘ugly porticos’
of the temple next to Iltutmish’s mosque, which he emphasized was
‘extremely tall – the tallest structure in the fortress – and both the Gwalior
fortress and the temple can be plainly seen from the hill in Dholpur’.
Moreover, he chose to provide a glimpse of the eminence of Hindustani
music in the region through the mention of an excursion to a waterfall, ‘six
kos southeast of Gwalior [where] musicians played their instruments and
the singers sang some songs’. The note reminds readers of the lavish
patronage of the dhrupad tradition by Man Singh Tomar.
Despite the prominent fortress, the tank in the painting occasions a recall
of Babur’s descriptions of gardens in and around Gwalior. Babur built one
‘a kos west’ of Dholpur and another ‘a kos north’ of the fort at the end of a
mountain spur, the Bagh-i-Nilufar, or the Lotus Garden. He oversaw the
planting of an orchard here, ordered a dam to be built for the lake that
served the mosque at the western end, and his talented stonemason Shah
Muhammad designed a scalloped octagonal pool. He and his men also
poured their wine into a stepwell in this garden after they got very drunk,
and vowed temperance. A keen observer of nature, who took delight in
beauty, Babur enthused about the ‘lovely red oleanders’ in the Gwalior
gardens, which were remarkably different from the native varieties and
were ‘like peach blossoms’. He took some with him to Agra for the gardens
there.
Gardens for Babur, as Dale tells us, were social venues, ‘the suhbat, the
congenial gatherings of comrades, poets and musicians held in a chahar
bagh or charbagh, the quadrilateral Persianate garden’. The numerous
descriptions of time spent within the garden environments in Hindustan in
the Baburnama, therefore, convey Babur’s critical views of the lack of what
he considered a civilized society, comprising the congeniality of social
intercourse, or the Timurid ikhtilat u amizish and amad u raft in ‘the
isolating Hindu life of separate castes’. Also considering that Babur saw the
office of kingship as a master gardener, his creations of the chahar baghs,
with ordered areas divided by intersecting water channels and raised
walkways, most certainly illuminate his perceptions of controlling an
imperial domain. Therefore, Babur’s gardens in the Gwalior region
epitomize the monumental traces of his conquest of the Tomar lands.
The narrative value of the Baburnama is aptly conveyed by Thackston in
his measured emphasis that ‘with his likes and dislikes, temperament,
struggles, successes and failures […] Babur has left an incredibly detailed
record of his life and not a few insights into his thoughts, his strategy, and
his dealings with commanders and subordinates’. The British, who claimed
discovery of the text, noted it to be ‘almost the only specimen of real
history in Asia’, as William Erskine boasted. Expectantly, scholarship
reveals the glaring errors of their assessment, and also demonstrates the
particularities of the cultural transactions which the Baburnama it conveyed
to the ‘native’ readers of the sixteenth century.
In his study of the extant Chaghatay copy of the text, Azfar Moin locates
three prominent instances of ‘cracks’ or breaks in the narrative, and
suggests that one of them represents a possible addition by Jahangir of a
miraculous dream of Babur for illuminating ‘mimesis between the saintly
and royal’. This addition, Moin suggests, reflects Jahangir’s efforts to
connect key imperial ideologies of the Mughal and Safavid rulers. Moin
also reminds us that the last ‘crack’ in the Baburnama illustrates political
events in Gwalior that entailed Babur’s settlement of a political matter by
roping in Muhammad Ghaus, the charismatic and powerful Shattari Sufi
saint of the region. Babur noted that ‘on Tuesday the third of Muharram
[September 7], Shihabuddin Khusraw came from Gwalior with Shaykh
Muhammad Ghaws to intercede on behalf of [the errant] Rahimdad’. He
forgave his commandant ‘for his crime’ of rebellion and sent the Shaykh
and Nur Beg ‘to Gwalior so that Gwalior could be turned over to them’.
The Baburnama ends here.
The Baburnama moves from the ‘world of the selves to world of texts’,
and Moin implores us to note that while praising Muhammad Ghaus's
spiritual credentials, Babur was deeply aware of the ‘heretical foundations
on which they rested: in the year 1526 when the Timurid had made his
foray into Hindustan, the Shattari Sufi had allegedly made a celestial
journey, prophet-like to the throne of God’. Although ‘throughout much of
the writing of the memoir he was an inconsequential and dominionless
prince […] after India, Babur’s deeds had outstripped his chronicles’. As a
new master of Delhi, Babur became a centre of ritual attention and a focus
of cosmological knowledge and had to reciprocate ritually and ‘expose his
“self” for charismatic engagement’. Therefore, Jahangir’s addition of a
miraculous dream was ‘not to enhance Babur’s repute but to help the
Baburnama keep up with it’.
 The Baburnama thus illuminates the social memories that texts create,
preserve, transmit, re-create and re-transmit. It also offers ‘an antidote to
counteract the Orientalists’ depersonalized vision of Muslim societies’,
because, as Dale tells us, Babur starkly painted the individual – ‘emotional
and intellectual, pious, ambitious, depraved, eccentric, manic […thus]
nullifying […] misleading generalisations.’ The painting, no doubt, conveys
creations of dynastic memories. Yet, in jogging memories of Babur’s views
of India it provokes us to recall the visual histories of alien terrains
reminding us thereby, of the many erroneous religious-based categories of
civilizational heritage that are often historicized through such views.

BISHANDAS. (1590). Babur supervising laying out of Kabul garden. [opaque watercolour, paper].
V&A. Explore The Collections (vam.ac.uk).
DALE, S.F. (1990). ‘Steppe Humanism: The Autobiographical Writings of Zahir al-Din Muhammad
Babur, 1483–1530’. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 22(1), 37–58.
DALE, S.F. (2018). Babur: Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor, 1483–1530. Cambridge University
Press.
ERSKINE, W. (1854). A History of India under the First Two Sovereigns of the House of Taimur,
Báber and Humáyun. Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans.
MOIN, A.A. (2012). ‘Peering through the Cracks in the Baburnama: The Textured Lives of Mughal
Sovereigns’. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49(4), 493–526.
THACKSTON, W. (Trans.) (1996). The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor. Oxford
University Press.
35
BHUGOLA: THE EARTH BALL
Possibly Gujarat
c. mid-16th century

‘A MAP OF THE WORLD ON A BOX? WHATEVER FOR?’ THIS IS HOW one might react
to this object at first encounter. The superbly made brass box bears an
inscription in Sanskrit, which informs us that this is a Bhugola or ‘Earth
Ball’, and viewers have suggested that it might have been used as a box for
storing condiments, such as paan (betel leaf). The Bhugola box, scholars
tell us, is possibly the earliest terrestrial globe made in South Asia. In its
unique translation of the geography of Earth, it beckons historical enquiries
into the practices of globe-making in pre-colonial India.
Within the European and Arabic worlds, terrestrial globes were
increasingly manufactured from the end of the fifteenth century that
ushered an age of great discoveries and voyages. The earliest extant
terrestrial globe was made in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1492 by a German
cosmographer, mathematician and philosopher, Martin Behaim, five years
before Vasco da Gama set sail for India from Portugal. Behaim had served
at the Lisbon Court, and in 1484 was sent on a voyage to Africa by the
Portuguese king. The journey inspired him to make a globe after his return
to Nuremberg. He called his creation Erdapfel (literally, Earth apple), and
located upon it more than 1100 places, including the circles of Tropics,
Arctic and Antarctic, and a single meridian from pole to pole, at 80 degrees
to the west of Lisbon.
Bhugola on display, on a modern stand. Brass, diameter 254 mm, height 222 mm, History of Science
Museum Oxford, 1927–10.

The sixteenth century brought a desire for more accurate representations

of the world than could be encapsulated upon a plane map. The Bhugola
was made towards the end of this century when globes had become
common in Europe. We could ask why the Indian subcontinent did not take
to globe-making. The question becomes pertinent when we consider that the
subcontinent’s Islamic rulers, through their cultural connections with the
Arab and Persian worlds, knew of celestial globes.
Globes appear in royal paintings from the reign of Jahangir, and one
particular painting, by Abu’l Hasan depicts the emperor sitting on a
European-type chair holding a globe. It is the largest Mughal painting
known to date, and was completed in c. 1617, three decades after the
Bhugola was made. The title Jahangir, which prince Salim assumed upon
accession in 1605, translates as the ‘World Seizer’, and the emperor’s
appearances with the globe convey his triumphant rule of the world.
In mapping the early depictions of globes within Mughal paintings,
Sumathi Ramaswamy reminds us that in contrast to European paintings of
the time – where the globe appears ‘as a scientific object of curiosity’ –
Mughal paintings depict the object only with the persona of the emperors,

most often physically connected to his body in some fashion: he is

either holding it, standing on it, resting his feet on it, or waiting to
receive it from either his predecessors or, interestingly, from Muslim
holy men. With a few notable exceptions […] the globe visually
appears only in imperial contexts where the Emperor invariably
occupies centerstage. [The paintings] conscript the terrestrial globe
into complex political, moral, and personal envisionings of the royal
self.

Terrestrial globes possibly appeared in the Indian subcontinent during the

reign of Akbar, together with maps and other cartographic objects, which
the Jesuit priests brought to the emperor’s court. In 1580, the first Jesuit
mission, of which Antonio Monserrate was a prominent member, presented
Akbar with the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570) of Abraham Ortelius − the
first atlas to have made the earth portable. Jahangir, too, was gifted an
equally important and magnificent atlas by Thomas Roe, the ambassador of
James I of England at his court between the years 1615 and 1618. In 1617,
Roe gave him the atlas of Europe which had been put together in the 1570s
by Ortelius’s friend and rival, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator.
The emperor’s curious reception of the gift, which entailed its return to Roe,
has been discussed at length by Ramaswamy, who also notes the imperial
uses of the globes as reflecting the ‘conceit of the Mughal emperor’ as the
master of the temporal and spiritual worlds. By the end of the seventeenth
century, the globe appears to have acquired a wider currency outside the
imperial persona, as we may note from the account of the French merchant
Jean Baptiste Tavernier (1605–89) on Brahmins and nobles in Benares
puzzling over two globes that were gifts from the Dutch.
The Bhugola which carries the earth upon a box-container, according to
its historian Simon Digby embodies ‘an elegant conceit suggested by its
shape’. Digby demonstrated that its shape and the engravings upon it were
both intentional. Although spherical, it carries aspects of Puranic
cosmology, and the shape and engravings work to weld scriptural authority
to the authority of astronomy. The Bhugola may thus well be an object that
was carefully constructed for scientifically negotiating the sacrosanct.
The Puranas conceptualize the Earth as a cosmic egg, Brahmanda, that
comprises seven dvipas (islands), including the central Jambudvipa, whose
southern quarter is the Bharatavarsha. The dvipas have mountains, the
largest of them is Meru, and oceans of curd, milk, water and sugarcane
juice. The Bhugola, however, is not egg-shaped. It carries the Brahmanda
on a sphere, and the design is ingenuous − the apex on the upper half
accommodates the Sumeru or the central peak of Meru. Additionally, it is
fashioned as two fitting halves, which denote the upper and lower
hemispheres, and upon the surface, are engraved elements of the Puranic
Earth in relation to cardinal points which were fixed by European and
Arabic astronomers by the late sixteenth century. The Bhugola follows the
Puranas in showing the Jambudvipa in the upper hemisphere. However, ‘the
six ring-shaped continents’ in the lower hemisphere are shown receding in
size, with the smallest near the South Pole; this depiction of the six dvipas
is in sharp contrast to the Puranic view of the rings becoming bigger as the
dvipas move away from Jambudvipa.
All academic viewers of the Bhugola have commented on the high
quality of the engravings, and George Michell and Mark Zebrowski noted
that the engraver ‘used his tools as freely as a painter uses his brush’, and
that ‘the hand that wielded the stylus to create these lively scenes was
highly trained and assured’. The engravings show remarkable stylistic
affinity with the paintings of Jaina manuscripts of Gujarat, which raises the
possibility that the object was made in Gujarat, perhaps Saurashtra.
 Notably, the Bhugola is one of the only two decorative boxes of pre-
colonial India with a dated inscription, which, to follow Digby, declares:

vanhyamkābdhi mahi yukta sake Vīrajī bhūpateh rājye bhugolam

utśrstam ksé
– ma karnenā dhīmatā
In the Saka year fire–digit–ocean–earth joined in the reign of the
earth–lord [bhūpati] Vīrajī by Kśema Karna the learned [was] the
earth ball [bhūgolam] created.

Bhupati possibly denotes the title of a landholder, and by sourcing the

nineteenth century family names in Saurashtra, Digby located a Viraji
(Virji, Viroji), the patron-name in the inscription, who was owner of lands
near the town of Bhavnagar. The date of manufacture can be ascertained
through the elements fire, digit, ocean and earth, which have specific
numerical values within specific eras – 3 fires, 9 digits, 4 oceans, and 1
earth form the chronogram of the Saka Era 1493, and the year corresponds
to 1571, when Akbar campaigned successfully in Gujarat. Notably, the
vernacular form of the maker’s name recorded in the inscription is Khem
Karan, and a painter of that name worked in Akbar’s atelier. However, there
is no evidence, as yet, to establish connections between the Bhugola and
Akbar.
The possible manufacture of the Bhugola in Gujarat draws our attention
to the virtual absence of the regional histories of astronomy, or jyotish-
shastra, in pre-colonial India. However, a glimpse of the possibilities of
such histories emerges through the Gujarati sage Kevalarama, who was a
royal astronomer at the Jaipur court of Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh. As the
historian of science Simon Schaffer recounts, Kevalarama worked on the
designs of the various yantras for the Maharaja’s Jantar Mantars and, with
Portuguese scholars at the Jaipur court, composed the Phirangichandra-
Cchedyakopayogika (Aid to Representations of The European Lunar
Theory). Through the treatise, he aimed at turning the ‘authoritative
celestial tables’ of the young French astronomer Phillipe de la Hire ‘into
informative calculation methods’ (see ch. 44).
Knowledge of astronomy, as Schaffer tells us, was formed through
contributions, collaborations and co-option of a variety of expertise and
networks of information exchange. Therefore, although the history of
astronomy within the Indian subcontinent continues to be largely traced
unreflectively in a linear fashion from Aryabhatta (b.c. 476 CE), it is
possible to unearth the historical trajectories of this observation science by
studying the trans-regional, or rather trans-continental networks. For even
Aryabhatta emulated the Ptolemaic views of a geocentric, or earth-centred
universe.
Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, Egypt (c. 87–150), an Egyptian of
Greek descent, greatly influenced the practices of map-making which
emerged in Ancient Greece during the sixth century BCE. The terrestrial
globe possibly existed by 150 BCE, as Strabo claims to have seen such an
object during his visit to Pergamon, Italy, in the first century BCE. The globe
at Pergamon may have been a creation of the stoic philosopher Crates, a
librarian in the city. Within the next hundred years, by the first century
when Ptolemy lived, scholars in the Roman Empire knew of the spherical
form of the Earth, and the naturalist Pliny declared that ‘the heavens bend
towards the centre, while the earth goes out from the centre, the continual
rolling of the heavens force its immense mass into the form of a sphere’.
Ptolemy demonstrated the scientific value of depicting networks of
parallels and meridians on maps. Yet, the statement of Pliny that the
spherical shape of the Earth represented heaven’s pressure tells us that
scriptural authority imbued astronomical observations during the first
millennium within the western world. As the scholarship of astronomy
advanced into the next millennium, such beliefs were discarded, and better
methods of ‘proper’ observation were devised.
Returning to the Bhugola, we may wonder why it was made, who the
owners were, and whether it was at all valued as a scientific object. All we
know with certainty is that it was brought to Britain by an officer of the
East India Company during the nineteenth century and donated by a
Captain Cobb of Oakhurst to the Science Museum in Oxford in 1927. Its
early curators noted that the box contained plans of the engraved cosmology
in an English transliteration of the Devanagari script. And this slip in the
translation fuelled the initial scholarship of the object. Thus, the acquisition
by a science museum has been crucial for the academic valuation of the
Bhugola, and we can only hope that its prominent display encourages
curious visitors to see the vast area of research that awaits the scholarship of
Indian globes.

BANERJEE, S.N. and J.S. Hoyland. (1922). The Commentary of Father Monserrate. Oxford
University Press.
DIGBY, S. (1973). ‘The Bhugola of Ksema Karna: a dated sixteenth century piece of Indian
metalware’. Art and Archaeology Research Papers, 4, 10–31.
GOLE, S. (1989). Indian Maps and Plans: From Earliest Times to the Advent of European Surveys.
Manohar.
HABIB, I. (1979). 'Cartography in Mughal India'. The Indian Archives, 28, 90–95.
MICHELL, G. and M. Zebrowski. (1999). Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates. Cambridge
University Press.
RAMASWAMY, S. (2007). ‘Conceit of the Globe in Mughal Visual Practice’. Comparative Studies
in Society and History, 49 (4), 751–82.
SCHAFFER, S.J. (2009). ‘The Asiatic Enlightenment of British Astronomy’. In S.J. Schaffer, Lissa
Roberts, et al. (Eds), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820
(pp. 49–104). Science History Publications.
36
AKBAR’S RAZMNAMA

c. 1582–87

THIS MAGNIFICENT PAINTING IS IN THE FIRST RAZMNAMA, OR Book of Wars – the

Persian translation of the Mahabharata created between 1582 and 1586 at
the behest of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. The imperial Razmnama
comprises four large and lavish volumes; the first three are translations of
the 18 books of the Mahabharata, and the fourth is the last book
Harivamsha. It was Akbar’s copy and was acquired by Sawai Madho
Singh, the Kacchwaha ruler of Jaipur (r. 1728–68), during the late 1740s or
early 1750s. It is now in a sealed vault in the City Palace, along with other
valuable antiquities of the Jaipur rulers, awaiting resolutions of litigations.
The hand-coloured photograph provides a glimpse of the grand pictorial
compositions that constitute this Razmnama and occasions a recall of
Akbar’s book-making projects to establish a sanguine, powerful, political
philosophy of high imperialism. Akbar’s Razmnama and its social accounts
allow us to see the many ways in which objects fashion politics and vice
versa.
The Razmnama was displayed in the Jaipur Exhibition of Industrial Art,
of 1881, to showcase the ‘art of brilliant calligraphy’. At the time, 168
paintings of these opulent volumes were recorded, of which 148 were
photographed and published in the Exhibition Catalogue, Memorials of the
Jeypore Exhibition, Vol. 4. All but two paintings were photographed as
black-and-white platinum prints, with notes written by the surgeon
antiquary Thomas Holbein Hendley (1847–1917), one of the event’s key
organizers. As Asok Das, one of the eminent historians of Mughal art,
reminds us, this is the earliest known instance of a publication of a Mughal
manuscript.

Photograph of painting ‘Karna Kills Ghatotkacha with an Enchanted Spear’ attributed to Baswan (or
Basavana) and Jagjivan’. Platinum Print, hand-painted, c. 1881–84. Plate in Memorials of the
Jeypore Exhibition, 4.
The ‘Mahabharat Shield’ of 10 medallions with copies of the paintings in the Razmnama. Steel and
Brass, c. 1880–81, Height 5 ft, Albert Hall, Jaipur.

The first three volumes of the Razmnama narrate the Mahabharata, and
are made up of 600 large folios, many of which are 40.8 cm × 23.5 cm in
size. The last folio of the Harivamsha carries a note that declares the four
volumes to be ‘of large waziri size’. It mentions that the Nastaliq script was
written on Daulatabadi white paper by Khwaja Inayatullah, the jadval
(border lines) is in gold and paintings, and that the volumes were ‘valued at
4,024 Akbari rupaiya’. The note shows the very high value of the royal
book. Although the volumes do not carry completion dates, there is
evidence to suggest that the project was completed by 1584, the year in
which Daswant, killed himself. He was one of the highly regarded painters
in Akbar’s atelier, who possibly made 29 sketches for the volumes.
Through the application of methods of digital humanities on inscriptional
data sourced from the catalogue of the paintings in the Razmnama which
appear in Hendley’s Memorials, Yael Rice informs us that more than 50 or
60 artists would have worked on this book, and that 128 paintings reflect
the work of more than one painter. Rice has successfully gleaned the
‘artists’ centrality’, rather than study only the frequency of their mention
‘among the numerous collaboration’, and her findings shows that Akbar’s
manuscript atelier fostered acquaintanceship among artists rather than
intimate relationships. As she says, ‘the workshop operated according to a
judicious and deliberate, rather than an accidental, scheme, which was
likely intended to streamline the production process. A large team of artists
[…] complete[d] a manuscript’s illustrations far faster than a small team
could.’
The previous photograph shows Karna killing Bhima’s son Ghatotkacha
on the fourth day of Drona’s command; and the battle was long and
described in detail in the Drona Parva section of the Mahabharata. The
hand-tinted photograph of the painting illustrates the careful attempts made
through this imperial production of the Razmnama for creating a vivid and
vibrant visual memory of the Mahabharata. As Ghatotkacha’s rakshasa
army began to produce fearsome magical illusions and hurl dreadful
weapons – discuses, clubs, great rocks, thunderbolts, bludgeons, maces and
lances – on the battlefield, causing terrible fear ‘in that dreadful unruly
route’, to quote an English translation of the Mahabharata by John D.
Smith, Karna made up his mind to use his spear

[…] that honoured Spear which he had stored for many years to kill
Arjuna in battle, that best of Spears which Indra gave the Suta’s son
[Karna] in exchange for his earrings – now, as it blazed and seemed
to lick its lips, like the night of Yama decked with nooses, like a
flaming meteor, like Death’s sister, Karna the Cutter hurled it at the
Rakshasa.

Baswan – whose name Rice notes as Basavana and who appears 95 times
in this Razmnama of Akbar’s – was a brilliant colourist, master composer,
and sensitive observer of human nature, all of which he brought into his
study of portraiture. Moreover, he was a master illustrator of trees and
rocks, which we note in the scene, possibly speaking of his ancestry among
the ahir, pastoralist, community. The other painter was Jagjivan, who
displayed his talents prominently in the Akbarnama (1590–95) that
followed this project.
The production of this imperial Razmnama, as Das reminds us, was a
‘path-breaking venture’ because the painters ‘had to plan every composition
from scratch’. The only illustrated copy of the Mahabharata they may have
seen would have been a northern recension made during the reign of
Sikander Lodhi (r. 1489–1517) by Kayastha painters of the Delhi–Agra
area. The paintings of this text ‘present the principal characters performing
their assigned role […] in a simple and straightforward manner and in a
limited range of colours’ while the paintings in Akbar’s Razmnama ‘express
the unfolding of details [and] immediacy of the tense and high drama’. The
latter remind us that the painters in Akbar’s court had learned to create
elaborate compositions of man, nature and myth while illustrating copies of
classical Persian texts such as Qissa-i-Amir Hamza or the Hamzanama.
With the Razmnama, they had to enter a new domain: that of a living
religion. They had little scope to deviate and many may have been familiar
with the Mahabharata episodes, having watched them being regularly
enacted.
The battle scenes would have ‘warranted less invention’, as Rice reminds
us, since the painters had access to illustrated codices of battle scenes in the
illuminated Persian manuscripts in the imperial library. Yet, as John Seyller
has noted, the empirical observations of local settings ‘charted the course of
Mughal painting away from its Persian roots’. To our eyes today Karna and
Ghatotkacha and their armies in Mughal war helmets and tunics may appear
erroneous and an anomaly. But such a depiction was probably deliberate.
Through a study of the art of epical tales, Marika Sirdar recalls that artists
often kept ancient stories relevant to the current age with subtle visual
clues, such as by keeping ‘the characters in settings and costume to the date
of the painting’s creation’. She points out that the illustrations were ‘a
significant part of the commentary and interpretation of the foundational
texts they accompany’.
The Drona Parva appears within the first three volumes, which carry
translations by Naqib Khan, Sultan Thanisri, Abd al-Qadir Badauni and
Abu’l Faiz Faizi. Although ‘some sections were abridged or significantly
altered’, Akbar’s translators, as Audrey Truschke tells us, provide ‘a near-
literal rendering of many passages’. The translation process was
collaborative, and many learned Brahmins whose names appear in the
subsequent Razmnamas, – including Deva Misra, Satavadhana,
Madhusudana Misra, Chaturbhuja and Shaykh Bhavan – read the
Mahabharata and explained it in Hindavi to the men who wrote it in
Persian. Akbar ordered the production to be overseen by Abd al-Qadir
Badauni, whom he had appointed to a high religious office, possibly
because he wished to impress the conservative nobles in his court with the
sectarian contents of all religions. Badauni, however, remained highly
critical of the project and, in listing the translators, stated that ‘most […] are
in hell along with the Kurus and Pandavas, and as for the remaining ones,
may God save them and mercifully destine them to repent’. Akbar often
challenged him for his intemperate views and derided him as a ‘turnip
eater’.
Crucially, the Razmnama project opened up a ‘new frontier of
knowledge’, tahqiq, or enquiry, which challenged the knowledge by rote, or
taqlid, which the ulama (Muslim clerics) propagated. It was a political
project, as Akbar strove to document through it a plural intellectual culture
whose members were personally loyal to the crown. The project enshrined
the value of his sulh-i kul, best translated as complete civility. Akbar’s
minister Abu’l Fazl ibn-Mubarak (1551–1602), who wrote the preface at
the emperor’s command, between 12 December 1586 and 2 December
1587, informed readers that Akbar wanted his subjects to learn of one
another’s teachings and reform their convictions. Thus, Akbar used
collaboration effectively, as a political strategy for establishing an imperial
ideology that comprised cross-cultural Mughal dispensations through the
world of ideas.
The Razmnama reminds us of the translation bureau (maktabkhana),
which Akbar instituted at Fatehpur Sikri in 1574, which oversaw the
copying of a vast genre of Sanskrit literature – including the political
chronicle Rajatarangini, and poetry and stories such as the Meghaduta,
Nala Damayanti, Panchatantra and Kathasaritsagara – into Persian. The
imperial projects of translation, as Truschke explains, continued well into
the reign of Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707), also for cultivating and contesting
new community identities.
The lavish volumes of the imperial Razmnama inspired a successor
series. A second Razmnama came into the royal library in the early 1590s,
and a third, commissioned by Abdul-Rahim Khankhanan (1556–1627), was
completed around 1025 AH/1616–17, in Jahangir’s reign. Significantly, the
Razmnama, produced in an ‘Islamicate’ court, became ‘one of the primary
sources by which later Hindus encountered the epic’, as Truschke recalls.
Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, Hindus constituted
its largest readership.
Akbar’s Razmnama commands a note of the contrasting histories of
Hindustan, which its Muslim and British rulers saw. Abu’l Fazl noted that
‘Akbar wanted Muslims in general, who believed that the world is only
7,000 years old, to […] listen to histories, to learn from experiences of the
past.’ The ancient Hindu lores that the emperor synced into his politics of
imperialism were entirely overlooked by the British in their imperialist
visions of India. And this marginalization promoted false truths about
Islam’s innate bigotry.
The presence of Akbar’s Razmnama in Jaipur from the mid-1700s
influenced the local craft of koftkari (the damascening of steel objects),
which the city was known for. A pertinent example is the Mahabharat
Shield. Over 5 feet tall with 10 brass roundels, or medallions, it depicts, as
its label tells us, ‘the paintings by renowned artists who illustrated emperor
Akbar’s Razmnama’. The Shield and two others, named Ramayana and
Ashwamedha, were made by Ganga Baksh Khati, who Hendley described
as ‘one of the best artists in brass in Jeypore’ for the Exhibition of 1881, in
which the Razmnama was displayed. Hendley declared that the objects were
looked upon as masterpieces of the ‘manipulative skill of the Indian artists’,
and in the Jaipur Economic and Industrial Museum that opened in the
stately Albert Hall in 1885, they flanked a painting of the Prince of Wales in
the Great Hall. Additionally, the central corridor of this museum was
decorated with six large murals of illustrations in the imperial Razmnama.
As Sugata Ray affirms, ‘each of these [mural] narratives reiterated the
notions of just kingship, universal sovereignty and royal sacrifice for the
welfare of the subject’. Thus, Akbar’s Razmnama came to serve both
colonial and native imperialist ambitions.
The Jaipur royalty’s public displays of its possession of Akbar’s
Razmnama were not coincidental. Considering that the Razmnama was the
foundation of the ‘new Indo-Persian imperial aesthetic’ that Akbar
established, the Kacchwaha rulers’ acquisition of the Mughal emperor’s
copy, as Ray tells us, created the object’s value as an ‘embodied relic that
gestured toward the Jaipur monarchy’s inheritance of Mughal courtly
practices’. Notably, in the Exhibition of 1881, the Jaipur court also strove to
disseminate information about the possession by gifting the photographic
catalogue of the paintings to prominent museums and libraries in Great
Britain, Europe, Australia and the United States. However, while displaying
the ownership of the Razmnama to show their closeness to the Mughals, the
Jaipur rulers also claimed the Mahabharata as their territorial epic. Thus, in
his introduction for the Memorials, Hendley possibly considered it politic to
mention that ‘there is […] a direct connection between the Mahabharata and
Jeypore. As many of the incidents related to the works are believed to be in
[…] the states now known under the name of Jeypore and Ulwar’.
The many values accrued by Akbar’s Razmnama before its sealed fate in
a safe vault convey some of the ways in which new political theories are
fashioned from a specific object. Importantly, the Razmnama allows us to
regard the shifts in epistemic domains which objects usually bring about
during their travels within different societies and at different times.

DAS, A.K. (1983). ‘The Imperial Razm Nama and Ramayana of the Emperor Akbar’. In K.J.
Khandalavala and S. Doshi (Eds), An Age of Splendour: Islamic Art in India (pp. 136–9). Marg.
DAS, A.K. (2005). ‘Imaging the Razmnama: The Razmnama Manuscript and Other Copies’. In A.K.
Das (Ed.), Paintings of the Razmnama: The Book of War (pp. 12–16). Mapin.
DAS, A.K. 2004. ‘Notes on Four Illustrations of the Birla Razmnama and their Counterparts in other
Razmnama Manuscripts’. In R. Crill, S. Stronge and A. Topsfield (Eds) Arts of Mughal India:
Studies in Honour of Robert Skelton (pp. 67–79). V&A and Mapin.
HENDLEY, T.H. (1884). Memorials of the Jeypore Exhibition 1883: Razmnamah or History of War,
Volume IV. W.H. Griggs.
HENDLEY, T.H. (1885). Handbook to the Jeypore Museum. The Calcutta Central Press Co.
RAY, S. (2014). ‘Colonial Frames, “Native” Claims: The Jaipur Economic and Industrial Museums’.
The Art Bulletin, 96(2), 196–212. DOI: 10.1080/00043079. 2014.899180.
RICE, Y. (2010). ‘A Persian Mahabharata: The 1598–1599 Razmnama’. Mànoa, 22(1), 125–31.
RICE, Y. (2017). ‘Workshop as Network: A Case Study in Mughal South Asia’. Artl@s Bulletin 6(3,
article 4), 50–65.
SEYLLER, J. (1987). ‘Model and Copy: The Illustration of Three “Razmnama” Manuscripts’.
Archives of Asian Art, 38(3/4), 56–62.
SIRDAR, M. (2017). ‘Indian Paintings and the Art of Story Telling’. In M. Sirdar, N. Poddar, Q.
Adamjee and A. Patel (Eds), Epic Tales from Ancient India: Paintings from the San Diego
Museum of Art (pp. 8–15). Yale University Press.
SMITH, J.D. (2009). The Mahabharata: An Abridged Translation. Penguin Classics.
TILLOTSON, G. (2004). The Jaipur Exhibition of 1883. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 14(2),
111–26.
TRUSCHKE, A. (2016). Cultures of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court. Allen Lane.
37
LINSCHOTEN’S MAP OF INDIA AND
ARABIA
Late 16th century

LINSCHOTEN’S MAP, THE FIRST DUTCH MAP OF SOUTH ASIA, invites us to explore
the histories of the Dutch trade in the Indian subcontinent. The map appears
in the Itinerario, voyage ofte Schipvaert (1596), whose author, a Dutchman
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1562–1611), spent five years in the
Portuguese city of Goa between c. 1583 and 1588. It is a strong reminder of
how little is known of the European politics of map-making, espionage,
cultural imperialism and commerce in South Asia during the seventeenth
century, prior to the ascendancy of the British and French East India
Companies.
The map was possibly made by Petrus Plancius, who subsequently
became the reputed cartographer for the Vereenigde Oostindische
Compagnie (VOC), or the United Netherlands Chartered East India
Company, which was established in 1602 to trade in the spices of the East.
It follows Linschoten’s manuscript map of the coastline, which the latter
made through information he derived from a Portuguese atlas he had seen
in Goa. The atlas was created a decade earlier, in the 1570s, by one of the
most skilled Portuguese cartographers of the time, Fernão Vaz Dourado,
and Linschoten added to it with observations from his own journey from
Lisbon to Goa. The Itinerario – a book in four separately titled and
paginated parts with multiple authors and intentions – presents ‘first-hand
news’ of this journeyed terrain that followed from
‘Mare Arabicum Et Indicum’, information from a manuscript map by Jan Huyghen van Linschoten.
Facsimile of engraving, 530 mm × 380 mm, in Itinerary, voyage or sea voyage of Linschoten to the
East or Portuguese Indies (1910, pg. facing 30).

[the] Coast of Abex, into the straights of Meca, otherwise called/the

Red Sea, the coasts of Arabia, Ormus, and Persia, to the River of
Sinden/or the River Indus, of Cambaia, India, and Malabar, The
islands of Ceilon, Chor/ramandel, and Orixa, The River Ganges, and
the Kingdom of Bengala, As/allso the Situation of the Creekes,
Cliffes, Banckes, Shallowes, and deptthes/upon or along by the said
coastes.

On publication, the Itinerario came to be, as its historians Nick Becker

and Bonny Tan emphasize, ‘the key to the East’. It was rapidly translated
into many languages – one of the first was English, in 1598, for which
Robert Beckit made the engravings. The accurate ‘English map’ of the
coastline of Arabia and western India contributed to the race between the
Dutch and English trading companies for wresting control of the spice trade
from the Portuguese, who had commanded it ever since Vasco da Gama and
his fleet arrived on the Malabar Coast in 1498. The Linschoten Map thus
brings us to see the furtive politics and machinations of maritime trade.
Linschoten was born in Haarlem, in the Spanish-controlled Low
Countries, in late 1562 or early 1563, just before the Eighty Years War
(1568–1648). His middle-class family moved to the northern port town of
Enkhuizen, a centre of herring trade during the war, when it also became the
first base of revolt against the Spanish Habsburg repressions. Economically,
the Low Countries were dependent upon the Iberian Peninsula, and
throughout the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal were, to quote Arun
Saldanha, ‘literally carving up the globe for expansion’. Following his older
brothers, Linschoten set off for Seville to seek an apprenticeship and learn
about the world. En route, he arrived at Lisbon – then ruled by King Philip
II of Spain, who had inherited his uncle’s Portuguese crown – and here he
met the newly appointed Portuguese archbishop of Goa, João Vicente de
Fonseca, with whom he left European shores. Linschoten eventually
returned to his home town in 1592 with the historic information that the
claims made in 1501 by the Portuguese king Manuel I (1469–1521) of his
overlordship of ‘the conquest, navigation, and commerce of Ethiopia, India,
Arabia and Persia’, had been grandiloquent, not reflections of ground
reality.
‘A Ilha e Cidade Goa Metropolitanada India e Partes Orientais Qve Esta Graos Da Banda do Norte’,
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, c. 1584–87. Facsimile of engraving in Itinerary, voyage or sea voyage
of Linschoten to the East or Portuguese Indies [1910, facing page 120].

The city of Goa, where Linschoten arrived in 1583 with its new
archbishop, was first established by the Adil Shahi rulers of Bijapur. The
sultans had hoped to develop it as their capital; however, the Portuguese
captured the city in 1510, rapidly developing it as Goa dourada (that is,
Golden Goa), the capital of Estado da India, or the Portuguese possessions
along the Indian Ocean. Linschoten’s employment in the archbishop’s office
provided him adequate time for accessing the rich Portuguese libraries in
the city, studying the European residents and visitors, observing the
Portuguese administration and defences, and crucially, honing his
cartography skills. The city map of Goa which he made during his stay, and
which appears in the Itinerario, remains to this day, as Saldanha reminds us,
‘the most detailed ever produced in history’. It depicts all the main
buildings and streets and the Portuguese ships on the river, including a
small local skiff that had capsized.
In the Itinerario, Linschoten provided a lively and on-the-spot
description of ‘all the places known and discovered by the Portuguese […]
their habits, polities, and nature’ and of ‘native Indians, and their temples,
idols, houses, with the most important trees, fruits, herbs, spices, and
suchlike materials’. Additionally, he regaled his readers with many
colourful anecdotes of his stay in Goa, and the illustrations of elephants in
the map remind us of his encounter with a ‘mad elephant’ that

ran through the streets, and […] came into the market, throwing
downe all that was in his way, whereat every man […] leaving their
ware, ranne to save themselves from being over run […] Among
them was this woman, that alwaies used to give the Elephant some
thing to eat, which had a little childe in the market lying by her in a
basket […] the woman ran into a house, not having time to snatch up
her Child […] when the Elephant […] came by […] took up the child
hand somee [and tenderly] with his snout, and layde it softly upon a
stall by a shop side, which done, hee began againe to use the same
order of stamping, crying, and clapping […] These and such like
examples do often happen in India […] of things worthy of memorie,
thereby to teach us to bee mindfull of all good deeds done unto us.

Crucially, Saldanha recalls that the ‘Itinerario gave the Portuguese India
lasting notoriety in Europe’. Regardless of his allegiance to the archbishop,
Linschoten’s survey of Goa dourada (Golden Goa) was rather critical and
came to constitute an ethnographic account of Portuguese luxury,
miscegenation and decadence. He also noted repeatedly that the ‘indolence
in Goa’ was possible due to the slave labour imported from Mozambique.
His detailed account of Goa’s racial landscape clearly illustrated the
linkages between the trade in slaves and spices, and his descriptions of lazy,
promiscuous, and drugged-out Portuguese merchants and officials prompted
‘Dutch capitalists and official readers to consider whether the Portuguese
still possessed the strength to defend their position in Asia’. The Itinerario
thus supplied crucial knowledge that fuelled Dutch commercial ventures
into the spice trade from the late 1590s, culminating in the Dutch Golden
Age during the eighteenth century.
 Prior to the publication of the Itinerario, various versions of the Venetian
Marco Polo’s travels in the East during the thirteenth century were
consumed in Europe as the most authoritative descriptions of Asia. By the
sixteenth century, when the Portuguese embarked on sea voyages, the
Europeans mapped India, as Susan Gole tells us, into three geographical
entities: India Intra (cintra) Gangem, India within this side of Persia; India
Extra (ultra) Gangem, India outside the Ganges towards Burma and
southeast; and India Superior, India of the upper regions, in and beyond the
Himalayas. Linschoten’s map of India and Arabia changed the above
cartographic imagination and also located some of the unknown terrains,
such as the mouth of the Ganges. But the map also informs us of the
ferreting of information by the Dutchman. It was based upon a Portuguese
map that depicted the sea route of the spice trade, which the latter guarded
fiercely.
The Portuguese sea voyages and missions to the East were organized by
the Portuguese crown. All geographic intelligence, including navigation
methods, hand-drawn maps and roteiros (journals), trade inventories,
cargoes dispatched and profits incurred, and information about the local
political conditions were closely guarded secrets. In fact, as Gole states, all
maps, charts and travel documents of Portuguese sailors were the ‘property
of the King of Portugal’. The strict control over information and its
diffusion coincided with Portugal’s self-proclaimed sovereignty over the
ports and routes which its sailors annexed. Additionally, as Saldanha
emphasizes, the ‘Portuguese monopoly on the import of spices by sea,
unchallenged for over a century, was based not on military might or
financial power but control of geographic information’.
Before each voyage, a ship’s captain was allowed to withdraw a map
from the royal library, which he had to put back as soon as he returned from
the voyage. He was also required to mark any new territories he discovered
on the map. In 1502, an agent of the Italian Duke of Ferrara stole a travel
chart from Lisbon and carried it to Italy, and this is how Portuguese
discoveries first leaked into Europe. In the same year, the Portuguese sent a
fleet of twenty ships to India, and Gole, who has recalled the story of the
theft, stated that ‘jealous of their new knowledge, they [namely the
Portuguese] published no report of the expedition. […] Pride of ownership
and secrecy have always accompanied maps’ guided by the compelling fear
that the maps would fall into the wrong hands.
The states of Holland renounced their allegiance to Philip II of Spain in
1581, while Linschoten was in India, and following the creation of the
United Provinces of seven burgher oligarchies, which included Holland and
Zeeland, the Dutch began to expand trading in the Mediterranean, Levant
and South Atlantic. By the early 1590s, Amsterdam began to dominate
Antwerp as the international market of northern Europe and the Dutch put
three fleets to the East, which marked the beginning of their spice trade and,
as it turned out, their empire. The navigational section of the Itinerario, or
the Reys-gheschrift, which is the third book, was published early, in 1595,
so that it could be used during the First Voyage to the East. During the
Second Voyage (1598–1600), all the ships were supplied with a copy of the
entire Itinerario. The voyage was commanded by Jacob van Neck and
brought the investors a 400 per cent profit. As the historian of the Dutch sea
borne empire Charles Boxer recounts, on return of this fleet ‘the chief
officers and merchants were given a civic reception while the bells of
Amsterdam rang peals of joy’. Summing up his study of the Itinerario,
Saldanha tells us that the book facilitated the transfer of ‘the geographical
accomplishments of the Iberian imperialism directly to the Low Countries’.
The ‘illustrious Portuguese routes’ which first appeared here effected a leap
in the Dutch geographical knowledge, bringing about a new struggle for the
Indian Ocean. Importantly, the book demonstrated the absence of
Portuguese control in the market of Bantam, which would become the
capital of Dutch Indonesia.
Histories of the Dutch settlements in India, such as Cochin, Surat,
Bandel, Chinsurah and Pulicat hold great promise of unravelling the
complexities of the global networks of trade in spices, textiles and slaves.
Additionally, recent histories of the Dutch and English East India
companies reveal the importance of tracking the provincial diplomacies
within Mughal India during the seventeenth century as the nascent
companies reaped and lost great profits by playing into the geopolitical
aspirations of the Mughal governors.
Linschoten’s map of India and Arabia allows us to regard the many
histories that make up the histories of map-making. It thereby illustrates the
importance of unravelling the cartographic world and its effect on global
histories, rather than viewing this world as a self-contained feature.

BOXER, C.R. (1965). The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800. Hutchinson.

GOLE, S. (1980). A Series of Early Printed Maps of India in Facsmilie. Jayaprints.
LINSCHOTEN, J.H. van. (1596). Itinerario, voyage ofte schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten
naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien [Itinerary, voyage or sea voyage of Linschoten to the East or
Portuguese Indies]. Gravenhage, M. Nijhoff, 1910.
MEERSBERGEN, G. van. (2018). ‘Diplomacy in a Provincial Setting: The East India Companies in
the Seventeenth-Century Bengal and Orissa’. In A. Clulow and T. Mostert (Eds), The Dutch and
English East India Companies (pp. 55–78). Amsterdam University Press.
POLO, M. (1968). The Travels of Marco Polo. R. Latham (Trans.). The Folio Society. (Original work
published 1298)
RUSSELL-WOOD, A.J.R. (1998). The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808: A World on the Move. Johns
Hopkins University Press.
SALDANHA, A. (2011). ‘The Itineraries of Geography: Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s “Itinerario”
and Dutch Expeditions to the Indian Ocean, 1594–1602’. Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, 101(1), 149–77.
38
JAHANGIR’S METEORITE KNIFE
Agra
c. 1617

CREATED AT THE ORDER OF THE MUGHAL EMPEROR JAHANGIR (r. 1605–27), this
superbly crafted knife was made from the debris of a meteor that fell on a
village in Jalandhar, Punjab, on 9 April 1621. Jahangir noted the geological
event in his autobiography, the Jahangirnama, and recorded it as the
‘strangest thing that happened’. He reported:

At dawn a tremendous noise arose in the east. It was so terrifying that

it nearly frightened the inhabitants out of their skins. Then, in the
midst of the tumultuous noise, something bright fell to the earth from
above. The people thought fire was falling from heaven. A moment
later the noise ceased, and the people regained their composure. A
swift messenger was sent to Muhammad Sa’id the tax collector to
inform him of the event. He got on his horse at once, and went to the
site to see for himself. For a distance of ten or twelve ells in length
and breadth the earth had been so scorched that no trace of greenery
or plants remained and it was still hot. He ordered the earth dug up.
The deeper they dug, the hotter it was. Finally they reached a spot
where a piece of hot iron appeared. It was so hot it was as tough as it
had been taken out of a furnace. After a while it cooled off, and
Muhammad Sa’id took it home with him. He placed it in a purse,
sealed it, and sent it to court.
Knife of meteoritic iron with design in gold, 1261 mm, c. 1617, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M.
Sackler Gallery, F 55.27.

Jahangir’s description of the meteor’s landing reads like an on-the-spot

report of any seventeenth-century European antiquary. The description
encourages us to reflect on the practices of antiquarianism in South Asia,
which has long been historicized as an import from the West.
Antiquarianism entails the collection and study of antiquities and surveys
of ancient landscapes and ruins, for understanding the past. The field
scholarship thrived in Europe and Britain from the seventeenth century,
when antiquaries distinguished themselves as a group of scholars who
undertook object-based field research. The histories of antiquarianism they
developed characterized the practice as a Western science, and added to the
politics of European imperialism whereby the West took credit of
discovering the ancient histories of the East. The meteorite knife, however,
provides reasons for seeing the different manifestations of antiquarianism in
different realms outside the Western world, in this case, within the domain
of the Mughal Empire.
Although Jahangir had not seen the meteor fall (he was in Agra), the
passage demonstrates his understanding of the importance of recording
observations which European antiquaries deemed mandatory for exhibiting
the incorruptibility of their material sources, and truth-making claims.
Jahangir tells us that the meteorite debris was brought to Agra for him to
see, where he ‘ordered it weighed’ in his presence, and that:

It weighed 160 tolas. I ordered Master Daud to make a sword,

dagger, and knife of it and show them to me. He said that the metal
wouldn’t hold up under the hammer and would break apart. I said
that in that case he could mix it with other iron to make it workable.
Just as I had ordered, he mixed three parts of the ‘lightning’ iron with
one part of other iron and produced two swords and one dagger
[which] he showed me. From the admixture of the other iron it had
acquired a watered effect and flexed like a real Yemeni or southern
blade. I ordered it tried in my presence. It cut beautifully, as well as
the very best swords. I named one of them shamshir-i-qati
(Trenchant Sword) and the other barqsirisht (Lightning Nature).

Jahangir’s orders to Ustad Daud to mix ‘other’ iron with the meteoritic
metal for making the weapons reveal his knowledge of the properties of
malleable raw materials. Additionally, his injunctions for experimentation
remind us of the experiments the European antiquaries carried out to
calculate the composition of metals.
The intellectual enterprise of antiquarianism in the West was anchored in
notions of a scientific temper. The English philosopher Francis Bacon
(1561–1626), who was Jahangir’s contemporary, propagated methods of
observation and experimentation that proved highly influential in shaping
the methods of the antiquarian scholarship. Yet, within the historiography of
antiquarianism, in which Bacon presides, Jahangir, expectantly, does not
make an appearance.
However, Jahangir too valued observation and experimentation, and the
paintings of natural history that he commissioned illustrate his injunctions
for the correct transcription of vision in drawings. He oversaw numerous
scientific experiments, which included animal husbandry and animal
psychology, and noted the reasons for the bravery of lions and tigers in the
Jahangirnama. His inordinate curiosity is well illustrated in his imperial
autobiography, which also documents his connoisseurship and collecting
practices.
The meteorite dagger and swords made by Jahangir’s metalsmiths no
longer exist. We know from the Jahangirnama that during the presentation
of the weapons to the emperor one of his court poets, Sa’ida, composed the
following quatrain:

The world attained order from the world-seizing monarch,

And during his reign raw iron fell from lightning.
From that iron was made by his world-conquering order
a dagger and a knife and two swords.

Sa’ida was an engraver, enameller and lapidary from Gilan (Iran) and
worked as the chief goldsmith for Jahangir and his son and successor, Shah
Jahan (1592–1666, r. 1628–58). Jahangir gave Sa’ida the title Bebadal Khan
or Prince Peerless, and a court historian of Shah Jahan subsequently
described the goldsmith as ‘extremely good company, a fine
conversationalist and a modest man with a sense of propriety’. Sai’da’s
intellectual skills are evident in the composition of the chronogram shu ‘la-i
barq-i-padishahi, which means ‘spark of imperial lightning’ and translates
into the Islamic year 1030 AH.
In his commentary of the Jahangirnama, Wheeler Thackston points out
that the inscription on the knife holds the same meaning as the quatrain.
Both illustrate the adroit use of a momentous happening by Jahangir’s
craftsmen at his orders, to add to his imperial persona as Nur-al-Din, or
Light of the Faith. The emperor adopted this title at his accession in 1605,
to establish his right to rule as the ‘light emanating from God’, as well as to
assert his pre-eminence among contemporaries as Jahangir, the World
Seizer. By promptly ordering the ‘bearer of divine light’ – the meteorite
debris – to be fashioned into weapons, he seized upon the ‘strangest thing
that happened’ to materially display the truth of the power of his title. The
knife, sword and daggers convey the act of imperial self-fashioning.
 The ideal of Mughal kingship, which Jahangir built upon, followed the
ideals of sovereignty that were established by his ancestors, the Turko-
Mongol rulers of Central Asia, which combined two touchstones – Light
and Divinity. Jahangir’s father Akbar had established his imperial persona
as being touched by Divine Light, and in the Akbarnama, Abu’l Fazl
declared: ‘Royalty is light emanating from the God, and a ray from the sun,
the illuminator of the universe […] Modern language calls this light farr-i
izadi [the divine light] and the tongue of antiquity called it kyan khura.’
Jahangir created the visibility of the divine royal illumination. His court
painters adapted the halo from Christian art to present a nimbate emperor as
the ‘illuminator of the Universe’. Such paintings show Jahangir’s sustained
efforts to document the veritable presence of his divinely ordained
illuminating being and rule. The meteorite knife was part of such historical
creations of the royal persona in unambiguous material forms.
The object draws our attention to the extraordinary meanings that falling
meteors have accrued since ancient times. Meteorite debris was also
transformed into artefacts in ancient civilizations. Some of the earliest iron
artefacts were fashioned out of meteors of which an example is a pre-
dynastic period (c. 3200 BCE) necklace comprising nine small meteoritic
beads found in a burial site at Gerzeh (Lower Egypt). Since the meteoric
substance splits into shatter cones when heated and is too hard for stone
drills, the beads would have required technologies that could manipulate the
material which were developed by the fourth millennium BCE.
Archaeologists are of the view that the meteorite was hammered for
obtaining thin pieces, which were then rolled into tubes for making the
beads, and suggest that the laborious manufacturing process is possible
evidence that the wearer of the necklace was a person of high status.
This suggestion allows us to infer that such objects of meteoritic metal
were possibly venerated in ancient times. Subsequently, meteors were
considered in many ancient religions as carrying the presence of God. The
Black Stone, comprising more than eight smaller pieces of the same stone,
fixed upon a wall of the Ka’aba at Mecca, Saudi Arabia, has been polished
smooth by the hands of millions of pilgrims for over a millennium in the
belief that it fell from the heavens. The Islamic tradition informs us that the
Stone was given to Abraham, who built it into his house, and it finally came
into the hands of Prophet Muhammad who, in 605 CE, placed it in its
present setting. Geologists affirm the Stone to be fragments of the impact
glass that forms the walls of the meteor crater at Wabar (known in the
Islamic traditions as the city of Ubar), approximately 100 kilometres from
Mecca.
Jahangir’s meteorite knife would, therefore, have been charged with
similar religious value. However, today its historical value as an antiquity is
best located in its representations of the emperor’s practices of observing,
collecting, experimentation and connoisseurship. We know the history of its
creation because Jahangir strove to record it. As a fashioned object of
empirical curiosity, the meteorite knife provides a brilliant example of the
local histories of antiquarianism in South Asia.

CRILL, R. (2010). ‘Jahangir Holding a Globe’. In R. Crill and K. Jariwala (Eds), The Indian
Portrait, 1560–1860 (pp. 76–77). London: National Portrait Gallery.
GUHA, S. (2015). Artefacts of History: Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts. Sage.
REHREN, T., T. Belgya, A. Jambon, et al. (2013). ‘5000 Years Old Egyptian Iron Beads Made from
Hammered Meteoritic Iron’. Journal of Archaeological Science, 40, 4785–92.
doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2013.06.002.
STRONGE, S. (2010). ‘Portraiture at the Mughal Court’. In R. Crill and K. Jariwala (Eds), The
Indian Portrait, 1560–1860 (pp. 23–31). London: National Portrait Gallery.
THACKSTON, W.M. (Trans.) (1999). The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India.
Oxford University Press and Freer and Sackler Gallery of Art.
THOMSEN, E. (1980). ‘New Light on the Origin of the Holy Black Stone of the Ka’ba’. Meteoritics,
15 (1), 87–91.
39
JAHANGIR AND A PORTRAIT OF THE
MADONNA
C. 1620

DESPITE BEING LISTED WITHIN THE AA CATEGORY OF OBJECTS that are valued as
rare, fragile, and unique, this lavish painting of Jahangir with the portrait of
the Madonna remains understudied. It shows us the influences of European
visual cultures on Mughal India, and the complexities of historicizing the
arts of the connected worlds of Pre-Modern Islam and Christianity.
The painting encapsulates the mastery and sophistication with which the
artists in the Mughal Court combined different aesthetics and ideologies of
different cultural regions for fashioning a distinctive art of portraiture that
expressed Mughal imperial idioms. Although historians remind us that the
portraits of the Mughal emperors and their nobles are ‘one of the greatest
artistic achievements of the Mughal dynasty’, they also demonstrate the
errors of the ‘common perception’, to quote Crispin Bates, that ‘portraiture
in South Asia begins with the Mughal emperor Akbar’ and highlight the
‘long literary and artistic traditions’ in the Indian subcontinent from the first
century, which contributed to the local receptions of familiarity for the
Mughal portraits.
Jahangir holding a portrait of the Madonna, c. 1620, gouache on paper, 31 cm × 22.5 cm, NM:
58.58/31.

Details of Jahangir’s portraiture with the Madonna.

Portraiture emerged as a distinct genre of Mughal painting by the end of

the sixteenth century, and illustrated the ‘turn to the individual [which] was
a feature of wider Eurasia in the early modern period’, as Laura Parodi
emphasizes. Aspects of its genealogy can be traced to the paintings of
Humayun by the emperor’s artists in Kabul, c. 1545–55, which present him
within the compositions as an identifiable person wearing his special
headdress Taj-i-‘izzat, the Crown of Honour. The origins can also be linked
to the passion of the Mughal emperors for ‘historical and observational
documentation’, of which an early example is Abu’l Fazl’s statement in his
Ai’n-i-Akbari that Akbar ‘ordered to have the likenesses [surat] of all the
grandees of the realm’. Yet, developments in portraiture from Akbar’s reign
cannot be fully explained through narratives of origins and genealogies, as
this painting of Jahangir holding the portrait of the Madonna implores us to
see.
The painting reminds us of the increasing presence of Europeans in the
Mughal court, which followed the Mughal encounters with the Portuguese
after Akbar’s annexation of Gujarat in 1573 which brought the Mughal
realm close to Goa. The Jesuit missions from Portuguese Goa, who came to
Akbar’s court, brought many illustrated European books, paintings and
engravings of reputed artists as presents for the emperor. Biblical imagery,
expectantly, inundated the illustrations, and much of this was carefully
copied by Akbar’s artists at his orders.‘[H]undreds of iconic portraits of
Jesus, Mary, and a panoply of Christian saints in the styles of the late
Renaissance, to adorn books, albums, jewelry, and even treaties, were
produced in the royal workshop’, as Gauvin Bailey narrates. Jahangir, then
Prince Salim, often intercepted the consignments for his father to
appropriate them for himself. As the governor of Lahore (1585–98), he
received the third Jesuit mission in 1596, and Susan Stronge draws attention
to an artist in this entourage who recorded that, ‘the Portuguese painter who
came with us has not time for anything except painting images for [Salim],
of Christ, Our Lord and of Our lady. He makes him paint the ones which his
father owns.’
After becoming emperor in 1605, Jahangir continued to add Christian
images to his collection, and ‘his acquisitions were carefully studied by
artists who either copied them exactly, or used them to create innovative
works loosely inspired by European models’. In this way, ‘the Mughal style
was continually modified and the radically different aesthetics and images
of the West were absorbed’, to quote Stronge.
The painting of Jahangir holding the portrait of Madonna dates to c.
1620. By this time, prolific reproductions of the Christian images within the
royal atelier had long ended, following the emperor’s peremptory dismissal,
in 1614, of the Jesuit delegation from his court after the Portuguese
captured and looted his imperial ship Rahimi on the Arabian Sea. However,
the English visitors to Jahangir’s court, such as Thomas Roe, who arrived in
1615, kept the flow of European prints and portraits.
The influence of the contemporary European visual cultures can be
observed in the conscious efforts of Jahangir’s artists for realistic rendition
and the creation of small portable images. However, elements of portraiture,
as Priscilla Soucek demonstrated more than 40 years ago, were part of the
Islamic visual language even before ‘any contact with early modern
Europe’. Therefore, scholars today, such as Mika Natif, also emphasize
that:

The Mughal painters […] repurposed European paintings […] Their

reconfigurations of European iconography and innovative use of
modeling, sfumato, and perspective, which served their own ends,
resulted in a verisimilitude that distinguished Mughal portraiture
from earlier Timurid representations […].

Natif tells us that Mughal artists transformed the genre of portraiture in

the Mughal sphere ‘to an imperative tool of political, ideological, and
historical importance’. Jahangir began gifting tiny bust-size paintings of his
likeness (shabih) – haloed, in profile and framed against the jharokha
window – to his nobles, peers and esteemed visitors as tokens of loyalty and
prestige. And as historians such as Afzar Moin note, the portraits of his
amirs shown wearing his pendant-portraits ‘encapsulated in visual form the
sacred manifestation of the saint-emperor to his disciple’.
 The portrait of Jahangir in the painting – a nimbate emperor in profile
and in jharokha – reminds us that, similar to Europe, portraits were created
for use as political images within the Mughal realm. The halo and profile
have long been regarded as clear European elements within Mughal art, but
the jharokha balcony draped in a rich textile, possibly a carpet, also
documents European features. Notably, Jeremiah Losty affirmed that

While the presence of cloths of honour or carpets on throne seats was

then an ancient eastern idea which may have influenced the earlier
Mughal arrangements under Akbar, nonetheless the manner of the
depiction of the carpet over the parapet in Jahangir’s portrait is in fact
entirely western […] The carpets hanging over parapets seen in the
later fifteenth century Netherlandish paintings were meant to be seen
as exceptionally rare and valuable articles and hence suitable for
adorning the images of the Virgin […] It is hardly surprising
therefore that this motif was quickly taken up in later royal and
imperial portraiture.

Citing examples of engravings and woodcuts from Renaissance Venice,

Losty demonstrated that the ‘old-fashioned portrait format’ reached India
by the late-sixteenth century through engravings in printed books. The
‘iconography was seized upon eagerly by the Mughal artists as models for
their own representations of the Mughal emperor’s appearances at the
jharokha, even to the appropriation of Charles V’s pomegranate fruit that
Jahangir is holding in one of his shasts [portraits]’. An example is a gold
coin of Jahangir of 1610–11 in the collection of the British Museum.
The Mughal emperors used Christian pictures not as ad maiorem Dei
glorium but ad maiorem Moguli glorium; namely, as ‘vehicles to represent
the reality and glory of their own dynasty’, as Ebba Koch reminds us.
European realism served the Mughal rulers ‘in their close and rational
observation of the visual world’. Notably, Abu’l Fazl, who openly declared
his preference for the written word and thereby subscribed to the prejudice
of the Muslim treatises towards calligraphy and painting, conceded that
‘European naturalism may serve as a means to attain higher truth’. He
emphasized that

A picture (surat) leads to the form it represents [khodawand-i khud,

lit. its own master] and this [leads] to the meaning (ma`ani) just as
the shape of a line (paikar-i khati) leads one to letters (harf) and
words (lafz) and from there the sense (mafhum) can be found out.
Although in general they make pictures (tazwir) of material
appearances (ashbah-i koni), the European masters (karbardazan-i
firang) express with rare forms (bashigirf suratha) many meanings of
the creation (basa ma`ani khalqi) and [thus] they lead those who see
only the outside of things (zahirnigahan) to the place of real truth
(haqiqatzar).

The painting depicts Jahangir wearing a pearl earring in honour of the

Chishti Shaikh of Ajmer, Khwaja Mu’in-al Din. Radiating divine light
(farr-i izadi), he looks at the bust-length three-quarter portrait of the haloed
Madonna, or Mary, ‘lowering her gaze in humility’ to follow Natif’s
description. The Madonna is revered in the Islamic world as a pre-eminent
mother since Jesus is the most important prophet in Islam after Muhammad.
However, she is historically associated with the Mughal political theory of
sovereignty. She is the representation of Alanquwa (Alan Gho’a), the
legendary queen of Mughalistan who bore the divine light that she passed
hidden through her children to Chengiz Khan and Timur, and through their
successors, to Babur and his descendants. The legend of Alanquwa
embodies the creation myth of the illuminist theory of kingship which the
Mughal rulers formalized, and which Akbar first documented by presenting
his imperial self as a receptacle of hidden divine light.
The Madonna whom Jahangir gazes at is ‘no longer the Mother of God,
but one of the matriarchs of the illustrious Mughal dynasty of Perfect Men’,
Natif informs us. And in seeing her as Alanquwa, as Jahangir possibly did,
we begin to see the detailed imagery of the illuminated royal self which was
fashioned in the emperor’s court through the art of imperial portraiture.
 The paintings of portraits with portraits, as of Jahangir and the Madonna,
‘convey a sense of silsila (chain of transmission)’, as Moin reminds us. Of
ancestral veneration and genealogy, ‘this type of innovative art was both a
record and medium of the emperor’s miraculous self’. Significantly,
Jahangir’s incredibly talented painters, such as Abu’l Hasan, Manohar and
Bishandas, deftly reworked Christian motifs for producing naturalistic
pictorial expressions of the ideologies of Timurid sovereignty, and those in
the contemporary Persianate world of the Safavid Empire. They made many
copies of the Madonna and variants of the Solomonic imagery, including
the winged-child angels, or cherubium, and figures of a lamb and lion lying
peacefully next to each other, to show the supreme position of Jahangir
within the imperial realm.
We do not know why this painting was made and who made it. We may,
however, assume that it represents the hand of a few artists; someone would
have drawn the face, someone else some other parts, and perhaps a third
person would have done some of the colouring. The layers of the borders, in
gold, and some with calligraphy, tell us that it was a folio of a muraqqa, the
Persian word meaning ‘patchwork’ that came to denote albums. As Elaine
Wright states:

Each side of an intact folio is itself a patchwork of separate pieces of

papers. In the centre of one side of an intact folio is a painting and in
the centre of the other is a panel of calligraphy and outer border […]
The folios were originally arranged in the albums so that openings, or
facing pages, of paintings alternated with openings of calligraphy.

Wright’s description of the patchwork construction of the muraqqa provides

an insight into the long and labour-intensive projects of album production,
which involved collecting paintings and panels of calligraphy, creating a
composite folio, and binding them together for viewing. The albums,
Rachel Smith recounts, were ‘luxury objects, symbols of the wealth of the
emperor and his court, a wealth that was made especially obvious by the
amount of gold on both the painting and calligraphy sides of the folios’.
 Most Mughal albums have been disassembled and broken up over the
centuries, and the exhibition of this painting of Jahangir holding the portrait
of the Madonna as a dispersed folio allows us to consider this historic loss.
Importantly, the breaking up of the albums provides a glimpse of the
numerous ways in which the intensely tactile world of visual culture is
often destroyed. This painted folio therefore brings us to see the importance
of reckoning with the materiality of encounters, influences and sovereignty,
as it fashioned the crystallization of a remarkably cosmopolitan political
culture of the Mughal realm.

KOCH, E. (2001). ‘The Influence of the Jesuit Missions on Symbolic Representations of the Mughal
Emperors’. In E. Koch (Ed.), Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays (pp. 1–11).
Oxford University Press.
KOCH, E. (2017). ‘The Intellectual and Artistic Climate of Tolerance at Akbar’s Court’. In M.
Leisch-Kiesl and J. Allerstorfer (Eds), Global Art History: Transkulturell Verortungen von
Kunst Kunstwissenschaft (pp. 151–68). Verlag.
LOSTY, J. (2013). ‘The Carpet at the Window: A European Motif in the Mughal Jharokha Portrait’.
In M. Sharma and P. Kaimal (Eds), Indian Painting: Themes, History and Interpretations (pp.
52–64). Mapin.
MOIN, A. (2012). The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam. Columbia
University Press.
NATIF, M. (2018). Mughal Occidentalism: Artistic Encounters between Europe and Asia at the
Courts of India, 1580–1630. Brill.
PARODI, L.E. (2018). ‘Tracing the Rise of Mughal Portraiture: The Kabul Corpus, c. 1545–55’. In
C. Branfoot (Ed.), Portraiture in South Asia since the Mughals: Art, Representation and History
(pp. 49–71). I.B. Tauris.
SMITH, R. (2008). ‘The Use of Gold in Mughal Painting’. In E. Wright (Ed.), Muraqqa: Imperial
Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library (pp. 199–205). Dublin: Art Services
International.
SOUCEK, P. (1987). ‘Persian Artists in Mughal India’. Muqarnas, IV, 166–81.
STRONGE, S. (2002). Painting for the Mughal Emperor: The Art of the Book, 1560–1660. Timeless
Books.
STRONGE, S. (2004). ‘“Far from the arte of painting”: An English Amateur Artist at the Court of
Jahangir’. In R. Crill, S. Stronge and A. Topsfield (Eds). Arts of Mughal India: Studies in
Honour of Robert Skelton (pp. 129–137). V&A and Mapin.
WRIGHT, E. (2008). ‘An Introduction to the Albums of Jahangir and Shah Jahan’. In E. Wright
(Ed.), Muraqqa: Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library (pp. 39–53). Dublin:
Art Services International.
40
A MUGHAL WINE CUP
c. 1657 CE

SCHOLARS ADMIRE THE WINE CUP AS THE ‘MOST EXQUISITE surviving object’ of
the Mughal emperors that provides an ‘outstanding example of
craftsmanship’, to quote Susan Stronge. The cup is unique in its shape and
design. It looks like a gourd, has a handle in the shape of a ram’s head and a
beautifully carved lotus as its pedestalled base, from which radiate acanthus
leaves. It fits neatly into a cusped palm and would have allowed its user to
savour the fabulous design while drinking from it. Significantly, it
encapsulates the Mughal court’s careful creation of quotidian objects to
display the grandeur of the sophisticated politics of imperialism.
Jade was highly valued by Emperor Jahangir, who saw the stone’s
translucence as proof of its innate purity. The unforgivingly hard stone,
which resists being carved, increasingly entered the Mughal treasury during
his reign, and was highly sought after by successive emperors for their
personal objects, including huqqas and daggers. Using bow drills, the stone
was abraded to create form and ornamentation. Such drills came to be
widely used in the Indian subcontinent for working difficult stones, such as
agates and crystals, and Jahangir’s talented calligrapher and chief
goldsmith, Sa’ida, who also composed the quatrain for his meteorite knife,
had engraved the emperor’s name on a white jade tankard with such a drill.
Stronge informs us that Sa’ida’s ‘expertise combined with his role as
supervisor of the most important imperial workshop suggests that the swift
adoption of jade for royal artefacts in the early seventeenth century was due
to his influence’.

Wine cup with inscription, 1067 AH, Nephrite Jade, 187 mm × 140 mm, V&A: IS. 12-1962.

Nephrite jade came to the Mughal court from China, and scholars of the
cup suggest that its gourd shape is derivative of the Chinese jade objects,
the lotus of the pedestal is a Hindu motif and the ‘serenely curving animal-
headed handle’ represents the European Mannerist style. This seamless
unity of the different design elements illustrates the exceptional skills of an
exceptional aesthete, although the designer remains unknown. The cup
bears the inscription Sahib-i-Qirani-Sani (Second Lord of Conjunction), the
Timurid title adopted by Shah Jahan at his accession (r. 1628–58). The
inscription is placed so discreetly on the lobed body that it remained
unnoticed for several decades by viewers in England, where it arrived
during the nineteenth century.
The cup, as a date in the inscription informs us, was in Shah Jahan’s
treasury in 1657, the year before he was deposed and imprisoned by his son
Aurangzeb, who crowned himself the emperor (r. 1658–1707). The
inscription and known provenance have shaped its nomenclature, although
some scholars oppose the naming as they believe the object was neither
designed by Shah Jahan, nor made specifically for him. The quibble does
not change the fact that the cup appears to be a Shah Jahani object, stamped
with his insignia. The royal cup reminds us that irrespective of the
prohibition in the Quran on the consumption of alcohol, pre-modern Islamic
societies regaled in wine drinking. There are many descriptive accounts of
wine drinking by the Mughal rulers, and we know that Jahangir, as also his
half-brothers Daniyal and Perviz, died of alcoholism.
Images of princely figures pouring and drinking wine abound from the
eighth century in the frescoes of the Abbasid palaces, and paintings of the
Timurid (1387–1502), Safavid (1502–1737), and Mughal (1526–1857)
dynasties amply convey the conviviality of wine drinking in the Islamic
courts. Importantly, the eleventh-century Persian epic Shahnama, or the
Book of Kings, documents the historic association of the wine cup with the
legendary hero Jamshid who ruled over men, demons, animals, birds and
fairies for more than 700 years, and who saw the world, past and future, in
his cup when he filled it with wine and gazed at the ‘still surface’.
The scholarship of Mughal paintings with wine cups documents a subtle
shift over time in the meaning of depiction: from pleasure and revelry in the
early examples to the mystical, godlike, immortal and cosmic kingship of
the Mughal emperors in those of the seventeenth century. As Meera Khare
notes, by the reign of Jahangir

[…] wine imagery brings together the search for the Absolute with a
certain notion of Mughal kingship, that of an ideal philosopher prince
who visits and discourses with the sages to attain knowledge, of
which wine, food and music are [an] integral part.

The wine cup appears in many portraits of Jahangir, especially in his later
years, with the emperor shown holding it also at a Jharokha-i-Darshan
where he sits cross-legged. The object appears as an allegory of Jamshid’s
cup, representing the world in miniature and highlighting the ‘World Seizer’
Jahangir, as Ebba Koch recalls, the ‘cup bearer of the age’. In a portrait of
Shah Jahan from c. 1645, the emperor is shown standing on a globe and
facing Prophet Khizr, who offers him a wine cup. The allegory becomes
clear through a quatrain in a different painting which states:

He who has a cup in his hands

Eternally possesses King Jamshid’s cup
The water from which Khizr found life

Prophet Khizr embodied the elixir of life; he drank to become immortal.

Khare suggests that in the portrait of Shah Jahan, the wine cup ‘by being an
object of presentation besides its symbolic connotations of world rulership,
has become an active participant in a meaning of kingship that sees the
emperor […] incorporating the person of all those who are in an act of
“presenting” to him’. She also notes that after the reign of Shah Jahan, the
depiction of wine cups in Mughal paintings increasingly conveyed revelry
and hedonism – a slip back to former times.
Shah Jahan appears through his court historians as exceptionally reserved
and self-controlled, and not given to any forms of abandonment. In fact, he
refused to drink until the age of 24, and had to be coerced by Jahangir to do
so. His ‘main agenda’ as Koch tells us, was the ‘formulation of perfect
rulership’, of which a spectacular example is the Solomonic throne which
he created at the Diwan-i-Khas in Shahjahanabad (Red Fort, Delhi), with
the pietra dura panel of Orpheus playing to the beasts set into the back
wall. The throne represented the Jharokha-i-Khas u ‘Amm (viewing
window for high and low), and it was, as Koch states,

the most spectacular and eccentric in the Islamic world […] The
Florentine Orpheus was meant to symbolize the ideal rule of Shah
Jahan. The iconological bridge for the transferal was Solomon […]
reinforced by the related iconography of the first mythical kings of
Iran Jamshid […] and its expression through the metaphor of pacified
animals.
 Jamshid of the Persian literature compares with Solomon of Biblical
traditions; both were world rulers with powers of divination. Jahangir and
Shah Jahan invoked them both consistently in all their projects of art and
architecture for building upon the aura and magnificence of their millennial
persona. Of the two emperors, Shah Jahan, as Koch has documented,
‘stands out for his consistent use of highly aestheticized form to express his
specific state ideology − that centralized authority and hierarchy bring
about balance and harmony’. The Chinese, Hindu, European and Iranian
motifs which make up the exquisite cup allow us to conjecture that the
object may have denoted for its patron the world-revealing cup of Jamshid,
ingrained with the Solomonic motif of the ram’s head. Whether or not made
specifically for Shah Jahan, the harmony in the design seems to echo the
principal elements of the Shah Jahani idiom, of symmetry, sensuous
attention to detail and selective uses of naturalism, which inscribe the grand
building projects of the emperor, notably the Taj Mahal.

KHARE, M. (2005). ‘The Wine Cup in Mughal Court Culture—From Hedonism to Kingship’. The
Medieval History Journal, 8(1), 143–88.
KOCH, E. (2010). ‘The Mughal Emperor as Solomon, Majnun, and Orpheus, or the Album as a
Think Tank for Allegory’. Muqarnas, 27, 277–311.
STRONGE, S. (2010). Made for Mughal Emperors: Royal Treasures from Hindustan. Roli Books.
41
PORTRAIT OF SHIVAJI
Golconda
c. 1670s–80s

THE INSCRIPTION, IN GERMAN, ON THE PAINTING TELLS US THAT the person ‘has
been Shivaji, the Maratha ruler’. The painting appears in the album
Portraits of Indian Princes and is one of the only two known paintings of
Shivaji, made during his lifetime (1630–80), or just after his death. The
other is in an album which was compiled in c. 1712 for Niccolao Manucci,
a Venetian, who served the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh and who
subsequently met Shivaji in 1665 in the camp of Aurangzeb’s governor in
the Deccan, Mirza Raja Jai Singh. Both paintings substantiate the
description of Shivaji within contemporary texts as a person with piercing
eyes and a beard. They also show him wearing similar turbans, with a
plume and tassels of pearls, which possibly add to the representational
value of the paintings as true portraits of the great Maratha, also described
by his contemporaries as fair-complexioned and of medium stature.
Shivaji, who founded the Maratha power that was to sweep over northern
India, the Deccan and Karnataka by the mid-eighteenth century, is one of
the legendary heroes of India. Born on 19 February 1630, and raised near
Poona, where his father Shahji Bhonsle (d. 1664) had a jagir, he rose from
relative obscurity with no political support or patronage to establish an
independent kingdom that comprised extensive lands within much of
present-day Maharashtra, from Baglan in the north to Kolhapur in the south,
and also lands in northern Karnataka and southern India, including the cities
of Vellore and Jinji. A remarkable aspect of his achievement was that he
was able to defy and hold to ransom the might of the Mughal Empire that
was also then seeking to make extensive conquests in the Deccan and
further south.
Shivaji in Portraits of Indian Princes. Ink, opaque, watercolour, gold on paper. Date of album c.
1680–87, BM: 1974.0617, 0.11.12.

At the time of Shivaji’s birth, the Nizam Shah sultans of Ahmednagar

controlled much of what is today’s Maharashtra; the Adil Shahs of Bijapur
ruled over the fertile lands and mineral resources of the Raichur Doab (near
the confluence of the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers); and the Qutub
Shahs of Golconda ruled over northern Andhra and controlled lands with
the largest alluvial diamond mines and renowned centres of muslin
production.
Shahji, Shivaji’s father, who remained largely absent from his son’s life
and political career, embarked upon his own career in the Nizam Shahi
kingdom (c. 1624, 1628–29), where he became a kingmaker. However, he
switched allegiance to the sultans of Bijapur (1625–28) and subsequently
served briefly in the Mughal army (1630–32). Shahji eventually returned to
the Bijapur Sultanate, and his service record – similar to that of Shivaji’s
maternal grandfather, Lukhji Jadhavrao, Deshmukh of Sindhkhed – allows
us to see the quick shifts within service alliances in the Deccan and the
political climate within which Shivaji grew up.
Shivaji’s early achievements of acquiring the forts and lands of the
Bijapuri Sultanate were potentially harmful for his father’s political career.
They were, however, as the historian John F. Richards reminded us, ‘truly
remarkable’.

With incessant negotiation, threat and on occasion, ferociously

applied violence, the young Bhonsla chief established dominance
over long established Maratha Deshmukhs in the region. By the same
means he took control of nearly every hill fortress from their Bijapur
appointed commanders […] extended his domain into the fertile
coastal districts of northern Konkan […] acquired several ships and
began to trade with the Persian Gulf and Red Sea […] garrisoned
several coastal or island fortresses in the Konkan. Throughout this
period, the youthful raja negotiated with the Portuguese and British
for guns, naval supplies, and technical assistance.

The portrait shows Shivaji wearing his unique weapon, the vagh-nakh, an
iron finger-grip with four curved talons. In 1659, he killed Bijapur’s best
general, Afzal Khan, with such ‘tiger claws’ at the foothill of Pratapgarh
(near Mahabaleshwar, Maharashtra) during their encounter for negotiations.
While embracing the Khan, Shivaji, to quote an account of the event by an
unofficial historian of Aurangzeb’s reign, Kafi Khan, ‘thrust that hidden
weapon into his [Afzal Khan’s] abdomen in such a way that he did not even
have time to sigh’. Kafi Khan derided Shivaji’s actions as ‘one of the most
notorious murders’ of the time, although the latter’s men, as Richards
recalled, lauded his ‘designing turpitude’ as the hallmark of a ‘daring leader
of indomitable courage’.
Shivaji followed his remarkable rout of Afzal Khan’s forces by seizing
forts and lands on the Konkan coast, whereby he also acquired Kalyan, one
of the most prosperous trading towns of the region. In 1663, Shivaji
infiltrated the Mughal garrison in Poona and the following year raided the
Mughal-governed Surat, the busiest port on the west coast, and rode away
with 10 million rupees. Shivaji’s lightning raids often comprised
disingenuous strategies. They infuriated his opponents, and Aurangzeb, his
long-term beleaguered enemy, took to calling him the ‘mountain rat’.
In 1666, Shivaji successfully escaped from Aurangzeb’s prison in the
Agra Fort – some say in a large basket of sweets – and after travelling by
foot for over six months through a long and incredibly circuitous route via
Benares, reached his fort at Raigad, completely undetected.
Eight years later – after pillaging Surat a second time, striking into the
heart of the Mughal Deccan at Khandesh, conquering the Bijapuri lands in
Kanara, and seizing the city of Poona – Shivaji crowned himself the
Chhatrapati of his Svaraj. His coronation in 1674 at Raigad, Maharashtra,
is viewed by historians as the most important political act of the
seventeenth century. He orchestrated the entire ceremony that lasted for
over a week, for which he demanded the resurrection of the ancient
Brahmanical abhishekha ceremony. He called a Brahmin priest from
Benares, Gagga Bhatta, to perform this ceremony and fashion for him a
Kshatriya genealogy, and employed court poets to write laudatory epics
about him. The many purification rituals of the royal lustration ceremony
included an orthodox wedding for him. Finally, amidst displays of lavish
donations to Brahmins, Shivaji was duly enthroned as the king of the
Hindavi Svaraj.
Historians concede that Shivaji may have emphasized the uniqueness of
his kingship as avowedly Hindu to throw a strong challenge to the political
hegemony of the Islamic world which surrounded his domain. However, the
writing and rewriting of Shivaji’s history from the eighteenth century has
established a powerful historical memory of a Hindu king who liberated his
people, the Marathas, from the yoke of Islam, and Muslim rulers. This
memory captured the imagination of early-twentieth-century Indian
nationalism, and in his book Shivaji and His Times, Sir Jadunath Sarkar
wrote that

Shivaji has shown that the tree of Hinduism is not really dead, that it
can rise from beneath the seemingly crushing load of centuries of
political bondage; it can put forth new leaves and branches; it can lift
its head to the skies. He has proved by his example that the Hindu
race can build a nation, found a state, defeat enemies; they can
maintain navies and ocean trading fleets of their own, and conduct
naval battles on equal terms with foreigners.

It is indeed noteworthy that although Maratha power reached its peak

during the period of the Peshwas (c. 1713–1818), no narrative of Peshwa
power has matched the heroic epic of Shivaji – the courageous, just and
righteous Hindu ruler who showed utmost respect to Muslim women
captured during his campaigns, a highly principled and dutiful son to a
mother who raised him alone, a humane and inspirational leader blessed by
the divines, and an innately noble chief who treated all his men equally.
The legend of Shivaji, which has only grown from the eighteenth century
has fashioned the identity of a Marathi culture, and is actively curated to
date by the state of Maharashtra. The statues of Shivaji which dot every
town and city in the state, speak of the godlike reverence he commands. Of
them, the grandest, which is planned to be over 210 metres tall, shall be the
guardian deity of the state. Looming over the Arabian Sea on an artificial
rock, it shall face the state capital Mumbai, and cost the state a whopping
₹4,000 crores.
In lauding Shivaji as a patriot, liberator and national hero, we tend to
overlook the astute and far-sighted ruler. For example, he was the only ruler
of pre-colonial India to develop a semblance of a naval fleet to tap into the
lucrative mercantile trade on the Arabian Sea. His contemporaries, the
Portuguese in Goa, the pre-eminent naval power at the time, feared his
ambitions on the sea and reported that ‘seafarers have been employed by
him on regular salaries, and because they have become bound to him, we
are unable to find a single sailor for our fleet. That he is employing
Europeans is even worse’.
Shivaji may not have perceived himself as a Hindu nationalist liberating
his country from the oppressive rule of the Muslim foreigners, or a patriotic
Maratha who resurrected maharashtrapana (Maharashtra-ness) as some of
his twentieth-century historians from the twentieth century claim he did.
However, his grand abhishekha ceremony and royal title Chhatrapati allude
to the possibility that he may have regaled in his royal persona as a Hindu
king. Yet, contemporary texts also remind us that he patronized Sufi
shrines, offered salaams, and agreed to an alliance with Mirza Raja Jai
Singh to fight for the Mughal army.
The Maratha world into which Shivaji was born was composite, with
many elements of the Persian–Islamic political cultures. In fact, the Marathi
language developed during Shivaji’s time, with many Persian loan words.
The portrait shows Shivaji in an Islamic dress, wearing a tunic (jama), sash
(patka), and turban, which tells us that he emulated the codes of fashion of
the Islamic rulers and their symbols of regalia. During the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, all rulers in the Indian subcontinent, whether
Muslims or Hindus, followed the Islamic fashion, in an effort to display the
sophistication of their courts. Shivaji, too, followed the codes to design his
grand royalty. Therefore, in Shivaji’s ‘public presentation of himself as a
Hindu king, we should understand the emphasis to lie on the “king” rather
than the “Hindu”’, as one of his astute historians, Gajanan Bhaskar
Mehendale, recalled.
There is much we do not know about this portrait, including the painter,
the date when it was painted, and of the original from which it was copied.
The album in which it appears comprises 26 portraits of Indian princes, and
opens with the image of Akbar, followed by Jahangir, Shah Jahan and his
sons, including a bent and stooped Aurangzeb in his old age, the latter’s son
Muazzam, the Persian ‘merchant prince’ Mir Jumla, who left his Qutub
Shahi masters in c. 1656 for service in Aurangzeb’s force, Shivaji, Sultan
Ali Adil Shah II and Muhammad Adil Shah of Bijapur, Sultan Abdullah
Qutub Shah and Sultan Abul Hasan of Golconda and some of the latter’s
most powerful nobles, including the Hindu chief minister Madanna Pandit.
The album thus presents some of the political elites of seventeenth-
century Deccan, and the history it maps follows the first Mughal campaigns
into the region, namely, Akbar’s attack on Ahmednagar in 1595. The pages
all have the same design, in gold, and are cut out for receiving the oval
portraits, which are more or less of the same size, with a gold border. The
portfolio-like content of the album suggests that it was a souvenir of a
European collector who visited the Golconda court during his stay in the
Deccan. The German labels on the portraits possibly indicate a successive
collector.
The appearance of Shivaji, Madanna Pandit and Sultan Abul Hasan adds
to the possibilities of the date estimated for the album. In 1676, two years
after he became the Chhatrapati, Shivaji entered into an alliance with
Golconda through the invitation of Sultan Abul Hasan’s powerful Telugu
Brahmin minister, Madanna Pandit. In January 1677, he led a 60,000-man
army to Hyderabad to meet the Sultan, in which ‘the two rulers […] aimed
at conquest and joined annexation of the lands of Bijapur in Karnataka’, to
quote Richards. Although Shivaji subsequently refused to part with any
portion of his new conquests to Golconda, ‘this sticking point did not
eliminate the defensive alliance between him and Qutub Shah’.
The history which connects the three portraits shows us the realities of
the political world of the times, in which a Hindu king sought alliance with
one sultan to make inroads into the territory of another, and powerful Hindu
ministers ran the administration of many sultanates. This world does not
lend itself to understanding, or studying, through the lens of innate Hindu–
Muslim enmity, and the portrait and its provenance show us the merit of
recollecting heroes within the times in which they lived.
ASHER, C. and C. Talbot. (2006). India Before Europe. University of Cambridge.
MANUCCI, N. (1907–08). Storia do Mogor, 1653–1708, Vol 4. W. Irivne (Trans.). John Murray.
MEHENDALE, G.B. (2011). Shivaji: His Life and Times. Param Mitra.
RICHARDS, J.F. (1993). The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press.
SARKAR, J.N. (1920). Shivaji and His Times (Second Edn). Longmans Green.
42
PICTURE OF RAGA MEGHA
Narsinghgarh, Madhya Pradesh
c. late 17th century

nīladyutih samvrtanādalīnah sukomalāngah kāmanīyamūrtih |

anangalīlāniratah pragalbhah sa megharāgah kathitah sarāgaih ||
31 || megharāgu
With the lustre of dark (clouds), absorbed in suppressed (concealed)
sound (rumbling), with delicate limbs, with a lovely body, delighting
in games of love, bold: that one is said to be the megharāga by those
who have aesthetic sense/are in love

RAGA MEGHA APPEARS THUS IN THE PAINTING OF A RAGAMALA, or garland of

musical melodies, a genre that combined poetry, music and illustrations,
emerging during the mid-fifteenth century to provide, to quote one of the
foremost scholars Klaus Ebeling, ‘visual interpretations of the Indian
musical modes previously envisioned in divine or human form by
musicians and poets’. The dark and dramatic monsoon skies under which
the dark-hued Megha Raga – as Krishna, in yellow dhoti, with a gold scarf
over his shoulders and wearing a gold crown – dallies with a nayika to the
beat of a mridanga drum, kartal and possibly a sitar, attune our ears to the
expected sounds of thunder, lightning and the saras birds flying away from
the approaching rains. We can see the painting ‘picturing sound’, which is
how the ragamala paintings were exhibited a few years ago at the
Metropolitan Museum, and are led to regard the materialist depictions of
intangible things. In savouring the vision, sound and rhythm of Raga Megha
through the painting, we engage with the complex field of visual reciprocity
and are possibly reminded of the injunctions of W.J.T. Mitchell, the
historian of visual culture and iconology, to allow pictures to speak for
themselves.

Megha in a ragamala series from Narsinghgarh, Bundelkhand state, 220 mm × 160 mm, c. 1680,
attributed to Madho Das. NM: 49.19/2.
 Raga denotes derivation from the Sanskrit root ranj: ‘to colour […]
especially to colour red’, and hence ‘to delight’. As Richard Widdess tells
us, raga is not only ‘central to Indian musical theory, aesthetics and practice
but it also links musical sounds with associated cultural meanings, and thus
has important connections with the visual arts, literature, and drama/film’.
The ragamala paintings are structured sets, and each painting in a set
depicts, as Anna Dallapiccola states

Dramatic situation […] the human figures, their stance and

appurtenances, the animals, the elements of the landscape and the
background scene […] help to decode the situation and the […] poem
or inscription on the folio helps to reveal the identity of the raga or
ragini.

Ragamalas were usually royal commissions, and they thrived until the
mid-nineteenth century. Regional iconographies differed greatly, and
although the precise relationship between a ragamala and music remains
elusive, the paintings convey the structural and aesthetic aspects of the
ragas. An early theoretical text, the Brihaddesi of Matanga (between the
fifth and seventh centuries) define the raga as ‘that particularity of notes
and melodic movements…by which one is delighted’.
The ragas are divine beings. Widdess suggests that the aksiptika, or short
measured songs in the Sangita-ratnakara of Sarangadeva which is a text of
the thirteenth century, are possibly the ‘unknown mechanism by which […]
each raga became identified with or personified as an image – usually a
person or deity, described with various attributes’. The personification lent
to the raga system, which is noted in the Sangita-darpana (c. 1625) as of
thirty-six, comprising six male ragas, each with five female raginis, their
wives. The text, as Vidya Dehejia explains, describes ‘each raga (male) and
ragini (female) to evoke a mood such as eroticism, heroism, tranquility,
devotion or loneliness. In addition, each raga or ragini usually also
suggests a particular time of day or night, while a few recall a season.’
However, the numbers vary, and Mesakarna, or Kshema Karna as he is also
known, a sixteenth-century court poet at Rewa (Central India), formulated a
raga system of eighty-four, adding to each family eight sons, or raga-
putras. Raga Megha, dark-skinned with lightning as garment, pleasing
peacocks and a luck-bringer, in Mesakarna’s description, comprises five
raginis, Mallari, Sorathi, Suhavi, Asavari, Kokani, and eight raga-putras,
Nata, Kanara, Saranga, Kedara, Gaud Mallara, Gunda, Jalandhara and
Sankara. The addition of raga-putris (daughters of the ragas), as many
ragamala series show, further complicated and extended the system. Thus,
although the ‘individual raga names and […] their pictorializations may be
held in common, the ragas will be differently ordered and grouped as a set
in the ragamala’ as one of their scholars Harold Powers emphasized. This
Narsinghgarh Megha Raga conveys the mood of the raga: ‘most frequently
love, in its various aspects, and devotion’.
The earliest example of the ragamala tradition is the painted series of 42
ragas and raginis in the margins of a Jaina Kalpasutra (c. 1475) from
Gujarat, which belongs to the period when Jaina merchants increasingly
imported paper – the material on which the paintings are made – from
Persia. The divine personification of the ragas as gods and goddesses,
which is clearly seen in the Jaina manuscript, was secularized by the
seventeenth century, and, as Widdess notes, ‘in the ragamala verses and
paintings […] many ragas and raginis are interpreted as amorous heroes and
heroines (nayaka and nayika)’. Early scholarship of ragamala attempted to
identify regional series and complete sets. Therefore, the paintings are
known as Malwa, Deccani, Rajput, Pahari, Basholi, Kangra and Mysore,
among many others. However, recent studies of those from Narsinghgarh
reveal the problems with the classification of Malwa, which is probably the
largest corpus. For, Narsinghgarh is now undisputedly located historically
in Bundelkhand, a powerful chiefdom albeit within Mughal domain during
the late seventeenth century, and scholars suggest that many ‘Malwa
paintings’ were possibly made in and around the ascendant cities of Orchha,
Datia and Chattarpur. So these paintings are from Narsinghgarh, not from
Malwa.
 We may expect that enquiries into the Malwa School would provide a
glimpse of the extra-musical signification of the late-seventeenth-century
Narsinghgarh paintings of Raga Megha. For example, an eighteenth-century
musical text, Sangita-narayana, from nearby Odisha informs us that the
purna raga with all seven notes, dha-ni-sa-re-ga-ma-pa was then
considered to confer upon listeners ‘long life, merit, fame, good repute,
success, health, wealth, long lineage which brings prosperity to the
kingdom’. As we can gauge, the raga was beneficial for an Narsinghgarh
state.
The ragas illuminate the prominent Muslim patronage of the innately
‘Hindu music’ that was theorized and developed through Sanskrit texts.
Thus, Amir Khusrau (1253–1325) innovated new ragas, talas and musical
instruments in the court of Sultan Ala-ud-din Khilji (r. 1296–1316);
Muhammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325–51) greatly encouraged Hindustani music
irrespective of his strong Islamic leanings; the Sanskrit treatise Sangita-
siromani (c. 1428) was dedicated to the ruler of Jaunpur, Ibrahim Shah (r.
1401–40), himself a fine poet; the Lahjat-i-Sikander-Shahi, a Persian
translation of the Sanskrit texts on music, was produced at the court of
Sikander Lodhi (r. 1489–1517) at his command; and Adil Shah II of Bijapur
(r. 1580–1626), possibly the greatest connoisseurs of the arts of his time,
composed nine poems in the Kitab-i-Nauras to be sung in different ragas.
The better known Mughal connoisseurship of music, as Katherine Butler
Schofield has demonstrated

[…] made sense of the rasas by reference to Persianate explanations

of music’s efficacies as medicinal preparations. […] By the
seventeenth century, the Mughal patron had long appropriated and re-
appropriated, through repeated listenings in different contexts and on
different occasions, the imagery and the sounds associated originally
with shringara rasa into his own deeply felt aesthetic experience of
Hindustani music, through the powerful affinity he felt between
shringara rasa and ishq […] In this way, some Mughal connoisseurs
of Hindustani music became, recognisably, rasikas.
 Overflowing with shringara rasa, Raga Megha, among the oldest ragas,
came to be historically associated with the much later Raga Malhar, the
legendary creation of Miyan Tansen (c. 1493–1589). The painting dates
close to this history of conjugation which enhanced the power of the Megha
Raga in making listeners savour the world of the sublime. It thereby also
compels us to reflect upon the force of the transcendental power of
Hindustani music to move aside the religion based cultural expressions that
are lionized by people and politics to further their own ends.

DALLAPICCOLA, A.L. (2011). ‘Ragamala Painting: A Brief Introduction’. In C. Glynn, R. Skelton

and A.L. Dallapiccola (Eds), Ragamala: Paintings from India from the Claudio Moscatelli
Collection (pp. 13–22). Philip Wilson.
DEHEJIA, V. (2009). The Body Adorned: Dissolving Boundaries between Sacred and Profane in
India’s Art. Columbia University Press.
EBELING, K. (1973). Ragamala Paintings. Ravi Kumar.
JAIRAZBHOY, N.A. (1971). The Ragas of Indian Music: Their Structure and Evolution. Faber &
Faber.
MITCHELL, W.J.T. (1996). ‘What do Pictures “Really” Want?’ October, 77: Summer, 71–82.
doi.org/10.2307/778960.
POWERS, H. (1980). ‘Illustrated Inventories of Indian Ragamala Paintings’. Journal of the
American Oriental Society, 100 (4), 473–93.
SCHOFIELD, K.B. (2015). ‘Learning to Taste the Emotions: The Mughal Rasika’. In F. Orsini and
K.B. Schofield (Eds), Tellings and Text: Music, Literature and Performance in North India (pp.
407–22). Open Books.
SEITZ, K. (2015). Orchha, Datia, Panna: ‘Malwa’ – Miniaturen von den Rajputischen Höfen
Bundelkhands, 1580–1850. Hanstein.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2014). Ragamala: Picturing Sound. [Exhibition Listing].
Ragamala | The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org)
WIDDESS, R. (1995). The Ragas of Early Indian Music: Modes, Melodies and Musical Notations
from the Gupta Period to c. 1250. Clarendon Press.
WIDDESS, R. (2006). ‘Raga’. Centre of South Asian Studies, SOAS. eprints.soas.ac.uk/5431/.
43
TIMUR RUBY
Late-16th to early-17th century

THE NAME OF THE GEM TIMUR RUBY IS A MISNOMER, AS THIS IS neither a ruby
nor was it in the possession of Timur (1336–1405), the Central Asian
warlord who was the illustrious ancestor of the Mughal emperors. The
‘ruby’ is actually a very large spinel, misidentified during the early-
twentieth century as belonging to Timur’s grandson Ulugh Beg. It was
owned by Jahangir and illustrates the resplendence of the opulent treasury
of precious stones which the early Mughal emperors carefully created
through purchase, tribute and plunder.
The unique treasury was foremost among the twelve imperial treasuries.
It comprised unmounted stones and was administered by a treasurer and
two assistants. The collection was divided into parts so that the emperor
could examine a portion each day of the year. European travellers within the
Mughal realms have described its splendour, largely from hearsay, but their
descriptions include a ‘fact’: no diamond in the collection was under two
and a half carats in weight. The precious stones were assessed and graded
according to their size, lustre and transparency, and their estimated
monetary value. The spinels, which are stones of deep carmine red colour,
and belong to a specific group of minerals, commanded the highest value.
They were known as la’l or la’l-i Badakshan and, as this Persian name
suggests, were sourced from Badakshan, Afghanistan. Those graded first
class were worth more than a 1,000 mohurs – the gold coins of the Mughal
realm.
Spinel mounted on a necklace of gold in a diamond set. RC:100017.

Sketch of the spinel (no. 3) and other stones including the Koh-i-noor (no. 1), by Emily Eden in
1838, in Portraits of the Princes and People of India (1844).

The Timur Ruby is a hereditary jewel inscribed with the names of the
Mughal emperors, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb and Farruk Siyar (r.
1712–19). The Persian inscriptions are rendered in beautiful calligraphy,
and the list of emperors reveals the stone’s dynastic value.
Jahangir, a great lover of beauty, was the biggest collector of spinels
among all Mughal emperors. He sought out those of great rarity, and
Thomas Roe, the ambassador from England to his court, described his
person as resplendent with ‘jewellery on his head, neck, breast, arms above
the elbow and on the wrist, and one or two rings on every finger’. Roe
declared that Jahangir possessed ‘the treasury of the World’.
In 1615, Jahangir sent an envoy to the Safavid emperor Shah Abbas I (r.
1587–1629), whom he considered his brethren and peer, and requested the
return of some of the spinels which he and his forebears had donated in
Najaf, Iraq, to the shrine of Iman Ali, the son-in-law of Prophet
Muhammad. The Shah returned a selection, and these were dispatched to
the Mughal court in a box of European manufacture. This anecdote
illustrates one of the most common ways in which objects established and
nurtured long-distance social connections within the pre-modern world.
Within the Persian cultural traditions, spinels embody sunlight – a
metaphor for the divine – and many valuable specimens were sewn into the
garments of kings and set into their crowns. Those in the imperial treasuries
of Persia were inscribed with the names and titles of their owning rulers,
and historians inform us that the tradition of displaying the ownership of the
gems through inscriptions existed even during Timur’s reign. The inscribed
spinels were considered charged and accrued great emotional values. An
example is the la’l-i Jalali, which Akbar’s mother Hamida Banu gifted him
on the birth of his son Salim (the future Jahangir). Akbar prized his
mother’s gift and wore the jewel often. He subsequently bequeathed it to
Jahangir, who bequeathed it to his son Khurram (Shah Jahan) in 1617, when
the latter returned to Agra after a brilliant campaign in the Deccan.
The dynastic value accorded by Mughal emperors to the Timur Ruby is
evident from the inscriptions. Apart from the names of four Mughal
emperors, it has inscriptions of two subsequent owners. One mentions
‘Sultan Nadir, Master of Conjunction’ taking the stone ‘from the 25,000
genuine gems of the king of kings […] from the Jewel House of
Hindustan’. The act refers to Nader Shah’s plunder of Delhi in 1739. The
other inscription is ‘Ahmad Shah durr-e-durran 1168’, referring to Nader
Shah’s protégé and successor, Ahmad Shah, to whom he conferred the title
‘Pearl of Pearls’ (the title engraved). The date in the inscription refers to
Ahmad Shah’s accession in c. 1754–55. Ahmad Shah acquired the spinel
and other priceless gems in Nader Shah’s treasury, including the Koh-i-
noor, through loot after the latter was assassinated in 1748.
The Timur Ruby subsequently came into the hands of Ahmad Shah’s
distant successor in Kabul, Shah Shuja, who in 1812 sought the help of
Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the ruler of Punjab (r. 1801–39), to get back his
throne. In exchange for his military aid, Ranjit Singh coerced Shuja to part
with the stone at a very low price. The Maharaja added the Timur Ruby to
his imperial treasury at Lahore, which comprised a vast collection of
Mughal jewels.
With the British annexation of Punjab in 1839, the Timur Ruby was
gifted by the defeated Sikh kingdom to the East India Company. Emily
Eden, sister of Governor General Lord Auckland (1836–42), drew the
stone, along with the Koh-i-noor, in 1838. Both appear in her book
Portraits of the Princes and People of India (1844). Eden wrote that ‘some
of the finest of the jewels which the Maha Raja possessed […] were sent to
the camp of the Governor General, for the inspection of the ladies’ and
reported that her drawings illustrated the ‘exact measurement’. Number 3 in
the folio captioned ‘horse and jewels of Runjeet Singh’ is the ‘uncut Ruby,
on which some Persian characters were engraved’. Eden also noted that
Ranjit Singh often made his favourite horses wear the jewels she had seen
and illustrated, and which were ‘worth above £300,000’.
In 1853, the Timur Ruby was presented to Queen Victoria and
subsequently set in a necklace made for her by the royal jewellers Garrard
of London. The necklace was made in such a way that the ‘ruby’ could be
alternated with the Koh-i-noor, which was also presented to the Queen and
also fashioned for setting into an imperial ornament.
The long history of transactions for the Timur Ruby informs us of the
complex biographies of magnificent jewels within imperial treasuries.
Notably, we may also find them embodying many origin stories through the
changes of their ownership, valuations and uses. Therefore, in demanding a
note as an object of history the ‘ruby’ illustrates the importance of engaging
with the histories of imperial treasuries as they open new areas of enquiries
into aspects of the past.

EDEN, E. (1844). Portraits of the Princes and People of India. J. Dickinson and Sons.
FOSTER, W. (Ed.) (1899). The Embassies of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–
1619: As Narrated in His Journal and Correspondence. London: Hakluyt Society.
STRONGE, S., J. Whalley and A. Ferrari. (2015). Bejewelled Treasures: The Al Thani Collection.
V&A.
44
THE SAMRAT YANTRA
Jaipur, Rajasthan
Early 1730s

THE GIGANTIC ASTRONOMICAL STONE INSTRUMENTS KNOWN collectively as the

‘Jantar Mantar’ are among the most visually arresting monuments of India.
Five Jantar Mantars were built during the early decades of the eighteenth
century, in the cities of Delhi (or Shahjahanabad), Jaipur, Mathura, Varanasi
and Ujjain, by the astronomer-king Sawai Jai Singh (1688–1743), the
Kacchwaha ruler of Amer, Rajasthan. Their spare and bold geometric forms
are considered ultramodern, surreal and mysterious even today. The large
crowds of tourists who visit the Jantar Mantars of Delhi and Jaipur daily
often engage with the instruments as exotic architecture, representing the
building feats of a Hindu king. Many also see them as examples of Hindu
science, although they rarely pause to reflect upon how these work or
whether they worked at all. What seems forgotten within the popular lore is
that the instruments illustrate the rapid pace of information flow from the
sixteenth century between Asia and Europe, in which the Hindu rulers of
the Indian subcontinent actively participated. The Jantar Mantars command
us to see the largely unexplored global networks that fostered technical and
scientific knowledge within pre-colonial India.
The Samrat Yantra, Jantar Mantar, Jaipur.

Through a study of the observatory at Varanasi, known as the Man

Mandir, Simon Schaffer has shown that the British officers who first saw
the architectural instruments here, less than 30 years after they were built,
were remarkably wrong in all their inferences. Yet, their descriptions of the
instruments as objects of Hindu science perpetuated the understanding in
Britain, that these architectural objects represented the knowledge of
astronomy that was to be found in the ancient Sanskrit texts. The British
inference of the great antiquity of the objects hindered explorations of the
technical qualities of the massive instruments.
The phrase Jantar Mantar constitutes two Sanskrit words, yantra and
mantra. The former, meaning instrument, also means mystical diagrams,
and in astronomy, refers to sextants. The latter is a reference to incantation.
The best-known Jantar Mantars are in Delhi and Jaipur and both were built
under the personal supervision of Jai Singh, with locally sourced building
materials. The instruments at Delhi and Jaipur are also the best studied, and
they are the Rama Yantra, Jai Prakash Yantra, Kapala Yantra, Rasivalyas,
Sasthamsa Yantra, Mishra Yantra, Digamsa Yantra and Samrat Yantra. Each
looks different and does a different astronomical calculation. Of them all,
Jaipur’s Samrat Yantra, or Supreme Instrument, is the largest and most
elegant.
The Samrat Yantra is a sundial, or an equinoctial dial, from which solar
time can be read. The instrument is found in all five observatories and
comprises a triangular gnomon in the centre. The one at Jaipur is the tallest,
rising 90 feet from the base, and has two giant quadrants of a circle
projecting from two sides, forming the east and west axis. The quadrants
rise like wings towards heaven, and the stairs of the gnomon, which make
up the hypotenuse, add to the visual sensation of being led up to the sky.
The gnomon of the Samrat Yantra is scaled to measure the angle of
declination of any celestial object visible above the southern horizon. It is
inscribed with markings, which, according to one of the best descriptions of
the instrument, has sixty divisions in accordance with the tangent of the
declination angles. On a clear day, as the sun passes from east to west, the
shadow of the gnomon falls on the scale of the quadrant, thus indicating
local time. The gnomon’s base is on the plane of the local meridian, and the
hypotenuse forms a parallel to the axis of the Earth. The instrument is,
therefore, carefully orientated due north.
Jai Singh had singled out the Samrat, Rama and Jai Prakash Yantras as
his inventions, and the instruments evoke the fascinating histories of
scientific experiments in his court. They are among the simpler-looking
instruments but are the most precise. The Samrat Yantra can measure time
to a precision that had not been achieved before, and the one at Jaipur
measures time to an accuracy of two seconds. This lofty instrument would
have afforded the observatory visibility within the new city that Jai Singh
founded as his capital in 1727, and for kilometres outside. As one of its
historians Susan Johnson-Roehr notes, before its construction, the city’s
builders and inhabitants may not have noticed the observatory.
Although the creation dates of the observatories remain uncertain,
scholars tell us that Jai Singh built the first in Delhi in c. 1720–21, just after
Muhammad Shah (1720–40) ascended the Mughal throne after a
tumultuous decade of weak rulers and court intrigues. Those at Jaipur,
Mathura, Varanasi and Ujjain followed, possibly in that order. Each
observatory served a different political aim, had a different combination of
instruments and had a different architectural layout. The ones in Delhi and
Jaipur appear intentionally designed to be seen from great distances.
Together with the one at Ujjain, they are located within clearly demarcated
areas. However, those at Mathura and Varanasi are on rooftops of existing
buildings, which inevitably hide them from public view.
Jai Singh built the Jantar Mantar at Shahjahanabad within his ancestral
lands of Jaisinghpura, possibly as a political act to exhibit his loyalty and
high rank to his new sovereign, the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah. He
also dedicated his treatise on the science of astronomy, which he had
written, to the emperor by naming it Ziz-i-Muhammad Shahi. He stated that
the text corrected the errors in the ‘new tables of the Ziz of Ulugh Beg’. The
maharaja, as Johnson-Roehr tells us, named the work of Mirza Ulugh Beg
as his direct precedent, ‘arguing that little of note had happened in the field
of astronomy since the era of the Timurid prince’s rule’. Therefore, as
Johnson-Roehr states:

It is probably not a coincidence that Sawai Jai Singh’s interest in

astronomy, long-standing but somewhat erratic in application,
coalesced into a building program just at the moment of Muhammad
Shah’s arrival at the throne in Shahjahanabad. Rather, this
development can be understood as […] a simultaneous attempt by the
Rajput king to reclaim some of Amer’s lost land and cultural
authority.

Jai Singh built the observatory in Shahjahanabad to participate

symbolically with the Timurid dynasty, and this adds to the views of his
historians that he was an ‘heir to a hybridized culture founded on centuries
of intellectual cross-fertilization’. For, the observatories demonstrate his
conscious efforts to follow the scholarship of astronomy in the West, which
transcended boundaries of empires, cultures, religions and ethnicities. In
this respect, Jai Singh’s moves to correct the existing astronomy tables
reflect, as Johnson-Roehr notes,

[…] those of the first royal astronomer in Britain, John Flamsteed (b.
1646, d. 1719), who published an extensive star catalogue with the
accompanying constellation charts. Similar to Flamsteed, he too
embraced familiar tools of measure (both astronomers relied on
mural quadrants/sextants) in order to achieve his goals, while
simultaneously pushing for the development of better, more accurate,
instrumentation.

Many of Jai Singh’s near-contemporary astronomers within the Indian

subcontinent, such as the high-ranking Hindu pandits Jagannatha Samrat
and Kevalarama, who knew of the Bhugola, were influenced by the Islamic
treatises on the subject. Jagannatha, for example, wrote the Samraṭ
Siddhanta, a commentary in Sanskrit of the Arabic text of Ptolemy’s
Almagest, and Kevalarama is the author of the Sanskrit text Tarasarani,
which is based upon the Zīzi Ulugh Begī. Their works illustrate that
differences in religion and language posed no barriers to scholarship. Yet,
perhaps because he rejected the uses of the telescope, or because of the
aesthetics and large size of his instruments, Jai Singh has ‘never been
integrated into historical discussions of astronomy’, as Johnson-Roehr
informs us. His Samrat Yantra conveys the need for reviewing the omission
and interrogating the West-focused histories of astronomy.
The massiveness of Jai Singh’s instruments marks a clear departure from
the small brass astrolabes of the thirteenth-century from Maragha (Iran) and
Denfeng (China). Significantly, in the Ziz-i-Muhammad Shahi, the
Maharaja noted that the above brass instruments did not measure up to his
ideas of accuracy ‘because of the smallness of their size, the want of
division into minutes, the shaking and the wearing of their axes, the
displacement of the centers of the circles, and the shifting of the planes of
the instruments’. He concluded that the errors in the works of Hipparchus
and Ptolemy, as well as in his own star tables, were probably produced by a
similar reliance on metal instruments. Thus, Jai Singh’s instruments
embody active processes of problem-solving, which was decidedly different
from the known approaches to instrument-making until then.
While instructing on the Samrat Yantra, the Samraṭ Siddhanta mentions
that

The yantraraja ought not to be made large because, even if a large

staff is constructed to support the circle, that [staff] bends; the circle
becomes imperfect and [the position of] a fixed star ceases to be
correct. So again, an instrument like a half-moon, called the
yantrasamrāṭ was constructed, whose radius is eighteen blacksmith’s
cubits […] By means of it one knows the declination and the [time
in] ghaṭikas from noon; by means of the declination and the ghaṭikas
from noon one knows [the position of] a fixed star.

Since Jai Singh’s Samrat Yantra did not distort under its own weight, the
instrument served his aim to rectify the flaws in the existing astrolabes.
Jai Singh planned the observatory at Jaipur as the architectural feature of
his new capital which he designed as a grid-like layout with wide streets
that could accommodate large ceremonial processions. Historians in the
past have perceived the construction of Jaipur as an attempt by the
Maharaja to serve the Hindus who were the dominant communities in his
realm. They regarded Jai Singh as a Hindu Rajput ruler who espoused a
Hindu state for his Hindu subjects. However, the architectural histories of
Jaipur reveal that Jai Singh ‘understood the value of having a multi-cultural
state’, to quote Catherine Asher. She adds that Jai Singh invited people of
all faiths and occupations to inhabit his new capital and practise their
professions, crafts, and skills for ensuring ‘the highest financial support to
the state’s economic well-being’ and notes that

[…] under the Kachhwahas, multiple religious communities thrived

in Jaipur. The court poet, Girdhari, presents Jaipur as a harmonious
multicultural city in which justice prevailed […] where Brahmans
 were respected and temples were built, but, at the same time, […] a
city intended as a universal city with multiple communities
coexisting peacefully.

The design of the city was clearly aimed towards economic prosperity
and nurturing a peaceful state. The treatises on astronomy that Jai Singh
collected, which are now a part of the palace archives of Jaipur, reveal the
cosmopolitan world he hoped to create. In his practise and scholarship of
astronomy, he drew inspiration from the practices of Emperor Humayun (r.
1530–40; 1555–56), who was a keen astronomer, and his selection of
manuscripts on the subject informs us that he intended his instruments to be
well used. Jai Singh’s archives also inform us of his efforts to gather
knowledge of the latest trends in the practices of astronomy in Europe. He
sent invitations to European astronomers to settle in designated areas inside
his capital so that his instrument could be used to make new calculations.
He also sent an emissary from his court to Portugal to acquire information
about European astronomy, and the archives inform us of the opinions of
French astronomers, regarding the effectiveness of the Maharaja’s
instruments.
Additionally, Jai Singh was an avid collector of world maps, which he
regularly used and consulted. His interest in cartography ‘can almost surely
be linked to his well-known passion for astronomy − both ways of
understanding the world’, as Asher points out. The Jantar Mantars therefore
allow us to see a non-sectarian ruler with a remarkably scientific bent of
mind, who satiated his intellectual curiosity by actively seeking the
cosmopolitan world of scholarship.
The Samrat Yantra at Jaipur speaks of the massive scale of resources,
including labour, which Jai Singh harnessed for the success of his ambitious
project. Looming over Jaipur’s architectural skyline, which he kept low so
that his grand processions could be seen from afar, the instrument presents
Jai Singh’s majestic aspirations, illuminating the service of science to
imperialist politics.
ASHER, C. (2014). ‘Jaipur: City of Tolerance and Progress’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian
Studies, 37(3), 410–30. DOI:10.1080/00856401.2014.929203.
JOHNSON-ROEHR, S. (2011). The Spatialization of Knowledge and Power at the Astronomical
Observatories of Sawai Jai Singh II, c. 1721–32 CE. University of Illinois.
MACDOUGALL, B. (1996). ‘Jantar Mantar: Architecture, Astronomy and Solar Kingship in
Princely India’. The Cornell Journal of Architecture, 5, 16–33.
SCHAFFER, S.J. (2009). ‘The Asiatic Enlightenment of British Astronomy’. In S.J. Schaffer, L.
Roberts, K. Raj and J. Delbourgo (Eds), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global
Intelligence, 1770–1820 (pp. 49–104). Science History.
45
NADER SHAH’S TABAR

THIS TABAR OR BATTLE-AXE CONJURES IMAGES OF CRUELTY, massacre and loot,

as viewers often exclaim that Nader Shah, the ruler of Persia (r. 1736–47),
had used it to kill the residents of Delhi in 1739, after he defeated the
Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–48) in Karnal (Haryana) on 24
February. Nader rode to the Mughal capital Shahjahanabad – the name by
which Delhi was then known – a month later, on the 20th of March, and left
the city on 16 May with much of the imperial treasury, after killing an
estimated 30,000 of the population.
The tabar was possibly gifted to Nader either by Muhammad Shah or
one of his nobles, Sa’adat Khan (the Nawab of Awadh), or Nizam-ul-Mulk
(the Nizam of the Deccan), who had both intrigued against the Mughal
ruler. The gold-plated Nastaliq inscription on either side of the blade are
verses from the Quran; they mention Nader Shah’s name and the imperial
title Sahebqeran (Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction), which he assumed
after his triumphant entry into Shahjahanabad. The octagonal handle is
‘damascened in gold in floral and creeper design in tehnishān style all
over’, to quote the object catalogue of the National Museum, and the
ornamentation conveys precision in the execution of the minute floral
patterns. The tabar looks like it was made for the Mughal court, and was
most probably made locally in Shahjahanabad. And although it recalls
horrors of the massacre of Delhi in the minds of viewers, this Mughal tabar
appears unused. The object probably never left the Mughal realm, as the
National Museum acquired it from a private collection in India. Yet it is of
immense significance as a historic object of encounter. For, it reminds us
that Nader’s invasion of the Mughal Empire is the only occasion when a
Mughal ruler met a Persian ruler in his own domain.

Axe of ‘Mughal make’ with inscriptions Shahebqeran, the ruler of Persia Nader Shah. c. 1739, steel,
gold, 752 mm (length of blade 135 mm), NM: 58.47/3.

As is well known, the Safavid Shahs of Persia were persistently recalled

by the great Mughals, who assiduously emulated their etiquettes to fashion
their imperial persona and the magnificence of their court. Notably, Persian
was the official language of the Mughal Empire, Persians held high offices
in the Mughal court, and many powerful queens were Persian, including
Hamida Banu Begum, Nur Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal. The grand portraits
of Jahangir embracing Shah Abbas are, perhaps, the most vivid examples of
the ways in which the Mughal emperors also competed with their Safavid
peers, who they regarded as rulers of their ancestral lands. Therefore, it is
indeed ironic that the eventual historic meeting of a Mughal and Persian
ruler virtually destroyed the empire that had vested enormous cultural
resources to conserve the classicism of imperial Persian culture. The display
of the tabar in India’s National Museum provides a reason for revisiting the
historic encounter to understand the complexities of cross-cultural politics
even among people of the same religion.
Of the three once-resplendent Islamic empires, namely, the Ottoman,
Persian and Mughal, the last, despite its declining fortunes, was still the
richest in the early-eighteenth century. The imperial treasury held fabulous
wealth accumulated over two hundred years, and Shahjahanabad, as Nader
well knew, was ‘the pride of opulence’, to quote his intrepid historian
Michael Axworthy. Nader therefore marched towards the Mughal city to
plunder, in emulation of his illustrious ancestor Timur, whose achievements
he hoped to surpass. However, he resolved to avoid the bloodshed that had
accompanied Timur’s invasion of the Delhi Sultanate 340 years ago. He
captured Kandahar, Herat, and the notional Mughal province of Kabul,
before defeating Muhammad Shah’s armies at Karnal. He then sent the
defeated Mughal to Shahjahanabad with Persian escorts to prepare for his
own triumphant entry into the fabled city.
Muhammad Shah received him, as Axworthy recounts, with elaborate
ceremonies and expensive presents that were meant to show ‘that as a host
[he] had some status’. However, on arriving, Nader made it clear to the
population of Shahjahanabad that he was their ruler. He ordered the qutba
to be read in his name for the Friday prayers at the Jama Masjid, assumed
the Mughal honorific Shahanshah (King of Kings), minted coins in his
name, and moved into Muhammad Shah’s lavish apartments, in Shah
Jahan’s Red Fort, forcing the latter into the harem.
In recalling the encounter between a victorious Nader Shah and a
defeated Muhammad Shah, it is important to remember that both claimed
Turko-Mongol descent. Although Nader belonged to the Afshar tribe, he
carefully traced his political and ethnic lineage to Timur, Muhammad
Shah’s distant but direct ancestor through lineage from Babur. The common
bonds of ancestral descent led Nader to proclaim that he would allow the
Mughal to reign with his friendship and support, and insisted that the latter
speak to him in Turki. Axworthy has aptly described the ‘mocking theatre’
in which

The conquered emperor was forced to persuade his enemy to accept

his most priceless possessions. […] Mohammad Shah offered Nader
all the imperial treasures. Nader demurred. Mohammad Shah
insisted. Nader refused. Mohammad Shah offered again. Eventually,
Nader accepted.
 The citizens of Shahjahanabad were, however, fearful of the invaders and
felt betrayed by their king. Nader had consciously timed his entry into the
city a day before the Persian new year Nowruz, the 20th of March, so that
his troops could feast upon the wealth. He lowered the price of grain and
ordered the citizens to pay taxes that were ten times higher. In retaliation, an
angry mob attacked and killed a few of his soldiers who had gone to
Paharganj and Chandni Chowk to fix the price of corn. Nader then sent over
one thousand men to these areas. He stationed himself at the upper terrace
of the Raushan-ud-Daulah mosque (today’s Sunehri Masjid) and standing at
the base of the golden domes with his sword drawn ‘in a deep and silent
gloom that none dared to disturb’, he looked upon Chandni Chowk while
his men killed and pillaged, and set fire to the rich houses and bustling
markets.
The next day he reportedly ordered his men not to shoot. As stray killings
of his soldiers persisted, he rode out of the Red Fort, of Shah Jahan, to
survey the situation. It was then that stones were thrown at his retinue,
killing one of his men riding by his side. This incident made Nader order
the killing of all residents in areas where his own men had been killed.
Thousands of shops and houses were set on fire in the rich merchant and
jeweller quarters, burning the living and dead, and his men collected a
spectacular loot. The killing and destruction, however, ended as quickly as
they had begun. Started at 9 a.m., the massacre ended abruptly after nearly
six hours, at 3 p.m. Significantly, The History of Nadir Shah (1742),
compiled by James Fraser, informs us that Nader unleashed the violence
under ‘considerable duress’ and describes the ‘extreme discipline of the
Iranian troops, who ceased the killing as soon as they were ordered’.
Additionally, Axworthy informs us that

the Qizilbash soldiers were so much in submission and under such

discipline and fear of their prince that on hearing the sound of the
word ‘peace’ they withdrew their hand from the massacre and
refrained from further plunder and robbery […] the blood thirsty
savage soldiers, who had heads of families and wealthy citizens in
 their power, at one word became submissive and obedient and
withdrew their hands from slaughter and rapine.

The massacre, seemingly, made no impression upon Nader. He got his

son Nasrollah married to a Mughal princess, who was Muhammad Shah’s
niece and a great-granddaughter of Shah Jahan and continued to live in the
Red Fort until his departure for Persia. Four days prior to his leaving, on 12
May, he convened a grand durbar where he gave several gifts to
Muhammad Shah, of which the most significant was a jiqe, aigret or hair
ornament denoting royalty, which he placed upon the latter’s head as a
gesture of giving him back his lost sovereignty. Additionally, he advised the
Mughal emperor to pay his nobles in cash, confiscate the lands of those
who erred in their payments, maintain a standing army of 60,000 horsemen
who would serve him personally, and nominate officers for particular tasks
but return them to the core army when those were over. The advice, as
Nader’s historians would tell us, is an evidence of his astute administrative
skills, which also allowed him to maintain strict command of his armies.
Yet, Nader became a different man after this victory. He became
excessively tyrannical, possibly also in the knowledge that he had instituted
a satellite king and would therefore need to annex in future the kingdom he
had looted. As Axworthy recounts, while leaving Delhi, he reportedly told
Muhammad Shah’s nobles that if they revolted against their emperor he
would be back ‘within six months to fall upon them’. He began to ‘fall
apart’ and was assassinated in June 1747 by his closest comrades, who
revolted against his tyranny.
Muhammad Shah too was a changed man after Nader’s invasion; he lost
heart. Despite the turbulence of his accession to the throne in 1719, when
four Mughal rulers were killed, Muhammad Shah had reigned peacefully
until 1738. He attempted to revive imperial patronage of the arts, especially
painting, and successfully attracted to his court accomplished painters.
Among them, Chitarman produced brilliant portraits of his. However, after
Nader gave him back his throne, he seems to have lost the desire to rule and
to be seen as the sovereign – there seems to be only one painting of his by
Chitarman which dates from 1739–40. By the time Muhammad Shah died,
he was so weak and feeble that he could barely walk.
Nader’s Mughal booty was truly astounding. The contemporary value of
the items he took back would be more than ₹70 crore. Of them the most
well known was the jewel-laden Peacock Throne of Shah Jahan that graced
the Diwan-i-Khas of the Red Fort, where Nader was graciously received by
Muhammad Shah. Its rich canopy of pearls and emeralds was crowned with
the Koh-i-noor, which went with Nader to Iran. However, like the other
prominent Mughal jewels which Nader looted, the Koh-i-noor too left
Persia after his death. The Mughal wealth that Nader amassed ‘changed the
Iranian concept of how the king should appear’, as Catherine Asher and
Cynthia Talbot note. The rulers formerly ‘wore virtually no jewellery, but
after Nadir Shah’s return, portraits of Iranian kings show them heavily
bejewelled in almost a caricature of Mughal fashion’.
The tabar provides a cue to reflect upon the legacy of this and Nader’s
other campaigns. He made himself the Shah in Iran in 1736 after deposing
the Safavid Tahmasp, and then ‘broke into Central Asia and pacified the
Turkmen and Uzbeks, before returning to the West and waging victorious
war against the Ottomans again. Without him Persia would have been
partitioned’, Axworthy explains. His defeat of Muhammad Shah alerted the
East India Company of the weakness of the Mughal emperor. That the
Company also emulated his strategy of scheming and winning over the
powerful nobles of opponents is quite clear from the battle at Plassey in
1757. The Company won by successfully negotiating the defection of Mir
Jafar, the most powerful commandant of their opponent Siraj ud-Daulah,
nawab of Bengal.
In jogging our memory of Nader Shah’s deposition of the Mughal throne,
the tabar may bring to mind some of the histories of the cruel massacre that
are linked to this historic event. However, it leads us to note a relatively
unknown aspect of pre-colonial India, namely, the fashioning of the social
etiquettes of politics through imperial gift-giving and their histories.
ASHER, C. and C. Talbot. (2006). India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press.
AXWORTHY, M. (2006). The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering
Tyrant. I.B. Tauris.
AXWORTHY, M. (2007). ‘The Army of Nader Shah’. Iranian Studies, 40 (5): 35–46.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00210860701667720.
FRASER, J. (1742). The History of Nadir Shah, formerly called Thamas Kuli Khan, the present
emperor of Persia: To which is prefix’d a short history of the Moghol Emperors: at the end is
inserted, a catalogue of about two hundred manuscripts in the Persic and other Oriental
languages, collected in the East. W. Strahan.
46
CHINTZ RUMAAL
Southern India
18th century
FOR OVER TWO CENTURIES, THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH, Indian
chintzes dominated European fashion, particularly in the Netherlands,
France and Britain. Exported from the ports of the Coromandel Coast,
mainly Masulipatnam (modern Machilipattnam), the vibrantly painted
cloths of cotton attired European men and women and decorated their
homes. The trade in chintz was the most lucrative aspect of the profitable
global trade in calicoes, or Indian cottons, at that time. By the 1660s, the
calico trade recouped vast profits for the British, Dutch and French East
India Companies, and the craze for ‘Indian gowne’ of chintz, to quote an
aggrieved English weaver of the eighteenth century, Claudius Rey, spread
like an ‘inveterate plague’. The historic cloth tells the story of the
fashioning of a transcultural object and provides glimpses of the social
histories of mercantilism that are often overlooked within the histories of
the East India Companies.
The beginning of the British craze for chintz is often documented through
the declaration of the noted diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys
(1633–1703). On 15 September 1663, he was at Cornhill with his wife and
after many trials bought her ‘a chinte […] that is paynted Indian callicoe to
line her new study which is very pretty’.
A chintz handkerchief, c. early 18th century, NM: 48.7–48.

Pepys’s purchase tells us that chintz was affordable to the late-

seventeenth-century middle class of Britain. Its vast consumption and huge
attraction lay in the brilliance of the painted patterns and durability of the
cloth. The dyes were permanent, and therefore the patterns on the cloth did
not dull even after repeated washing.
The lightweight cotton fabric arrived in European markets when Europe
produced only plain and coarse woollen cloths and when increasing trade
connections with Asia were nurturing a growing taste for the Oriental look.
The European demand for ‘piece-goods’, or yardage, of chintz began, as
Pepys’s note reveals, as items of furnishing, and some of the earliest
evidence of this use comes from the 1570s, from homes near Marseilles,
France.
 The initial uses of Indian cotton for furnishing, illustrates the living
habits of a changing European society – with a growing middle class that
began to indulge in home décor because of the introduction of fireplaces
with chimneys inside the houses. The fireplaces replaced the open fires that
had until then warmed rooms and created soot-filled interiors. Chintz, the
Indian calicoes, were sumptuously used as quilts, bedcovers, wall hangings,
counterpanes, curtains, and for cushions and chairs. The large pieces,
colloquially referred to as palampores (derived from the Persian word
palangposh), were often commissioned by wealthy townspeople.
From the 1660s, chintz was increasingly used for fashioning gowns,
petticoats, jackets, handkerchiefs and overdresses in Europe. From middle-
class use, the fabric quickly became the fashionwear of the upper classes –
first in Holland, and by 1689 in Britain, when with the accession of William
and Mary of Orange all things Dutch became a status symbol. The 1764
painting by François-Hubert Drouais of Madame de Pompadour, the
mistress of the French king Louis XV, wearing a resplendent gown of
chintz, captures the chintz mania that continued in France, on the continent,
and in Britain until the end of the eighteenth century. The dazzling colours
and distinctive sheen of the cloth created its dramatic appeal in fashion
among the upper classes, contrasting sharply with the plain look of wool,
linen and silk. Chintz handkerchiefs, or rumaals, were an important import
item although very few survive as they were ‘inexpensive and used to
destruction’, as Rosemary Crill reminds us. They were often used as
bandanas, and the sprigged floral pattern as in this chintz rumaal was
particularly popular in France, where imitations of the design – known as
paillaca – were created from the mid-eighteenth century.
The histories of the production of chintz highlight the remarkable
innovative and technical skills of the weavers and painters of the Indian
subcontinent. The word appears in the seventeenth-century records of the
East India Companies, and was possibly derived from the Persian word
chhint, which continues to mean ‘to sprinkle and spray’. Like the word
palampore, chintz reflects the growing European usage of Hindustani words
from this period, and it came to mean painted cottons from India. The
Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to encounter the painted cloths
produced in western India, called it pintado, which meant ‘spotted’. The
tradition of making painted cloths by using mordants and applying the
technique of resist-dyeing were long established within the subcontinent,
and we can trace an increasing demand of such resist-dyed textiles within
the Southeast Asian markets from the fifth century. Well until the sixteenth
century this ‘Indian’ textile trade from the subcontinent was commanded by
Arab merchants along with those from the Indian subcontinent and China.
They traded the cloths for buying spices from Southeast Asia, especially
Indonesia. By the mid-seventeenth century this Asian trade was usurped by
European trading companies, and the history of chintz is one of the best
examples of the dictates of European order specifications upon cloth
production in pre-colonial India. ‘By 1622 the East India Company was
sending out actual designs (“musters”) to be copied by the Indian painters’
as Crill recalls, emphasizing that ‘it is extraordinary how precisely the
Company directors were able to oversee this trade from London, sending
minutely detailed instructions in response to every shipment that came to
India (and China as well) as to the designs, colours and quality of the
textiles’.
The production process of the ‘calico chintzes’, to use the English term,
was innovative, time-consuming, and demanded a highly skilled workforce.
After weaving, the cotton cloth was ‘prepared’ by soaking it in a solution of
water, buffalo milk and myrobalan fruit and then dried. The design was then
transferred upon it through pouncing or with stencils; outlines of the areas
to be coloured red were painted in alum mordant solution and those areas
which were to be black, with an iron mordant. The mordants were applied
with a bamboo pen (kalam) and the techniques of kalamkari, which created
the resist-dyed cloths, continue to thrive in the former areas of chintz
production. After the application of the mordants, the cloth was boiled in a
solution of chay root. The iron mordant, as Crill tells us, reacted with
myrobalan to produce fast black lines, and alum reacted with chay to
produce red. The cloth was then prepared for receiving the red dye by
washing and bleaching it repeatedly with dung and soaked again in
myrobalan and buffalo milk. Any white lines that were to be reserved
against the red background were drawn with wax, and the cloth was
immersed in a hot solution containing the red dye, and repeatedly washed
for four days. It was subsequently covered with beeswax except in those
areas that were to be coloured blue, and handed over to indigo dyers.
Finally, it was starched, beaten with wooden mallets and polished with a
shell to produce a shiny texture.
We know virtually nothing about the weavers and painters who so
laboriously manufactured the chintzes. Of the temperament required for
undertaking the taxing production processes, a Dutch physician Daniel
Harvart had noted in the 1690s that

[the] painting of chintzes goes on very slowly, like snails which creep
on and appear not to advance. Yes, he who would depict Patience
would need no other objects such as a painter of Palicol [possibly
Pulicat].

In contrast to all textiles produced in pre-colonial India, the chintzes bore

a distinctive, exotic and hybrid look because of their unique designs. The
best example is the serpentine ‘flowering tree’, often with large composite
blooms, usually shown as emerging from a stylized rocky mound. This
motif was conceived and admired in Europe as Chinese-looking, and it
satiated the seventeenth-century European craze for Chinoiserie. However,
it was as exotic for the Chinese as for the Europeans, and in Origins of
Chintz (1970), John Irwin and Katherine Brett demonstrate that the chintz
designs were innately hybrid, containing elements of Persian, Chinese,
European and Indian drawings of trees – real and imaginary. They,
therefore, seem to convey the transcultural and transnational world of the
local craftspeople of India, in this case the native weavers and painters of
the cloth.
Depiction of blooming peonies and other exotic flowers, large butterflies,
insects, birds and animals, stylized vases – often with ribbons and bows –
flower gardens, figures in European costumes, and European furniture on
the chintzes represent a grand confluence of hybridity. The motifs were
variously derived – designs of British crewel embroideries, Flemish
paintings, European narrative prints, repertoire of the antiquities of
Classical Rome, Japanese lacquer goods, Chinese porcelain, Persian
paintings and local Indian artistic traditions – and every yard of chintz
embodies the heady mix of the West and the East.
The production of chintz for markets in western Europe represents the
boom from the 1660s in the export trade of Indian textiles. The European
merchants often recruited local merchants – referred to as ‘Chettys’ in the
Company records – to control and coordinate orders. The fabric was
produced in centres near the Coromandel Coast, of which Pulicat and
Nagapattinam are among the best known.
Chintz was exported from ports along the Coromandel Coast, and
Masulipatnam carried the largest bulk of the export trade. The port was
close to areas of production around the delta of the river Krishna, which
Crill tells us ‘was particularly well suited for the cultivation of “chay”’, the
red dye of south India. As a result, there were many villages in the area
producing what the British East India Company called “chay goods” –
cloths that were dyed red’, of which chintz became the most sought-after
product.
Although trading in chintz proved intensely lucrative for European
mercantilism, there was intense opposition to imports of the cloth in Europe
from European weavers, especially of France and Britain, who began to fear
for their livelihood. In 1697, more than 5,000 British wool weavers mobbed
the House of Commons in a mass protest against all Indian imported
textiles, and in 1701 laws were passed in the British Parliament forbidding
the import of Indian dyed and printed cottons and silks, except for re-
export. Since chintz was worn by all levels of British society, the upper
classes lent their voices to the curtailment of the import of the cloth, for
every ‘jilt of the town’, as Gitanjali Shahani recalls, could own the fabric.
In exploring some of the histories of the fierce protests in Britain against the
cloth that was ‘a foreigner by birth’ Shahani has drawn attention to the
proclamation of Claudius Rey
 the wearing of painted or printed Commodities, puts all Degrees and
Orders of Womenkind into Disorder and Confusion, and the Lady
cannot well be known from her Chamber-Maid. In this Confusion,
Men often pay Honour to those to whom ‘t’is not due, and withhold
it from those to whom it justly belongs: But when our Women-kind
were clothed with Silk and Woollen Commodities, those mistakes
were avoided, and a tolerable Order observ’d.

By the late eighteenth century, the sought-after designs on clothes in

Europe, such as ‘the warp-printed resist decoration, Chiné à la branche […]
found on contemporary French and Swiss woven silks’, were imitated in
India on painted cotton. As Steven Cohen points out, this was a much
cheaper way of producing them for European markets than the woven silk
original. But this was also the period of increasing industrialization in
Britain, which heralded technological innovations, and those related to the
spinning machine and inventions of copper plates and rollers for printing
very soon allowed cotton cloth to be cheaply produced and printed ‘at
home’. The declining European trade in chintz destroyed the livelihoods of
weavers and local economies in the production areas in India; the
devastation is well captured in the Hobson-Jobson (1887). The entry on
chintz tells us that when Yule was a sub-collector of Madras district (1866–
67) ‘chintzes were still figured by an old man in Sadras, who had been
taught by the Dutch, the cambric being furnished to him by a Madras
Chetty. [But] He is now dead, and the business has ceased; in fact the
colours of the process are no longer to be had.’
The histories of chintz convey a reality check for us today. For, as
Shahani emphasizes, the hostility of British weavers towards chintz is
uncannily similar to the protests of our times about the outsiders taking
away jobs. She recalls that when Dorothy Distaff complained that the
heathens and pagans of India worked for ‘half a penny a day’, she voiced a
complaint that is resoundingly familiar to all of us: ‘against the cheap
labour that the outsider had willingly provided at the cost of local jobs’.
Chintz demands us to reflect upon such nationalist rages.
BRETT, K. and J. Irwin. (1970). Origins of Chintz: With a Catalogue of Indo-European Cotton-
Paintings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.
Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
BURNELL, A.C. and H. Yule. (1887). ‘Chintz’. Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian
Colloquial Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical
and Discursive. John Murray.
COHEN, Steven. (2015). ‘Textiles for the East’. In J. Guy and K. Thakar (Eds), Indian Cotton
Textiles: Seven Centuries of Chintz from the Karun Thakar Collection (pp. 154–69). ACC Art
Books.
CRILL, R. (2006). Textiles from India: The Global Trade. Seagull Books.
CRILL, R. (2008). Chintz: Indian Textile for the West. V&A.
IRWIN, J. (1956). ‘Indian Textile Trade in the Seventeenth Century (2): Coromandel Coast’. Journal
of Indian Textile History, 11, 24–42.
REY, C. (1719). The Weavers True Case or, the Wearing of Printed Callicoes and Linnen Destructive
to the Woollen and Silk Manufacturies. W. Wilkins.
SHAHANI, G. (2008). ‘A Foreigner by Birth: The Life of Indian Cloth in the Early Modern English
Marketplace’. In B. Sebek and S. Deng (Eds), Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of
Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700 (pp. 179–200). Palgrave Macmillan.
47
TIPU’S TIGER
Mysore
Late 18th century

‘This thing’, said the Librarian [of India House, London], ‘was made
for the amusement of Tippoo Saib; the inside of the Tyger is a
musical instrument; and by touching certain keys, a sound is
produced resembling the horrid grumblings made by the tiger on
seizing his prey; on touching others, you hear the convulsive
breathings, the suffocated shriek of his victim’.
‘For Heaven’s sake’, cried Emily, clinging to the arm of Mr
Carberry, ‘do take me home’. The gentleman, turning to her, beheld
her pale, and trembling, and lost not a moment in conducting her to
the carriage.

TIPU’S TIGER, WHICH UNSETTLED AND SCARED EMILY, THE heroine of Barbara
Hofland’s novel A Visit to London (1814), is perhaps the only large imperial
regalia of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore (1750–99), which British looters
of Srirangapatna, in 1799, managed to ship in its original form to their
homeland. Over the two centuries of its display in London, it ‘became the
most famous sculpted Indian object outside the subcontinent’, as Richard
Davis notes.
Automata, mechanical musical organ, c. 1790, Mysore. Wood, Paint, Ivory, Metal, 1780 mm × 710
mm × 610 mm, V&A: IS 2545.

Tipu was one of the most powerful rulers during the eighteenth-century
in the Indian subcontinent. Taking full advantage of the declining fortunes
of the Mughal emperor in Delhi, he established a formidable empire despite
the persistent threats of the British, who helped two of his rivals: the Nizam
of Hyderabad and the Marathas. The British found the Tiger in the music
room of the palace in his resplendent capital, Srirangapatna, or
Seringapatam – as the place continues to be referred in the Anglophone
world – during their scandalous and frenzied week-long loot of the city,
after they defeated and killed him on 4 May 1799.
It is a musical instrument, a semi-automaton, and is made up of two life-
size effigies that are aptly described by Davis as

[a] tawny male tiger, all claws extended, crouched atop a wooden
man lying stiffly. The light complexioned man wears a red coat and a
black brimmed hat, clearly marking him as a European of the
eighteenth century. His eyes are wide open in distress. The tiger
meanwhile sinks his teeth into the man’s throat.
 The body of the tiger contains a musical organ, with pipes and eighteen
buttons that can be operated by a crank handle which emerges from the left
shoulder. Both figures are endowed with weighted bellows and on turning
the crank handle the tiger moves and growls, and his victim flays his hands
and makes crying noises. An early description of the ‘musical tyger’ in a
London newspaper, St. James’s Chronicle or British Evening-Post (17–19
April 1800) declared this to be

A most curious piece of mechanism as large as life, representing a

royal tyger in the act of devouring a prostrate European officer […]
The sounds produced by the organ are intended to resemble the cries
of a person in distress, intermixed with the horrid roar of the tyger.
The machinery is so contrived that while the organ is playing, the
hand of the European is often lifted up to express the agony of his
helpless and deplorable condition.

The British followed their defeat of Tipu with the pillage of his capital.
One estimate places the loot of that one night, when Tipu was killed, to be
over ₹45 lakh. Arthur Wellesley, a minor participant in the storming of
Srirangapatna, immediately wrote to his elder brother, then Governor
General Richard Wellesley, that ‘nothing could have exceeded what was
done on the night of the 4th. Scarcely a house in the town was left
unplundered.’
The younger Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, took charge of
restoring military discipline and the treasures, in the aftermath of British
victory and Tipu’s death. He deftly classified the treasures that survived the
pillage as ‘prize’, following which a committee officiated the distribution of
the loot – amounting to a staggering £1,600,000. In the distribution, many
sumptuous personal objects of Tipu, including his bejewelled throne of gold
and his fabulous jewels, were systematically broken. The spectacular palace
collections – of art objects, weapons inlaid with precious gems, furniture of
ivory, Persian carpets, rich textiles and wardrobe – were all brutally
divided, often torn into coveted pieces, which were then bartered, melted,
sold and/or auctioned by the recipient British soldiers. The musical tiger
escaped destruction possibly because it was not made of precious materials.
It was shipped to England with a rich cargo of Tipu’s private possessions
and was received by an immense crowd in London in August 1800. Eight
years later, from 29 July 1808, it could be seen in the Company’s
reorganized library at Leadenhall Street. A Mamluk chief, Elfi Bey, on a
visit to London heard it ‘perform several airs’, including God Save the King
and Rule Britannia. Clearly, the automaton had been tinkered with by then.
In a memorandum of the effigy, Arthur Wellesley noted that Tipu Sultan
‘frequently amused himself with the sight of this emblematical triumph of
the Khoudadaud [god given domain] over the English Sircar’. Throughout
the nineteenth century, British politicians and media were to extensively
source this citation to describe the organ as portraying Tipu’s childish want
of taste, captivated on a ‘barbarous piece of music’; a cruel ruler taking
vicarious pleasures in gruesome murders.
The great popularity of the musical tiger among British public rested
upon an irony. As Davis observes, ‘The Tiger devouring the redcoat no
doubt signified an anticipated future victory [Tipu’s] over [his] primary
south Indian rival [the British].’ However, appropriated and domesticated in
the East India House, at Leadenhall Street, the object’s significance shifted
to ‘representation of the Indian despot’s imagined victory overturned by
British forces’.
The apparent personification of the tiger effigy with Tipu was established
through an incident that occurred in July 1792 in Sagar Island (Sunderbans,
Bengal), where an Englishman was killed by a Royal Bengal tiger. He and
his friends had stopped to eat when a tiger chanced upon them, grasped him
by his head, and hauled him away. Although he was dropped off after a
short distance, he succumbed to his wounds. Such occurrences of tigers
killing people, including Europeans, were quite common. However, this
particular incident entered into the production history of the musical tiger
because the man killed was the son of Hector Munro, the British army
commander who had defeated the troops of Haidar Ali and Tipu in 1781 at
Porto Novo (now known as Parangipettai, Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu).
 A year before the above defeat, however, the British had been defeated
by Haidar Ali and Tipu in the Battle of Pollilur (15 kilometres from
modern-day Kanchipuram), mainly because Munro had failed to reinforce
the commanding officer, Colonel Baillie, with men and supplies. Tipu was
so enthused that he commissioned a painting of the British defeat upon a
wall of his palace, the Dariya Daulat, at Srirangapatna. The subsequent
Tipu–Munro encounters accord weight to views such as those expressed by
one of the pioneering historians of Company Paintings, Mildred Archer,
‘that the son of Tipu’s enemy should die by tiger and Tipu himself
commission so exactly a replica of Munro’s death can hardly be a co-
incidence’.
Whether news of events thousands of kilometres away in Bengal reached
Tipu’s court is anybody’s guess. However, Tipu was defeated in 1792, in the
Third Anglo-Mysore War, and forced to hand over his two young sons as
hostages until he ceded half his lands to the Company. The musical tiger
was possibly created after this defeat by artisans living in the nearby town
of Channapattana, which has a long history of craftsmanship in painted
wooden objects, including toys. As Susan Stronge suggests in her book
Tipu’s Tigers (2009), the automata may well have been made as a toy.

The absence of inscription upon the wooden tiger separates it from

the Sultan’s other personal possessions or his monuments, with their
multiple religious, cultural and literary allusions. Its whimsical
quality gives it the appearance of a three-dimensional cartoon, and it
is not difficult to conclude that it was simply made for entertainment,
perhaps to amuse his young sons when they returned from their
British captivity in 1794.

As the title of Stronge’s book informs us, Tipu possessed many tigers
and, similar to his musical tiger, most can be placed in the genre of
decorative arts, apart from the few real ones that famously guarded the
entrance of his toshakhana (state treasury). Tiger motifs inundated his
personal possessions. They appeared on his clothes and those of his
soldiers, on war helmets, ceremonial staffs, object d’arts, swords, guns,
state banners, and even on his Mughal-like gold throne which was fronted
by a tiger-head, set with rubies, diamonds and emeralds, and comprised
eight tiger-headed finials. In fact, a gun belonging to Tipu, that dates to
1787–88, has a silver mount-lock with an image which is strikingly similar
to the musical tiger. The object demonstrates that images of a tiger mauling
a prostrate European pre-date the death of Munro.
Contrary to British caricatures of Tipu as the Tiger of Mysore who roared
and flaunted his prowess in vain, the Sultan – as his historians, such as Kate
Brittlebank, have demonstrated – fashioned the tiger insignia for invoking
Hindu and Muslim symbols of power. The emblem constituted the
combination of Shakti, or power, of the Hindu goddesses associated with
tigers, and barakat, or blessings, of the Muslim peers, and was ‘a highly
stylised calligraphic cipher in the form of a tiger’s face made up of the
Arabic characters “Allah” and “Muhammad”’, as Sadiah Qureshi notes.
Moreover, tigers, and not lions, roamed the dense forests of Mysore, so
Tipu’s symbol of power was familiar to all communities in his kingdom.
In their characterization of Tipu as a tiger, the British displayed him as a
cruel Mohammedan and tyrannical beast who unleashed fearful revenge on
those who crossed him. Many Indian historians have followed the colonial
historiography in their characterization of Tipu’s rule of Mysore as an
Islamicist assault upon the local Hindu population. Conversely, revisionist
histories of Tipu seize the tiger motif in extolling him as one of the earliest
national heroes of India, who put up a frightful and formidable resistance
against the British. Both characterizations of Tipu, as a tyrant and a patriot,
erase the realities of his political circumstances.
Tipu cannot be rescued from the colonialist historiography through
exhibitions of him as India’s national hero because notions of pan-Indian
nationhood were non-existent during his lifetime. Besides, like all his
contemporaries, he was tyrannical in maintaining his power and empire.
Yet, Tipu was a unique visionary among his peers in the Indian
subcontinent, who tried to seek French alliance to check the increasing
political meddling of the British. It was his misfortune that France became
progressively embroiled in troubles at home following the Revolution of
1789 and failed to support him in the Anglo-Mysore campaigns.
By casting aside the caricature of Tipu as tiger we are able to see other
histories of his reign which are of immense importance, such as his lavish
patronage of local crafts for improving the economic conditions of his
subjects. He created vast demands for exquisite goods that included
precious jewels, which boosted existing technologies of gem-cutting,
lapidary and gold working; sumptuous cloths, including chintz, which were
used also for his tents and thereby enhanced textile productions at
Masulipatnam, and elegant cloths for himself and his family members from
weavers of Bangalore, who were thereby introduced to new technologies of
silk production from silkworms. He also initiated grand architectural
projects in Srirangapatna, including the Dariya Daulat that culminated in
1784, and at Lal Bagh, his chief residence, which honed local building
skills. Furthermore, the sophisticated royal armoury, that he built up by
seeking French and British musketeers to his court, advanced local
technologies of metallurgy and steel working.
Tipu created trading depots within his domain and sent emissaries in
areas far away, such as Kutch and Muscat, for establishing Mysore’s
presence on the international trade routes. This added to his conspicuous
efforts of reviving old local industries and creating new ones. The rich
traditions of manufacturing and artisanship which we see today within the
lands he held is his singularly unique political gift.
The British made all efforts to obliterate every trace of the grandeur and
prosperity of Tipu’s empire – ironically through attempts at conserving his
palaces. As Dalhousie’s Minute of 1854 informs us, the conservation
projects were undertaken to memorialize the ‘great man’ Arthur Wellesley,
who became Britain’s pre-eminent general after he defeated Napoleon at
Waterloo in 1815. The scars of the battle on the architecture of
Srirangapatna were deliberately left unattended so that ‘the traveller can
understand as by a touch of the magician’s wand [why] the real starting
point of Wellesley’s great military career was Seringapatam’. Through
conservation the British unmade Tipu’s Srirangapatna to commemorate
their historic conquest.
The British portrayal of Tipu emanated from their fear of being defeated
by him. Tipu’s Tiger therefore provides a significant reminder that political
anxieties root prejudice and shape facts of history.

ARCHER, M. (1959). Tippoo’s Tiger. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

BRITTLEBANK, K. (1997). Tipu Sultan’s Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kingship in a Hindu
Domain. Oxford University Press.
DAVIS, R.H. (1999). Lives of Indian Images. Princeton University Press.
LUSHINGTON, S.R. (1840). The Life and Services of General Lord Harris, G.C.B., During His
Campaigns in America, the West Indies, and India. John W. Parker.
NAIR, J. (2012). Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule. Orient Blackswan.
QURESHI, S. (2012). ‘Tipu’s Tiger and Images of India, 1799–2010’. In S. Longair and J. McAleer
(Eds), Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience (pp. 207–24).
Manchester University Press.
STRONGE, S. (2009). Tipu’s Tigers. V&A.
The St. James’s Chronicle or British Evening-Post. London. Printed by H. Baldwin (began 12 March
1761).
48
PAINTING OF SERFOJI II IN COURT
Tanjore, Tamil Nadu
Early 19th century

THIS REMARKABLE COURT SCENE DEPICTS A POLITICALLY powerless monarch

who created the resplendence of Tanjore. The angle of the turbans and
linear arrangement of men draw our eyes to the presiding figure, Raja
Serfoji, or Sarabhoji, II (r. 1798–1832), who brought into the city of Tanjore
– over which he had nominal political authority – some of the key European
sciences, while also creating its pre-eminence in the traditions of the
regional arts. The raja, an avowed Hindu and a worshipper of Shiva, was
esteemed by the British and Europeans in India as an extraordinary man for
his vast knowledge of the modern sciences and classical and modern arts of
Europe. In his efforts towards emphasizing the relevance of the European
sciences to his subjects, he established the logic of imbibing and developing
intensely modern yet decisively indigenous-oriented knowledge systems.
The depiction of the alignment in the painting, which makes us immediately
look at the Raja, also alludes to his careful uses of the arts for establishing
visual histories of power and enlightened rule.
Serfoji II in Court, early 19th century, Painting on Cloth, 1300 mm × 1110 mm (with frame), Tanjore
Style. NM: 56.104/3.

The painting illustrates the brilliance of Serfoji’s Telugu-speaking

moochy artists (originally, leather craftsmen) whose work he often
personally supervised, and who became the master painters of south India
by the 1810s. Adept at elegantly combining the forms and aesthetics of
European art with their own traditional idioms and practices of illustration,
they produced a hybrid style that represented the contemporary social
histories of the early-nineteenth-century Indian subcontinent.
The kingdom of Tanjore which Serfoji inherited as the adopted son of
Raja Tulaja, or Tulsaji (r. 1772–86), was virtually a British protectorate.
Comprising the delta of the river Krishna and parts of North Arcot, it was
once part of the Vijayanagara kingdom. From 1676 it came to be under the
rule of Maratha kings, who were descendants of Shivaji (see ch. 41), who
ruled over it for close to a century. The kingdom was annexed in 1773 by
the Nawab of Arcot, but three years later, in 1776, the East India Company
defeated the nawab’s troops and restored the rights of rule of the Maratha
raja, Tulaja. The Company, however, established a Residency in Tulaja’s
kingdom and managed much of the governance from Fort St. George in
Madras. In order to settle the succession issue, in 1786 the childless Tulaja
adopted a distant relative, Serfoji, then 10 years old, as his heir apparent,
who after a protracted period of regency became the Raja of Tanjore, in
1798. However, in less than a year, Serfoji was compelled to sign a treaty of
annexation with the British whereby the Company became the de facto ruler
of the kingdom of Tanjore and left him with only nominal authority over the
city of Tanjore, and with ‘a mere 100,000 pagodas and a fifth of the net
revenue as annual income’, as his historian Savithri Preetha Nair recalls.
Yet, despite his hollow crown, Serfoji fashioned the reputation of Tanjore as
an enlightened ‘centre on the colonial periphery’. His Tanjore produced
men who were renowned for their scientific knowledge and artistic skills
and who greatly influenced institutions and traditions in distant places.
Serfoji’s lifelong dedication to intellectual activities manifested early and
was noticed by those who knew him. In 1810, a member of the Danish
Mission at Tranquebar, C.S. John, wrote to him, stating that

I perceive with great satisfaction not only your increase in knowledge

of sciences, but also your ardent zeal for promoting the same in
future; and many other friends of sciences will be encouraged to
imitate your noble example.

To a considerable extent, this zeal reflected Serfoji’s grooming as a student

in Madras between the years 1793 and 1796. Notably, George Annesley, the
British peer better known as Viscount Valentia, who visited the Tanjore
Court in 1804, found the raja’s education ‘far more superior to that of the
Asiatics in general’. Serfoji gained proficiency in English, and Reginald
Heber, the Bishop of Calcutta (1823–26), whom he hosted in March 1826,
eulogized him as having ‘more accurate judgement of the poetical merits of
Shakespeare than that so felicitously expressed by Lord Byron’, and being
able to compose ‘English poetry very superior indeed to Rousseau’s on
Shenstone’.
 Like his contemporaries, the young native princes of South Asia, Serfoji
studied the useful sciences, and thereby mastered languages (in his case,
English, Marathi, and Tamil), arithmetic and geography. He was tutored
under the watchful eyes of his German guardians, Freidrich Schwartz and
Wilhelm Gericke, who had both been educated in the Protestant Mission at
Halle. Their influence equipped him with a deeper understanding of the
intellectual ferments in the European arts and sciences.
Serfoji ‘endeavoured’, as he wrote in 1797 to the governor of Fort St.
George Robert Hobart, to make himself ‘useful and to set a good example
to all’ with whom he had ‘anything to do’. His enduring zeal for
information regarding the European sciences, and his belief in their
usefulness, shaped his collecting habits. His collections present a glimpse of
the intersections of different ‘cultural currents in nineteenth-century India,
of Pietist Christianity, Enlightenment ideas of science and Indian responses
to European science prior to the entrenchment of British colonial
hegemony’, as Indira Viswanathan Peterson has noted.
By establishing and nurturing wide-ranging networks of information
exchange – with his teachers, mentors, the British administrators of Tanjore,
acquaintances and visitors to his court – Serfoji built up a spectacular
European collection of books and manuscripts ‘in French, English, German,
Greek and Latin’, as Bishop Heber tells us, and also pamphlets, newspapers
and encyclopaedias, paintings, prints and drawings, drawing equipment,
including a camera obscura and pantograph for the purposes of copying,
distinctive furniture, surgical instruments, medicine chests, maps, globes,
seeds, rare plants, electricity machines, chemical kits, a telescope, air pump,
printing press, and an exact model of a human skeleton which he hoped
could be made in ivory. Notably, he strove to put the unrivalled collection to
beneficial use. He lent his valuable books and paintings upon requests and
made large donations of his collection of Sanskrit and Persian manuscripts
to institutions far away, such as the College of Fort William (Calcutta).
Serfoji’s vast library shows us his keen interest in the observational and
experimental sciences which were being developed in Europe, such as
natural history, chemistry, anatomy, medicine, geography, history and
astronomy. As Nair tells us, he acquired books such as ‘William Roxburgh’s
Plants of the Coromandel […] five volumes of George Adams’ Lectures on
Natural and Experimental Philosophy (first published in 1794) […]
Guthrie’s Grammar and John Pilkerton’s Modern Geography (published in
1802) […] C. Hutton’s A Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary […]
and Humphry Davy’s Agricultural Chemistry’. He commissioned the
translations of these texts in Marathi, an example of his unique legacy in
creating the Tanjore Enlightenment. Many survive within the bundles of
manuscripts in the Modi script in the Saraswati Mahal at Tanjore, which
houses a large part of this royal library. In addition, inspired by the
European dramas and music he had seen and heard, he commissioned
adaptations in local languages that included a Sanskrit rendition of God
Save the King. The adaptations, as Laxmi Subramanian informs us,
fashioned new forms of music ‘that represented a more individual approach
to melodic delineation and rhythmic structures’.
Serfoji’s passion for the sciences nurtured his aims for improving public
health, physiological problems, agricultural practices, veterinary medicine
and animal management. He strove to introduce good practices of sanitation
in the city of Tanjore, vaccinate the residents, create institutions and
medical facilities for diseases, childbirth and epidemics, especially cholera
that prevailed in 1820, and actively encouraged Company surgeons to treat
the ailing members of his family. The case reports and dispatches he
received of their methods of cure, makes a veritable archive of the
interactions between European physicians and native patients long before
the British formally established their medical schools in India.
Yet Serfoji was primarily a Hindu prince, who performed his religious
duties correctly and with fervour. During his great pilgrimage from Kashi to
Rameswaram in the years 1820 to 1822, he immersed himself in the
ceremonies of the temples, donated money for constructing new temples,
and often sent the gifts he received to his palace at Tanjore for distribution.
During this tour he actively collected copies of the mimansa and other
Sanskrit manuscripts, and gave learned opinions on aspects of traditional
laws, including adoption and rules of inheritance.
 The empiricist sciences of Europe were based on field observation and
demanded accurate description not only through text but drawing – the art
Serfoji consciously mastered during his student days. He equipped himself
with instruction manuals on illustrations, with ‘paper, colours and every
implement of drawing’ and the ‘latest European and Indian richly coloured
views and scenery’, as Valentia emphasized. He learnt to draw ‘perfectly’,
and the moochy artists in his city endeavoured to emulate his practice. In
1807 the British Resident at Tanjore, Benjamin Torin, was able to present
the Court of Directors of the East India Company ‘two portfolios of
drawings […] very accurately representing many of the Birds, Fish Snakes,
Insects & Plants peculiar to the Southern part of the peninsula of India
which have been taken from life by a celebrated moochy or Painter in the
Raja’s service’.
The moochy artists had moved south from the Deccan during the late-
seventeenth century and found employment in the Tanjore Court of Serfoji’s
forefathers, the Maratha kings. In writing about them, Mildred Archer
observed that ‘the Tanjore style in its early phase includes idioms
reminiscent of Golconda painting [and as] British power increased,
European stylistic idioms began to influence [the production/paintings]’.
Serfoji ‘employed some of the best [among them] in his Court, and set
about modernizing their style, giving them the latest painting materials and
providing instruction regarding the subject matter and framing’, recounts
Nair. Their paintings became decidedly naturalistic, often with figures
against a blank background, and they began to use European paper, adopted
watercolours and discarded the technique of gouache. Paintings in sombre
colour with little gold, and looped shadows at the feet of the figures, came
to represent the Tanjore style of the nineteenth century, and show the
adoption of European idioms, as the artists were increasingly compelled to
respond to the demands of the British patrons who ruled their state.
The aim towards accurate depiction in the painting of Serfoji’s court can
be gauged from this painting, in the details of the garments worn by Serfoji
and his courtiers, and in the rich adornments of the throne and the
architectural elements. The painting shows remarkable precision and
sophistication, and is of refined brushwork. The colours are sombre, and the
depiction of men in three-quarter profile and the realistic rendering of the
faces, especially Serfoji’s, are some of the key elements of Western
influence. Yet, the painting illustrates the traditional technique of gilding,
which the moochy artists of Tanjore were masters of, and the deep red
background presents the enduring influence of the traditions of kalamkari
(painted cotton) of the skilled dyers of Masulipatnam. The division of the
space into distinct panels through the positioning of ornate pillars of the
throne room also appears in contemporary Deccani paintings, which were
heavily influenced by the Mughal style. The painting, therefore, distinctly
conveys the emulation of disparate traditions of aesthetics and the inherited
artistic traditions of the painters.
Serfoji’s portraiture in the painting directs viewers to reflect upon the
intellectual legacy he bestowed upon Tanjore, of a European empiricist
tradition that was firmly rooted in the Hindu culture. The painting of him in
his court draws us to the tradition of vitalism the powerless prince
established. It brings us to recall that he could nurture this best through the
arts and collecting practices, and therefore by harnessing visual histories
and objects, and by building upon the networks of social connections they
facilitated. In illuminating Serfoji, the painting provides a view of the ways
in which collections endowed enlightened powers to their royal collectors.

APPASWAMY, J. (1980). Tanjavur Painting of the Maratha Period. Abhinav.

ARCHER, M. (1992). Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period. V&A.
NAIR, S.P. (2012). Raja Serfoji II: Science, Medicine and Enlightenment in Tanjore. Routledge.
PETERSON, I.V. (1999). The Cabinet of King Serfoji of Tanjore: A European Collection in
Nineteenth Century India. Journal of the History of Collections, 11(1), 71–93.
SUBRAMANIAN, L. (2011). From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social
History of Music in South India. Oxford University Press.
49
THE GENTIL ALBUM
Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh
c. 1774

THE PAINTINGS OF INDIA COMMISSIONED BY EUROPEANS from the late-

eighteenth century have for long been classified as Company Paintings
through the understanding that they represent ‘European tastes’, to quote
the pioneering scholar Mildred Archer. She described them as ‘an attempt
by Indian artists to work in an Indo-European style which would appeal to
the Europeans employed by the various East India companies’. However,
the Gentil Album, which Archer regarded foundational of the genre, shows
us the constraints of this categorization.
The inference embedded in the term Company Paintings seeks the
agency of European consumption, and thereby obliterates many histories,
including those of the contributions of native artists who produced them.
The Gentil Album illustrates the reasons for receiving these paintings as
transcultural objects that also served purposes other than conveying the
supposed essence of India to Europe. It informs us of ways in which such
paintings nurtured global mobility and fashioned histories of political and
cultural influences. Besides, the Album, commissioned by a Frenchman,
reminds us to engage with the collecting practices of all European powers
within the Indian subcontinent for exploring social histories of imperialism
and resistance in the region.
‘ The Presentation of Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gentil by Nawab Shuja ud-Daulah to the Emperor Shah
Alam in the Angur Bagh’, watercolour on paper, 370 mm × 535 mm in Manners and Customs of the
People of India. V&A: IS 25-16-1980.

The Album was commissioned by Colonel Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gentil

(1726–99), an officer of Compagnie française des Indes Orientales (French
East India Company), who began his career as an ensign in the infantry
regiment and arrived at Pondicherry in February 1752. He served with
distinction under the commandants Dupleix, de Bussy, Law de Lauriston,
Comte de Confalns and Lally, and was promoted to lieutenant in 1760, and
then captain in 1770. He contributed to the French successes and was
witness to the reverses. He became a British prisoner after the capture of the
French settlement of Masulipatnam by the East India Company in 1759, but
was soon able to make way north and join the French settlement of
Chandernagore (Bengal), commanded by de Lauriston, only to see it fall to
the British. Seeing no future in the French army in India, he offered his
services to the Nawab of Bengal, Mir Qasim (1760–63), and soon after
moved to the court of the Nawab of Awadh, Shuja ud-Daula (1754–75). The
Nawab chose him to conduct negotiations with the British on behalf of
Awadh after the Battle of Buxar in 1764 in which he had aided Mir Qasim.
He was therefore forced to relinquish some of his territories to the British in
the treaty that followed in Allahabad. Gentil’s successful negotiations
secured him employment at the Awadh Court, where he trained a corps of
French regiment, of 400 to 600 men, who were deserters from the British
army. The British soon began to pressurize Shuja to remove the Frenchman
from his court, but the nawab resisted the pressure. However, at his death in
January 1775, his son and successor Asaf ud-Daula was forced to dismiss
Gentil, who went to live in Chandernagore.
Gentil eventually left for France in October 1777 and settled down in
Bagnols, Languedoc, where he was born. His vast collections of
manuscripts, paintings, coins and arms doubled the Oriental collections of
the French Royal library, and paved the way for the beginnings of
Indological studies in France. ‘For this reason alone, Gentil deserves to be
remembered in India more than any other Frenchman; more than Dupleix,
Lally or Bussy, who played such an important part in the political history of
the country’, declared S.P. Sen, one of the early historians of the French in
India.

Map of Awadh in Atlas of the Mughal Empire (1770). Watercolour on paper, 340 mm × 480 mm.
 Gentil died in 1799 in relative poverty despite the wealth of the Indian
collections he donated to his country, largely because of the disruptions
caused by the French Revolution in the payment of army pensions.
While in India, Gentil had resided in Shuja’s capital Faizabad between
1763 and 1774. The fall of Bengal exposed Awadh to the raids of the
Marathas and Afghans, and therefore, in 1756, Shuja moved his court from
the vulnerable Lucknow to the centrally located Faizabad. The shift proved
to be immensely beneficial for Faizabad, which soon routed Delhi as the
cultural capital of northern India, and in wealth and commerce. Many
powerful families of Delhi who had lived in the city for generations moved
to Faizabad due to the persisting raids of the Afghans, which the powerless
Mughal king Shah Alam II (1728–1806) was unable to oppose. In their train
came many master artisans, poets and musicians, who sought work in
Shuja’s court.
The Nawab governed Awadh in the name of Shah Alam, his emperor;
however, he was virtually an independent ruler. He strove to build Faizabad
as an unparalleled imperial city and created its architectural grandeur;
contemporary accounts tell us that the largest market, the Chauk Bazaar,
acquired a grand three-arched gateway, roads were widened so that they
could take 10 bullock carriages abreast and that Shuja built his palace on
the banks of the river Ghagra in a Palladian fashion covering great extent of
ground with columns of ‘Moorish style’. Faizabad became the centre for
boat-building, and the manufacture of arms and ammunition, fine textiles,
bidri and enamel work, and gained renown for the best Urdu poetry and
rich and delicate paintings. The city’s fortunes reflected the immense
political power of Awadh under the Nawab, who, with his immense
diplomatic skills, kept his province out of the clasp of the British, Marathas
and Afghans. He tried to bring the grandeur of the Mughal court to his
capital, for which he also sought to improve Awadh’s military strength by
reforming the army along European models. Gentil was one of the French
officers appointed for the task.
The Gentil Album is made up of 58 folios, of which all but one are
watercolours. The album and the folios were designed by Gentil, who
composed the labels and descriptive texts which accompany each painting.
We can see his notes in the margins of the pages, in pencil in French,
instructing the subject that was to be illustrated. The illustrations are
anecdotal, of life and times in the Awadh in which Gentil lived. However,
the title page, which bears his seal, and in which he presents his service
details, mentions the contents as Recueil de toutes sortes de Dessins sur les
Usages et coutumes des Peuples de l’jndoustan, which means Manners and
Customs of the People of India. The title, no doubt, is misleading – the
contents do not illustrate the entire Indian subcontinent. However, it
initiated the scholarship of the Album as a record of Gentil’s personal
observations and experiences. And his commission of local artists for its
creation constituted its characterization as one of the founding objects of
Company Paintings.
Gentil intended the Album as a record of his close proximity to Shuja ud-
Daula. Therefore, we may regard it is an artefact of a personal political
project. A large number of folios depict the Nawab, who was an imposing
man with great charm and urbanity. He is shown hunting, celebrating his
son’s wedding, sporting with his zenana, participating in religious
processions during Muharram, in audience with Shah Alam, meeting the
British, and with his illustrious grandfather Burhan-ul Mulk and the family.
Five of these depict Gentil being presented by the Nawab to Shah Alam,
and at the treaty at Allahabad in the presence of the British General Carnac,
and the images offer a ‘visual testimony of his status as a special adviser to
the ruler, for which he earned the lofty Persianate title Rafi’ al-daula,
nizam-i jang, bahadur, tadbir al-muluk (Uplifter of the State, Leader in War,
the Valiant, and the Counsel of Kings)’, as Chanchal Dadlani tells us in his
study. The rest depict festivals and rituals of the Hindus and Muslims,
public entertainments by acrobats, jugglers and snake charmers, kite-flying
and dances, and people of different castes, sects and occupational groups.
The paintings were made by three reputed artists of Faizabad, of whom we
know two: Nevasi Lal (fl. c. 1760–75) and Mohan Singh (fl. c. 1763–82).
They were trained in the techniques of Mughal painting, and Gentil
employed them for ten years to make copies of some of the esteemed
Mughal paintings.
Dadlani has noticed influences of the Ai’n-i-Akbari in the Gentil Album,
especially in the ‘diversity of subject matter, inclusion of miscellanea, and
combined historical and documentary approach’. As he recounts, Gentil had
based an earlier commission, the Atlas of the Mughal Empire (1770), on
Book Two of the A’in. In this, subsequent, Album he strove to document the
Mughal Court through ‘figures […] arranged in rows and columns, objects
[…] neatly displayed’ so that the ‘narrative scenes unfold in a clearly
organized, easily annotated fashion’. Importantly, the illustrations emulate
Mughal classificatory and descriptive practices, and the captions of the
paintings of Hindu customs clearly mention the A’in as a source of the
subjects depicted. The paintings of hunting tigers and elephants, equestrian
sports, games and pastimes and acrobats evoke the descriptions of
strategies, or the methods of undertaking the above activities and games and
performances in the Mughal texts. Even the ‘folio depicting jewellery that
has been interpreted as a catalogue of Gentil’s own collection […]
corresponds to a section of the Ain-i-Akbari containing a descriptive
catalogue of Indian jewellery’. Therefore, Dadlani emphasizes that the
Album documents an important point, namely, that the ethnographic
impulse to catalogue and describe, which has for long been historicized as
Europe’s contribution to South Asia, was also an intrinsic part of the
Mughal, and thereby, Islamic epistemic traditions.
Significantly, the Gentil Album committed the Ai’n-i-Akbari to popular
memory in eighteenth-century Europe. The Ai’n, as is well known, was
copied and preserved within the Mughal domain from the time it was
created, as it was valued as a source of information on land revenues and
methods of taxation. However, because the copies were not illustrated, the
text possibly lost its ‘celebrated’ status after Akbar’s reign. Soon after the
Gentil Album the Ai’n was translated into English by Francis Gladwin
(1783), which resurrected once again its popular memory. Although there is
no direct evidence of the influence of the Ai’n upon the Gentil Album, both
document ‘contemporary intellectual networks in India, centred on munshis,
or “scholar-scribes”, who acted as language teachers for many Europeans’.
And because the Album predates the English translation of the Ai’n, it also
allows us to question the claim by the British of their sole discoveries of all
the ‘important’ texts of pre-colonial India.
Gentil praised Abu’l Fazl for his histories of Akbar’s court in all his
subsequent publications, which included a history of the kings of India
sourced from the new English translation of the Tarikh-i-Firishta of
Muhammad Qasim Firishta (b.c. 1570). As Dadlani contends, ‘in
positioning the Ai’n-i-Akbari as a foundational Indian source, Gentil
invoked and likened his service to that of the Indian historian’. Although
the Album conveys aspects of ‘Mughal visuality and representational
systems’, the paintings mediate between ‘old’ and ‘new’ practices and
could ‘be read by those unfamiliar with Mughal visual codes’. The Album
thus proved consumable in France.
Gentil’s collections from India became a valuable asset for the nascent
scholarship of the Orient in Paris and served early French Orientalists such
as Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805), who learnt Persian
and is best known for translating the Zend Avesta. By the late 1780s,
Gentil’s reputation as a connoisseur of India was well established in France,
and when the court of Louis XVI at Versailles ordered Sèvres porcelain as
gifts for the visiting dignitaries from the court of Tipu Sultan in Mysore, he
was consulted for ideas regarding the design. By then, as Dadlani tells us,
the paintings in his albums had been drawn into the universal histories that
were published in France, such as Bernard Picart’s Religious Ceremonies
and Customs of All the Peoples of the World (1723–43), which demonstrate
their contemporary value as ‘global mobilities’. Gentil received two
audiences with the king, following which he presented several of his
translated and authored works to the royal library.
In reckoning with the Gentil Album as a series of Company Paintings we
erase the histories of its intention and consumption. The Album brought
together Mughal genealogies in European commissioned works, different
modes of visualizing, interactions among artists and patrons, and
contemporary practices of seeking status. It was invested with many
meanings – by Gentil, by his painter collaborators, and by French viewers.
Subsequently, it has accrued substantial collections-histories, for we find it
today not in France but in Britain. An object of numerous life histories, it
coaxes us to reflect upon the ways in which our categories and
classifications of things can erase their historical efficacy.

ARCHER, M. (1991). Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period. V&A.
ASIF, M.A. (2020). The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India. Harvard University Press
DADLANI, C. (2015). ‘Transporting India: The Gentil Album and Mughal Manuscript Culture’. Art
History, 38(4), 748–61. DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.1217.
GOLE, S. (1788). Maps of Mughal India: Drawn by Colonel Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gentil Agent for
the French Government to the Court of Shuja-ud-Daula at Faizabad, in 1770. Keegan Paul.
SEN, S.P. (1958). The French in India, 1763–1816. Firma K.
50
COLONEL MORDAUNT’S COCK
MATCH
Lucknow
Late 18th century

THE ENGRAVING OF THIS LUCKNOW COCK MATCH WAS prominently displayed in

the exhibition The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947 which was held at
the National Portrait Gallery (London) in 1990, and the scene was described
by the curators as ‘one of the most famous conversation pieces of the
eighteenth-century Anglo-Indian record. [It] epitomises the luxurious ease
of the kingdom of Awadh in the later eighteenth century, where Company
officials and soldiers had adopted Indian ways of life in the glittering court
of Asaf ud-Daula, the fourth Nawab (1775–97).’ The painting which the
engraving represents is of the grand cock match by Johann Zoffany (1733–
1810) and it depicts the cosmopolitan society of Lucknow in Asaf’s time.
Similar to the paintings in the Gentil Album, it conveys the imperial
grandeur of the eighteenth century Awadh. However, it also provides a view
of the self-fashioning of men like Gentil, who came to India with no social
pedigree but were able to build fortunes among the splendours of the
provincial courts they served, through political acumen, great business
skills, lavish patronage, intricate social networking and voracious collecting
practices.
Cock match in Lucknow attended by Warren Hastings. 478 mm × 667 mm, Mezzotint engraving
(Richard Earlom, 1792) of a painting by Johann Zoffany, c. 1784–86, CSAS.

Zoffany is highly regarded as the master of ‘conversation pieces’, who

made spectacular portraits of royals, aristocrats, actors and actresses in ‘off-
duty’ poses as appearing ‘to have wandered off from stiffer, stately duties
and have flung themselves down without changing their clothes to be alone
with each other and the painter’, as a recent reviewer in The Telegraph has
described. He was born in Germany, and made his name as a painter in
Britain where he came in 1760 and stayed. He was an insatiable adventurer,
led a rather eccentric life, and made vast amounts of money in India
between 1783 and 1789 by attracting the patronage of Company officials,
Europeans and native princes. His grand portraits and scenes bring to mind
the other British and European painters who had been lured to India by the
Western lore of its fabulous wealth.
Zoffany arrived in Lucknow at the end of 1783 and stayed for long in the
city. He made the painting of the cock match between 1784 and 1786 at the
behest of Warren Hastings, the governor general of the East India Company
(1772–85), who had attended the sport on 5 April 1784. He received
₹15,000 for the painting that, however, got lost with the ship on its way to
England. So, he made a copy for Hastings which is now in the collections
of Tate Britain, and one other for Asaf ud-Daula at the Nawab’s behest,
which unfortunately went missing during 1857 and the Siege of Lucknow
(see ch. 52).
The engraving by Richard Earlom is of the second painting which
Hastings finally owned, and it dates to the period when the latter faced
parliamentary impeachment in Britain. It is quite likely that Britons in the
1890s would have viewed it as an apt illustration of the Anglo-Indian
nabobs gone native. Yet, although the painting captures the decadent Indian
princes and ‘lush temptations and shameless self-indulgence’ that India
offered in plenty, it is a snapshot of a world in which it was possible to
cross cultural borders with ease, as Maya Jasanoff reminds us. For, in the
Lucknow of the cock match

Hindus and Muslims shared state positions, celebrated each other’s

holidays, borrowed from one another’s literary and artistic traditions
[…] Europeans caroused and hunted with the Nawab, and talked,
traded and intermarried with his subjects.

In a bid to free himself from the pressing demands of politics and

administration, Asaf ud-Daula moved back to Lucknow, the city his father
had left, and through lavish patronage was able to transform Lucknow into
the cultural capital of north India. Although the city was fiercely derided
during this time by the older nobility who stayed back at Faizabad and by
many Company officers as a place of debauchery and ignominy, most
visitors rejoiced in its monumental splendour, urbane taste, and eclectic
ethos. The picture of the cock match introduces us to Lucknow’s high
society, to the great patrons, collectors and connoisseurs who virtually
created the city’s cosmopolitan culture and its fame as the centre of the arts
in Hindustan.
John Mordaunt (Jack to his friends), who paid for the cock match, was a
commander of the bodyguards of Asaf ud-Daula and also the master of
ceremonies and leader of court revels. He was the illegitimate son of the
Earl of Peterborough, and to allow him to escape the social stigma of his
birth, he was sent to India to make his fortune. His office at the Awadh
court was instituted by Shuja and fetched him a phenomenal salary of 8,000
rupees per month, which, as C.A. Bayly informs us, ‘is an indication of the
level of rewards that attracted Europeans to seek service with the nawabs of
Awadh’.
Asaf ud-Daula was fabulously rich, although he is remembered in history
as often in debt. His revenues, as one of his European cronies Lewis
Ferdinand Smith wrote, amounted to ‘about three million sterling’. The
nawab was, as Smith noted,

extremely solicitous to possess all that is elegant and rare, and his
main concern was that there be money sufficient for his private
expenses. [He was] a curious compound of extravagance, avarice,
candour, cunning, levity, cruelty, childishness, affability, brutish
sensuality, good humour, vanity, and imbecility.

Moreover, Asaf ud-Daula had many children although he may have

fathered none despite being married to some of the ‘finest women’ and
having a harem of five hundred. He may have been impotent.
Grand spectacles of conspicuous consumption were weekly affairs in
Asaf’s Lucknow. Mordaunt, who was his special favourite, imported
several game cocks from England for the spectacular cock fight events. The
scene of Asaf rising from his seat on the dais with his arms outstretched at
Mordaunt – who appears remarkably under-dressed wearing a cotton
sleeved waistcoat but no outer coat – has been noted by the conservators of
the painting at Tate for its ‘erotic dimension’. They view Asaf’s pose as
agitated and aroused, and the vignette behind, of a bearded Hindu (in a
turban) fondling a Muslim boy (in a white cap), they suggest, substantiates
the perception. Therefore, historians see this painting of the cock match
between the illegitimate and the impotent as ‘perhaps Hastings’ select joke’.
However, as Jasanoff emphasizes, it is also an ‘astute comment on two men
[Mordaunt and the Nawab] who came to Lucknow to escape the social
margins’.
Standing between Mordaunt and Asaf are Salar Jung, Asaf’s uncle, who
is counting on his fingers, and Hasan Reza Khan, who supervised the
revenue assignments of the Company in Awadh. In front are the two cock
fighters, Mordaunt’s in a red turban and Asaf’s in white. To the far left are
native bystanders under a tree and among them is a woman with a child.
Near the arena is a troupe of musicians and nautch girls who are clearly
hedging their bets in the cock matches.
The immensely wealthy Swiss-born Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (1741–
95) appears quite distinctly in the painting, standing under the red canopy in
a coat which is red but appears black in the print, looking at the spectacle.
Beside him sits the Anglo-Indian aristocrat of Lucknow Colonel Claude
Martin (1735–1800) who was French. Both were outsiders to the hierarchy
of the East India Company, although both arrived at the Awadh court via
their services in the Company. Martin came to Lucknow in 1776 as the
superintendent of the nawab’s arsenal. He proved to be a brilliant
businessman and successfully transformed himself into a British gentleman
and an unsurpassable collector. He made a huge fortune and built the
palatial Constantia, which rivalled all the stately homes in Britain in
architectural grandeur and material contents. He is interred here, and the
building came to serve as the school of La Martiniere that remains Martin’s
grand bequest to the city, which he established for educating boys and girls
in the English language.
Polier, who hosted Zoffany at Lucknow, came to Awadh in 1773 as an
engineer, surveyor and architect of the East India Company in response to
requests from the then nawab, Shuja ud-Daula. He subsequently took up
service with the Mughal emperor Shah Alam, raising a contingent of troops
for him, for which he received the jagir of Agra. Unlike his friend Martin
who never married, Polier had two Indian wives. His vast estate in
Lucknow was known as Polierganj where he built a massive collection of
Sanskrit and Persian manuscripts. The collections contributed vastly to the
nurture of the French scholarship of the Orient.
 Behind Martin is John Wombwell, the son of a chairman of the East India
Company who was the Company’s paymaster in Lucknow (1777–79). He is
holding a nargila pipe, and sitting beside him is Zoffany, holding a pencil or
paintbrush. Standing between the two is Zoffany’s friend, the English
painter Ozias Humphrey, who was in India between 1785 and 1787. He has
his hand upon Zoffany’s shoulder.
None of the men in picture were typical representatives of their countries
and culture, and neither did they fully adopt the Indian ways. ‘They were
partners in a […] world where the Indian environment absorbed European
influences, where Europeans assimilated Indian ones’, as Jasanoff aptly
summarizes.
The painting and its print, the engraving, are poignant traces of the
fragility of the cosmopolitan cultures of early Orientalism, illustrating also
the tumultuous period that followed the French Revolution (1789) which
unleashed forces of nationalism within Europe. The Napoleonic Wars of the
1790s added to the hostilities between Britain and France, whetted their
imperialist ambitions, and hardened their attitudes towards other European
nations. Britain regarded with grave suspicion French and Europeans who
wished to be regarded as Britons, and therefore, men such as Polier and
Martin had to give up hopes of settling down in Britain. They also found
themselves eternally displaced – strangers in their homelands, and also in
the city they resided in, namely Lucknow, whose cultural sophistication,
cosmopolitan hybridity and huge commercial wealth they virtually created.
On returning to Lausanne in 1788, Polier found the country of his birth
so alien that he chose to live in France, the country of his Huguenot
ancestors, to which he moved by 1791. He was, however, murdered in
1795, in his house near Avignon, allegedly by bandits. Martin died in
Lucknow as a rich man, but lonely and ailing and in a city he no longer
recognized. Asaf ud-Daula died in 1796, and soon after Awadh came to be
virtually controlled by the British. In 1801 when the East India Company
annexed half the province, the British had begun to regard all Frenchmen in
India with suspicion, stopped mixing with natives as equals and marrying
native women. As the decade progressed, cultural borders between the East
and West could no longer be crossed.
The print belonged to the Lorimer family before it came into the
Cambridge collections. On the reverse, the donor Christopher Lorimer
recorded the occasion when it was gifted to him by his father Robert, who
had said: ‘I have never had time to collect prints… you ought to… this
would start your collection.’
The father’s wish for his son to collect resonates powerfully upon the
Zoffany painting of a grand cock match in Lucknow. For, the painting
vividly illustrates some of the greatest collectors in eighteenth-century India
and reminds us that it is they who made Lucknow resplendent, albeit for a
short time, but at a historic moment just before the city, and Awadh, was
usurped by the British.

ARCHER, M. (1979). India and British Portraiture 1770–1825. Sotheby Parke Bernet.
BAYLY, C.A., B. Allen and J. Shrimpton. (1994). ‘Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match’. In C.A. Bayly
(Ed.), The Raj: India and the British 1600–1947 (p. 116). [Exhibition Catalogue]. London:
National Portrait Gallery.
HENSHER, P. (2012, March 6). ‘Johan Zoffany: The loveable artist who ate a sailor’. The Telegraph.
JASANOFF, M. (2006). Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–1850. Harper
Perennial.
MAJOR, J. (2016, February 16). ‘A closer look at Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match’. All Things
Georgian.
SMITH, L.F. (1825). ‘Appendix [containing four letters on Asiatic Manners and Customs]’. The Tale
of the Four Durwesh. Translated from the Oordoo Tongue of Meer Ummum: with notes by the
translator (pp. 223–48). Madras.
SUBRAHMANYAM, S. (2000). ‘The Career of Colonel Polier and Late Eighteenth-Century
Orientalism’. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 10 (1), 43–60.
51
GAME BOARD AND ‘SNAKES AND
LADDERS’
19th century, North India
HISTORIES OF ORIGINS OFTEN FAIL TO TAKE COGNIZANCE OF the transformations
in the intents and uses of things, especially those that look alike in the past
and present. In popular histories of India many board games, including
carrom, ludo and snakes and ladders are declared Indian in origin. However,
this intricately carved board with designs of ladders and snakes and writing
in Arabic provides reasons for interrogating historical enquiries into the
genealogies of objects and phenomena. Because it shows us that what we
may see as a parent material can have a very different production history of
intent.
The eye-catching board – carefully and densely inlaid with teeming
snakes and intersecting ladders, floral borders with the winning square of a
Mughal mosque that represents the Throne of God, and fine calligraphy – is
valued today by its curators as a rare object. It is one of the only three
known pieces of the 100-square gaming board that are classified as Muslim
(Sufi), and is the only one made of wood; the other two, in the collections
of the Royal Asiatic Society (London, hereafter RAS) and Ashmolean
Museum (Oxford) are, respectively, of parchment and paper. Such boards,
as Andrew Topsfield tells us, were used for playing a version of the game
gyan chaupar or gyan bazi, which was very popular in north India during
the eighteenth century.
‘Snakes and ladders’, Sufi Islamic Board with inscriptions in Persian. c. 1850–55, Wood, Shell and
Mother of Pearl, 695 mm × 80 mm × 798 mm, MAA: 951.995.

The earliest examples of boards with intersecting snakes and ladders on

mandala-like grids are possibly the creations of the Jaina communities of
western India during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. They
were made to illustrate the workings of the philosophical and psychological
doctrines of liberation, and were initially drawings on paper, cloth and
wood. They were meant as teaching aids, and were subsequently produced
as didactic ‘Jaina boards’ often comprising 84 squares in a 9 × 9 grid. The
illustrations clarified ‘interconnections of Karmic causation’, and inspired
the creations of the philosophical boards of the Hindu Vaishnava
communities in the fourteenth century. The latter usually comprised
seventy-two squares which illuminated the complex intermeshing of the
philosophies of Sankhya, Yoga, Mandala and Tantra during this period.
The two longest snakes in many Jaina boards are the rajas-ahankara and
tamas-ahankara. Vaikuntha (the heaven of Vishnu) is the highest
achievement one can aim for in the Hindu boards. Such sectarian boards
occurred increasingly in southern India from the sixteenth century, and they
inspired creations of edifying games that were played with cowries.
An illustrated board in the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum
(Oxford) bears the label ‘Hindu type philosophical game board used in
India’. It was donated by the renowned Indologist Frederick Max MÜller
(1823–1900), who described the object further through the game it
supposedly served, in which ‘the players advance from one numbered
square to another, by means of ladders from virtues to their rewards, and by
means of snakes from vices to their punishments’.
The Muslim Board of MAA is of a recreational race-game that resembled
the gyan chaupar of the nineteenth century. According to Topsfield, such
boards were designed by the Sufi communities of northern India during the
late Mughal rule ‘perhaps as a didactic exercise, in emulation of the Jaina
and Hindu games’. They were the last of the sectarian boards and were
probably used for playing with dice, and as teaching aids, and they
‘uniquely achieved a wider dissemination and an afterlife’ through
adoptions by the Sufi communities of Turkey and the Middle East. Outside
South Asia, they continued to be used, principally, for spiritual instruction;
an example is from Syria, the square names of which inspired the treatise,
published in 1938, Sharh Shatranj al-’Arifin (Commentary on the Chess of
the Gnostics).
The Cambridge board was made either in the Delhi–Agra region or at
Lahore, for the donor, Richard George Lawrence (1818–96), a British
military officer who made his career in Punjab. As the curators emphasize,
it ‘was doubtless a very valuable and high-status object, made with the
finest materials and considerable craftsmanship’. It has eleven snakes and
sixteen ladders, and of the former two are disastrous. One plunges from
shaitan (Satan, 100) to shahwaat (lust, 10), and the other from ghurur
(pride, 91) to darya-ye ghazah (sea of wrath, 17). The ladders increase in
the upper rows, and two are visibly advantageous: one from khauf (fear, 26)
to imam (faith, 70), and the other from shuja’at (fortitude, 55) to shahadat
(bearing witness, 90). The 84th square, fana-fi Allah (extinction of the soul
in God), leads directly to Arshilla (God’s throne) and the end of the game.
Although the Cambridge board resembles the boards in the collections of
the RAS and Ashmolean, the names of many squares differ across all three.
Thus, where the RAS has aq’l (reason, 3), gham (grief, 17) and atish (fire,
58), Cambridge has riza (contentment), darya-ye ghazah (sea of wrath) and
damagh (drunkenness). And although the ‘patterns of snakes and ladders
connections are largely similar’ in all, to quote Topsfield, the Cambridge
board has eleven snakes and sixteen ladders to the RAS’s thirteen and
seventeen, respectively.
The Muslim boards demonstrate the adaptation of Hindu traditions by the
Islamic communities in India. Notably, a bilingual game board in the
collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum has Sanskrit names in the squares
that are translations of the appropriate Islamic analogue. In this board, the
players reach svarga (heaven) from tapasya or riazat, and can descend to
adharma or nai imani, to moha (illusion) or fariftagi (beguilement).
Topsfield reminds us that the board was produced in a milieu where Hindus
and Muslims associated freely and were largely unconcerned with the
adaptations of their religious imagery.
We can, no doubt, trace aspects of the nineteenth-century gyan chaupar
within the moralistic children’s game of snakes and ladders, which were
increasingly produced in Britain from the mid-century. However, the
‘English boards’, which bear ecumenical messages, do not convey the
philosophical subtleties of the old Jaina and Hindu boards. They lack ‘the
essential element of jnana, or transcendent knowledge [and] the awareness
that on attaining moksha all worldly dualities such as snakes and ladders
[…] will fall away as mere illusory […] maya’, as Topsfield points out.
The new secular boards with the game of snakes and ladders may
physically resemble the older sectarian boards – Jaina, Hindu and Muslim.
However, they do not embody the origin histories of the game. Notably, by
studying the old boards we begin to see why the endeavours towards
gleaning origins of certain object types can be particularly unenlightening.

ELLIOTT, M. (2011). ‘Snakes and Ladders’. In M. Elliott and N.J. Thomas (Eds), Gifts and
Discoveries: The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (p. 40). Scala.
Topsfield, A. (2006). ‘Snakes and Ladders in India: Some Further Discoveries’. Artibus Asiae, 66(1),
143–79.
52
AN 1857 BED
Provenance unknown
c. late 1850s–1860s

PICTURES OF GREAT BATTLES HAVE LONG HISTORIES OF displays in domestic

settings, which add to their genealogy as memorable objects. They appear
in the empires of the ancient world – in images of the prisoners of wars on
mosaics of the rich Roman homes of the first century, for example – and we
can trace the vast chronological span of this iconography in the Western
world when we regard the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings
and tapestries of defeat and surrender on the walls of stately homes, palaces
and castles in Europe. In South Asia, the Mughal emperors nurtured the
genre of the depiction of battle scenes through their illustrated books to
record their victories, and the earliest examples are, unsurprisingly, in the
Baburnama (see ch. 34). A prominent example of the emulation of the
European and Mughal genres by rulers of the Indian subcontinent is the
wall painting in the Dariya Daulat palace, commissioned by Tipu Sultan to
illustrate his victory over the British troops in 1780. Yet, a bed with a war
image is rare memorabilia of conquest, and its existence informs us of the
extent to which the British glorified and commemorated their success in
suppressing one of the fiercest oppositions they encountered within the
Indian subcontinent, namely, the Rebellion of 1857.
Possibly a footboard of a bed depicting a scene of the British ‘Relief of Lucknow’ in 1857. Wood,
49.4” × 19.5”, CSAS.

Variously recalled as ‘rebellion’, ‘insurrection’, ‘revolt’, ‘Mutiny of

1857’, or simply ‘1857’, and within the Indian nationalist historiography as
the ‘First War of Independence’, this particularly fierce opposition of a
large segment of the local population of northern and central India to the
British comprised numerous armed insurgencies and uprisings for an entire
year: from 28 March 1857, when sepoys at the cantonment of Barrackpore
(near Kolkata) revolted, to 23 April 1858, when the forces of the Rani of
Jhansi, Lakshmibai, were captured at Kopatti Serai by British troops. The
rebellions were both local and non-local in leadership and directions, and
very violent, and the British suppressed them with extreme brutality. The
massacres committed by the British and Indians remained in popular
memory for a long time and the British created many memorials of the
brutalities of the natives, of which the best example was the Memorial Well
at Kanpur. The monument – surrounded by a decorative marble screen and
with a marble statue of a downcast angel standing over it with arms crossed
and holding palm fronds – was regarded the most iconic of all British
memorials of the Mutiny well until the 1940s, which ‘every tourist
sketched, and every traveller’s book described’, as Stephen Heathorn
recounts. The affective recall of the British victories of 1857 which it
represented was very evident at the eve of independence, when residents of
Kanpur defaced the angel on 13 August 1947. The British community
which remained in the city then decided to relocate the statue and a portion
of the screen to the nearby All Souls Church. Soon after, Indians replaced
the angel with a statue of Tantia Tope, who had served Nana Sahib, one of
the rebel leaders.
The carving, possibly on a footboard of a bed, depicts the Relief of
Lucknow. The scene came to command increasing commemorative values
in Britain because of a large oil painting that was made in London in 1859
by the well-known British portrait painter, Thomas Jones Barker (1815–82).
Barker made two similar-looking paintings of the Relief, one large and one
small, based on the sketches of a Swedish artist, Egron Lundgren (1815–75)
who, as C.A. Bayly stated, ‘was the only European artist in India during the
rebellion’. Realizing that it was ‘impossible to despatch an artist to India
and expect him to produce a painting quickly enough to exploit topical
interest’, the London-based print publishers Thomas Agnew and Sons
‘purchased hundreds of Lundgren’s sketches and made them available to
Barker’. The publishing house made a series of prints from an engraving of
the large oil painting and prominently displayed the latter in their shop in
1860 to advertise sales. The moves to exploit topical interest served the
publishing house well, as the prints commanded a large circulation. The
carved bed panel with the Relief of Lucknow informs of the other kinds of
memorabilia which Barker’s paintings inspired.
Unfortunately, there is no information regarding the object – when and
where it was made, who made it, who commissioned it, and who owned it.
The only aspect we may correctly conjecture is that the owner was British.
It came into the collections of the Centre for South Asian Studies via
Professor C.A. Bayly, although how he acquired it is also not known. The
staff of the Centre often refer to it as the bed of the Siege of Lucknow.
The British victories of 1857–58 formalized the political status of the
Indian subcontinent as a colony of Great Britain. It ended the Mughal
dynasty and replaced the Company with Crown rule, whereupon Queen
Victoria became the Empress of India (1877–1901). Throughout the early
nineteenth century, the East India Company had faced many strong local
revolts within the Indian subcontinent – against oppressive taxations, unfair
court proceedings, and drastic changes of the older traditions of patronage.
The Company’s inadequate intelligence, Tapti Roy recalls, remained largely
unaware of the brewing dissent as ‘rulers of traditional kingdoms such as
Awadh, Nagpur and that of the Peshwa [were increasingly brought] to ruin’.
The Rebellion of 1857, therefore, caught the Company by surprise.
The sepoys of the 19th Native Infantry at Barrackpore mutinied against
their commanding officers because to use the newly issued Lee Enfield
rifles they had to bite off cartridges whose ends were greased. There was a
rumour that the grease contained cow or pig fat, forbidden in Hinduism and
Islam respectively, and that the British had given the ammunitions to the
sepoys to ‘pollute’ them. The role of rumour in this seminal mutiny is well
presented by Rudrangshu Mukherjee, who states that

In the summer of 1857, there were rumours about cartridges […];

about flour being polluted by bone dust; about forcible conversions
to Christianity; about the intentions of the British to disarm the
sepoys; and about the end of British rule at the centenary of Plassey.
All these circulating together aggregated into one gigantic rumour
about the evil intentions of the British.

The mutineers were arrested, and a quickly assembled court of enquiry

disbanded the 19th Infantry. On the following day, 29 March 1857, Mangal
Pandey, a sepoy of the 34th Regiment that was barracked near the 19th,
fired at his commanding officer, John Hearsey. Pandey and another sepoy
were tried and hanged, and in less than six weeks, the sepoys at
Barrackpore, thousands of miles away from Meerut and one of the strongest
cantonments of northern India, mutinied. On 9 May, one of the regiments
revolted in protest of the use of greased cartridges and by 11 May others
had joined and forced open the armoury and attacked and killed British
officers. The rebel sepoys then marched to Delhi to persuade the old and
frail Bahadur Shah Zafar II (1775–1862), the nominal Mughal emperor of
Hindustan, to lead them.
The quick pace at which the uprisings against the British unfolded
remains unprecedented within the annals of anti-British movements in
South Asia. Between March and June, there were rebellions in most areas
of the Gangetic plain and residents of Delhi, Lucknow, Bharatpur, Benares,
Kanpur, Allahabad and Jhansi rose up in arms in rapid succession. The
rebels were from many different communities and social classes: Muslim
weavers and artisans, Hindu and Muslim landless peasants, rich
landowners, mercenary soldiers, religious warriors, merchants, and
disenfranchised royal dynasties and their nobles. Each section rose against
the British for a different grievance and all revolted against the hostile, alien
and interfering policies of the Company.
Lucknow rose in rebellion on 30 May, as did all the administrative
centres of the former kingdom of Awadh, including Faizabad, Sikora,
Gondah, Bahraich, Sultanpur, Saloni and Purwa. The rebellions followed
the decision of the British to usurp Awadh, possibly the wealthiest province
in India at the time. The British, Crispin Bates tells us, ‘alleged that the raja
was misruling his country, and this alone was used as a pretext to seize
control of the kingdom’.
The ‘raja’, or rather the Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah (1847–56),
was the vizier (guardian) of the Mughal Empire and the British seizure of
his kingdom was a blatant attack on Mughal sovereignty. He was deftly
removed to Calcutta and the Company then sent a high-handed settlement
officer who, in fixing revenue demands, dispossessed most of the local
landed aristocrats from their ancestral estates. Led by the raja of
Mahmudabad, this class rose in rebellion and were immediately joined by
poor peasants, artisans of the former Awadh court, and virtually the entire
population of the Mughal province.
The Siege of Lucknow was immensely long – eight months – which
illustrates the strength of the rebels. A native proclamation issued in May
began with the declaration that ‘it has become the bounden duty of all
people, whether women or men, slave or girls to come forward and put the
English to death’ and provided a litany of measures including the ominous
advice that ‘they should stone to death the English in the same manner, as
the swallows stoned the Chief of the elephants’. In the vision of insurrection
everybody was his own commander.
The word siege, used by the British, indicates the hopes of controlling the
uprisings through counter-insurgency. British historians who wrote volumes
about 1857 immediately after the Rebellion, dated the inception of the
Siege of Lucknow to the 1 or 2 July, when at the command of Henry
Lawrence, who led the British troops, a strong garrison was built around the
area of the Residency for housing the entire British population of the city.
The British move into the Residency compound entailed evacuation of the
Nawab’s Fort of Macchi Bhawan and placing an arsenal of ammunition
inside the premises instead. Lawrence ordered the arsenal to be blown up,
in the belief that the fort would be impregnable if captured by the rebels.
Macchi Bhawan with its splendid palaces was thus fully destroyed, and
only a baoli (well) remains as a relic of its former grandeur.
The protracted siege saw the death of Lawrence and many other British
officers, and the death and deprivation of many British women and children
who were inside the Residency. It ended with the recapture of the city on 21
March 1858 by Colin Campbell and his 1,400 men. Campbell was
specifically sent from London, and the three central figures of Barker’s
paintings – which we can see on the carved bed panel – depict him, Sir
James Outram and Sir Henry Havelock. The three men became the British
heroes of 1857. The city architecture in the background shows the intact
nawabi Awadh, bereft of the mutilated Residency, whose upper part was
blown off by the heavy firing, and Baillie Guard Gate that served as the
entrance to the complex. Both acquired commemorative value for the
British through photographs that were taken in 1858, and the rapid
consumption of their images in Britain and Europe established their status
as the iconic memorials of the inception of the Raj.
In ruminating whether the bed was made in India, we realize how little
we know of the perceptions of the Indians who were swept into the turmoil
of 1857. The possibility that the bed panel may represent Indian
craftsmanship provokes enquiries into the native views regarding the British
and European views of the Siege and Relief of Lucknow. The British
historiography and British-commissioned visual documents historicized the
rebels as perpetrators of horrible atrocities upon ‘our women and children’.
Yet, the celebration of British victory upon an object whose history might
remain unknown forever provides a fitting site for building research on the
‘rebels’, and local perceptions of the heroic defeat.

BATES, C. (2007). Subalterns and Raj: South Asia since 1600. Routledge.
BAYLY, C.A. (1990). ‘The Indian Mutiny and Rebellion of 1857–9’; ‘The Relief of Lucknow, 1857’.
C.A. Bayly (Ed.), The Raj: India and the British 1600–1947 (pp. 231; 246–47). [Exhibition
Catalogue]. London: National Portrait Gallery.
HEATHORN, S.J. (2007). ‘Angel of Empire: The Cawnpore Memorial Well as a British Site of
Imperial Remembrance’. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 8(3). DOI:
10.1353/cch.2008.0009
MUKHERJEE, R. (1984). Awadh in Revolt, 1857–1858: A Study of Popular Resistance. Oxford
University Press.
MUKHERJEE, R. (2005). Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero? Penguin Books.
ROY, T. (1994). The Politics of a Popular Uprising: Bundelkhand in 1857. Oxford University Press.
53
HANDHELD PRAYER WHEEL
Tibet
c. 19th century

A MEMORABLE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH COLONIZATION OF India is the Great

Game which the British and Tsarist Russia engaged in for much of the
nineteenth century, until the First World War. The Game in effect was a
shadowy but focused bid for political influence and power over a vast area
of Asia north of the Himalayas, stretching across the Caucasus mountains
and the great deserts and mountains of Central Asia and Tibet. It involved
espionage, surveillance and military attacks on local kingdoms, and the
coveted prize was the possession of India.
The Great Game began during the 1830s, and the clandestine techniques
of spying which it entailed resulted in the mapping of millions of miles of
physically treacherous and seemingly inaccessible terrains, much of which
was openly hostile to Europeans and their allies. It is immortalized by
Rudyard Kipling in his novel Kim (1916), in which the character Babu
Hurree Chunder Mookerjee represents Sarat Chandra Das (1849–1917), the
foremost Bengali explorer of Tibet, and the author of this sketch. Hurree
Babu explains to Kim that the prayer wheel, an innately Tibetan object, is
the most ‘adventitious aid’ for the Game, and Das’s prominently labelled
drawing reveals the reason: ‘Prayer wheels were used to disguise pundits as
pilgrims, and also to record measurements and hide survey notes.’
A mani khorlo of the mother of Tashi Lama. Drawing, c. 1879, Sarat Chandra Das. RGS: S0001207.

In drawing attention to the uses of Tibetan prayer wheels for espionage,

Kapil Raj informs us that between 1863 and 1885 no less than 15 Indians
were sent to Tibet and eastern Turkistan (present-day Turkmenistan and
Xinjiang) to map the area. Of them, two were murdered, one sold to slavery
by his Chinese colleague, and another, suspected of spying spent seven
months in a Mongolian prison: ‘Almost all of them had near fatal
encounters with bandits but succeeded nevertheless in accomplishing their
geographical mission.’ They were code-named Pundits (Pandits) if Hindus,
and Moonshees (Munshis) if Muslims, and were the human instruments of
surveillance for the British to spy upon Tibet and Central Asia.
The first pandits to penetrate the forbidding kingdom of Tibet, between
1864 and 1886, were two Bhotiya cousins, Nain Singh (active: 1865–75; d.
1882), a schoolteacher, and Mani Singh (active: 1864–66), the patwari, or
record keeper, of Milum village in remote Kumaon. The all-native
expedition was the brainchild of the celebrated hero of the Great
Trigonometrical Survey of India, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas George
Montgomerie (1830–78), who clandestinely took charge of the surveys of
Tibet. He planned the itinerary, which was to map the route between the
known commercial town of Gartok and the unknown Lhasa, a distance he
reckoned to be 700 to 800 miles. At the time, the location of Lhasa was
guesswork, and the route which Montgomerie wanted mapped, for tapping
Tibetan wealth, followed the great river Tsangpo whose source and end was
not known to the Western world.
Apart from equipping the two pandits with miniaturized sextants, pocket
compasses, pocket chronometers, air and boiling-point thermometers, and a
watch each, Montgomerie gave them two new instruments – a prayer wheel
and a rosary, both Tibetan. The instruments, as Raj recounts, appeared to be
‘perfectly normal adjuncts, one would think, for two lamas on a pilgrimage
to the holy city of Lhasa’.
The pandits were trained to take strides that measured exactly 31.5
inches, so that the number of paces they eventually covered could be
converted into distances measured in miles. The rosary they were given had
only 100 beads, in contrast to the 108 of the Tibetan rosaries, and every
tenth bead was larger than the rest, which decimalized counting. The
pandits were instructed to consider each turn of the wheel as one pace and
told to count a bead at every 100th turn of the wheel, that is, at every 100th
pace. The counting of the 100th bead, which entailed one circuit of the
rosary, meant having taken 10,000 paces, which was equivalent to covering
five miles.
Considering the British usage of a prayer wheel for spying upon Tibet, it
is ironical that the Tibetans perceived their prayer wheels as emblems of
precision. Unlike the oral recitations of Buddhist mantras, wherein a slip of
the tongue could potentially destroy the rhythm of chanting and bring
disaster and calamity upon the worshipper, the prayer wheel ensured error-
free incantations, provided the mantras it carried inside were written
correctly. As Das annotated in the drawing, the prayer wheels were known
as mani-‘khor and used for invoking Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of
Compassion, whose mantra – universally known as ‘Om Mani Padme
Hum’ – was printed on strips of paper and kept inside the wheel, and also
carved upon the surface. Each revolution of the wheel, facilitated through a
flick of the hand, represented one incantation of the mantra.
It took ‘more than a year of utmost perseverance for Nain Singh to
succeed in entering Tibet alone’, records Raj. During the two-and-a-half-
year expedition, Nain Singh walked 1,200 miles at a maintained pace and
counted two and a half million paces with the aid of his prayer wheel and
rosary. He successfully measured the position of Lhasa, reported 31 other
stations, gained useful insights into Tibetan culture, mapped the upper
course of the Tsangpo from its source to Lhasa, and reported that the mighty
river was the same as the Brahmaputra. ‘The prayer wheel and the rosary
served as a perfect alibi, giving the Pundit a sufficiently pious look for him
not to be bothered by his fellow travellers when he took his astronomical
and meteorological readings.’
The prayer wheels were subsequently used by pandits for concealing
maps, notes, compasses and miniaturized instruments, as well as the scraps
of information on paper which they often received during their journeys.
The wheel is a cylinder, which was often of silver, beautifully carved and
embellished with precious stones, as Das’s drawing shows. This is fixed
loosely through a pin to a handle, and between the two is a ring, usually of
shell or ivory in specimens that are antique. A heavy ball or cube of metal is
attached to the cylinder by a chain or leather cord.
 The ‘ball and chain governor’, to use the Western terminology, sets up
the centrifugal momentum that turns the cylinder on its axis. Scholars
speculate that the form and design of the large prayer wheels in the
Buddhist temples was derived from the large revolving octagonal bookcases
in the monasteries of China which contained the Buddhist Tripitakas, and
that the handheld prayer wheels that find mention as lag-‘khor in old
Tibetan texts were possibly a Tibetan development. Lynn White, a historian
of technology, tells us that the mechanism of ‘ball and chain governor’ was
also known in the West by the fifteenth century, as it was then used for
machine designs in Italy.
Das drew the prayer wheel in 1879 during his first visit to Tibet, and as
the annotation informs us it belonged to the mother of the Lama of Tashi-
lhunpo (Tashi Lama). Das, ostensibly, undertook the expedition at the
latter’s invitation. An engineer by education, he became a headmaster at a
Tibetan boarding school in Darjeeling which was started by the Bengal
government in 1874 in view of the Great Game. In the popular book which
he wrote of his travels, Indian Pandits in the Land of Snow (1893), he stated
that since he ‘mastered the Tibetan texts’ he visited Tibet. He went on a
second expedition in 1881, also at the invitation of the Tashi Lama, and
during this visit met the Dalai Lama at Lhasa and saw many places of
pilgrimage and ‘great cities’. The Tibetans, he tells us, bestowed great
honour upon him for his knowledge of Buddhism, and placed him within
the lineage of the ‘illustrious Indian pundits [of ancient times] who had
reformed the religion of the Buddha’. Thus, by the time Das went on his
third visit in 1884 to spy upon the Tibetans, he was feted in Tibet as a
pandit. This time he accompanied the secretary to the Bengal government,
Colman Macaulay. They went through the Lachen Valley (Sikkim), and
Macaulay memorialized the journey in a poem with the note

And Sarat Chandra, hardy son

Of soft Bengal, whose wondrous store
 Of Buddhist and Tibetan lore
A place in fame’s bright page has won,
Friend of the Tashi Lama’s line,
Whose eyes have seen, the gleaming shrine
Of holy Lhassa, came to show
The wonders of the land of snow.

Clearly, Das was a great asset for this first British encounter with the
Tibetan kingdom, and in 1885 he was sent to Peking (China) to assist the
colonial government in matters connected with Tibet. The trip was his
diplomatic success. He gained the confidence of the tutor and prime
minister of the Chinese emperor and the Tibetan plenipotentiary. The
Peking correspondent of the London Times reported his heroic undertakings
as

In using Asiatics to conciliate Asiatics, the Government would be

following the line of least resistance and might hit upon the true
solution of the Tibetan problem. There are Bengali Pandits, not many
perhaps, who combine the highest qualities of the European explorer
with tolerance of privations and subtlety of address which are special
characteristics of the Hindus. Their mildness disarms the hostility,
and when imbued with zeal for their work their quiet resolution and
infinite capacity for waiting overcomes every obstacle. With a
handful of rupees they appear capable of making stupendous
journeys over the eternal snows, surveying the country as they go,
and gaining the active good will of the inhabitants. Such a force as
that is surely an element of incalculable strength to a government
whose external affairs are all Asiatic. That at any rate is the
impression which an outsider gathers from observing one specimen
of the class who has come to Peking in the suite of Mr Macaulay.

The high praise of the Bengali Pandits in the British press is notable
because it belongs to a period when the British saw themselves as heroic
explorers and routinely castigated the Bengalis as ‘babus’ who were ‘soft’
and ‘effeminate’, an attitude also conveyed in Macaulay’s poem.
The prayer wheel and rosary required extreme patience and perfection
from their users in their techniques of pacing. They directed the pandits to
patiently develop accuracy, and because of the ‘assured calibration of his
human instrument’, as Raj tells us, ‘Montgomerie could link two distinct
surveying techniques on the map – classical triangulation and the
geodetically and astronomically controlled route surveys of the Pundits’.
The British invested in the confidence and credibility of their Indian
agents, and often lauded the accuracy of the Indian observations and
measurements, and we remember the declarations of Sir Henry Yule at a
meeting of the Royal Geographical Society (London) that for Nain Singh
‘to have made two […] journeys [to Tibet, and] adding so enormously to
accurate knowledge […] is what no European but the first rank of travellers
like Livingstone or Grant have done’. Subsequently, the Russians tried to
appropriate the reports, technical publications, prayer wheels and rosaries.
But despite seven attempts they could use neither the knowledge nor the
instruments. Raj paraphrases the Russian defeat aptly as ‘what was missing
were the human instruments and the trust and complicity thanks to which
the whole system functioned’.
Sarat Chandra Das’s drawing of the Tibetan wheel commits to our
memory the Indian instrumentations of British territorial surveillance. It
reminds us of the remarkable contributions of the Indians in the field
histories of the British Empire.

DAS, S.C. (1893). Indian Pandits in the Land of Snow. N.C. Das (Ed.). Baptist Mission Press.
DAS, S.C. (1904). Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet. W.W. Rockhill (Ed.). John Murray.
RAJ, K. (2007). Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in
South Asia, 1650–1900. Palgrave Macmillan.
WHITE, L. (1962). Medieval Technology and Social Change. Oxford University Press.
54
A DEEN DAYAL PHOTOGRAPH
Bhopal State, Madhya Pradesh
1886–87

THE PHOTOGRAPH DEPICTING A RAILWAY OF A PRINCELY STATE was taken by

Deen Dayal (1844–1905), the best-known Indian photographer of the
nineteenth century, who gained international renown during his lifetime. It
forestalls many histories and creates a critical regard of the photographic
encounter. We see it variously – as the brilliance of a native photographer of
India, a document of the rise of the Bhopal State and its investments into
projects of modernity, and as a memento of the two seminal technological
innovations of the nineteenth century, photography and steam engine. Both
transformed the ways in which India was seen, mapped and accessed by the
British, and opened up immense possibilities of publicly challenging and
resisting their rule.
The Deen Dayal photograph prise recollections of the ways in which
aesthetics and perceptions imbricate techniques of field photography. It
illuminates the inherent quality of a photograph’s polysemic nature that
reveals ‘much more than what is printed on photographic paper’, to borrow
a phrase from Ariella Azoulay’s powerful history of The Civil Contract of
Photography (2008). As Azoulay demonstrates, photographs ‘allow civic
negotiations about the subject they designate’ which implicate their various
uses and displays and also the practices of picture-taking. In reckoning with
a Deen Dayal photograph, which is clearly stamped with the authorship of
its creator, we begin to see why every photograph belongs to no one. This
insight requires us to place the rich histories of photography within the
mainstream economic, political, social and other histories of Modern and
Contemporary India, and watch the ways in which we create the ontology
of presence.

‘Bhopal State Railway’. Albumen Print, Lala Deen Dayal, c. 1886–87, 202 mm × 268 mm,
Photographer’s Ref. 3043. ACP: 2001.14.0247(37).
Album Views of Central India, 1886–87, Lala Deen Dayal, 280 mm × 380 mm × 50 mm. Containing
the photograph of Bhopal State Railway. ACP: 2001.14.0247.

Within India, photography and railways came to be seen at about the

same time, in the 1850s. Although daguerreotypes were possibly made in
Bombay and Calcutta by December 1839, within six months of the launch
of the technology in Europe, the ‘remarkable efflorescence’ of photographic
activities in India took place only from the mid-1850s, ‘typified by the
dominance of amateurs […], establishment of photographic societies in all
three presidencies and active government sponsorship’ as John Falconer
reminds us. Similarly, although plans and investments for railways in India
were increasingly mooted from the early 1840s and the first rail company –
the Great Indian Peninsular Railway (GIPR) – was established in 1849, the
first commuter trains operated only from 1853. This maiden venture
between Bombay and Thane was followed by another, in the east in 1854,
between Calcutta and Hooghly.
Photography and railways remained daunting enterprises in India
throughout the 1860s. Samuel Bourne (1834–1912), the pioneering British
commercial photographer of India, highlighted the travails of his profession
in his bitter complaints about the difficulties and destructive forces that
attended the procurement of supplies. Bourne recruited more than thirty
porters in each of his three Himalayan journeys, between 1863 and 1866,
who carried his ten-foot-high tent, hundreds of heavy glass plates and
bottles of chemicals, bulky cameras, lenses and his personal luggage, often
in perilous conditions. Bourne made his European reputation as the
photographer of the picturesque quite literally on their backs, and, as
Sandeep Banerjee recalls, his interaction with his coolies speaks of the
wage relations and the attendant violence which mediated the practices of
British photography of India.
Similar to the early histories of photography, those of railways highlight
a formidable task and one of the best examples is the ‘taming’ of the 15-
mile-incline of the Bhor Ghat, which was undertaken by the GIPR to
provide Bombay with ‘unfettered access to the cotton-rich Deccan’, as Aditi
Shah recounts. The project required 8 years, 26 tunnels and 8 viaducts of
masonry for completion, and took more than 24,000 lives. At the time of its
grand inauguration in Khandala in 1863, 42,000 workers were still working
on the track. Three decades later, it was recalled as ‘a certain and more
enduring form of attack than military power’ within the professional
journals of civil engineering.
Coincidentally, developments in photographic technologies began to
occur from the early years of the Raj and facilitated imperialist projects. By
the mid-1870s, as photography became easier, with smaller and more
convenient equipment, it constituted a powerful tool of racialization,
classification and surveillance. To a considerable extent, this use followed
some of the precedence of the photographic project that had culminated in
the eight-volumed The People of India (published 1868–75). By then,
railway lines of the three main rail companies – GIPR, East India Railway
and Madras Rail – connected Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, although large
tracts such as in central India remained rail-free. Demonstrating its
proverbial financial stringency, the colonial government bullied the native
princes to pay for the construction of railways that were to, supposedly,
benefit their provinces. Henry Daly, the Agent of the governor general in
central India (1870–81), cajoled the states within the region – Gwalior,
Bundelkhand, Baghelkhand, Malwa, Bhopal, Indore and Bhopawar – to
initiate rail projects, notably through the logic that ‘with a line of rail,
Malwa would be to Central India what Bengal is to the North-West
Provinces’. The rulers of Gwalior, Indore and Bhopal shouldered the lion's
share of the construction, and Deen Dayal’s photograph of a ‘train in the
middle distance’, as it is described by his premier historians Deborah
Hutton and Deepali Dewan, dates from the time when the projects were
near completion.
The photograph allows a recall of the famine that severely afflicted
Central India between 1866 and 1868, for which the colonial government
unashamedly promoted the railways as ‘an artery for the corn trade in years
of plenty, and the only artery of supply to a large famine tract in years of
scarcity’, to quote a report in the Times of India in January 1885. Inevitably,
the rail connections through Central India eased up movements of the army,
and goods of colonial trade such as cotton, opium and salt, and strengthened
British politics of exploitation. However, the photograph also brings to
mind the astute Begum of Bhopal, who when asked to pay ₹50 lakhs of the
estimated 63 to the colonial government, saw to it that the Viceroy ratified
her stipulations: the profits on the sum she was to pay were to be enjoyed in
perpetuity by the Bhopal Durbar.
The photograph bears the hallmarks of the photography of Deen Dayal. It
is ‘rich in colour and at the same time soft to the eye [with] no black
corners […] the minute details [are] visible in the shade’, and the subject
depicted with ‘knowledge of line and perspective’, to quote a description by
the British painter F.A. Phillips, who ordered a selection of Dayal’s
photographic views when travelling in India in 1887. Dayal’s photographs
inform us of his brilliant uses of light, through which he created a sense of
the distance between the different elements he photographed. He thereby
produced a unique ‘layering effect’, as Hutton and Dewan point out. Of this
photograph of the Bhopal State Railway, they note that

The camera is positioned from above and shows the tracks cutting
through the landscape across the middle of the picture plane. In this
way the composition emphasizes the sense of movement, indexed in
the train’s puff of smoke, which leaves behind a seemingly
bewildered group on foot.

The commanding viewpoint and slightly elevated bird’s-eye perspective

is recalled today as emblematic of Dayal’s oeuvre. This ‘picture-taking of a
vantage point’ documents his education in civil engineering from
Thomason College, Roorkee, as he brought into his photography the
techniques of surveying. He successfully framed a baseline and corners of
angles through his camera, and thereby created photographic perspectives
of triangulation. But he also adapted the visual strategies that were in
fashion, prominently the picturesque, which allows us to literally watch the
billowing trail of smoke from the train.
 Dayal’s oeuvre, therefore, represents ‘the best approaches and latest
techniques of the day’, as Hutton and Dewan affirm, and allow us to
critique ‘the polarizing discourse in the study of colonial visual culture that
tends to try to identify separate British and Indian elements (or conversely
tries to erase any difference)’. In fact, Dayal’s reputation and commercial
success spoke of the consistently high quality of work which he, and
subsequently his sons and the photographers of his studios at Indore (1885–
94), Secunderabad (1886–to date) and Bombay (1896–1912), produced.
Therefore, a Deen Dayal photograph, and those sold as Deen Dayal and
Sons, negate truths about ‘native gaze’ in the Indian approaches to
photography during the nineteenth century.
Dayal possibly learnt how to use a camera at Thomason College, where
photography was made part of the syllabi from 1864. He began to
photograph consistently from sometime around 1874 at his first and only
government job, as a draughtsman-surveyor and estimator at the office of
the Chief Engineer, Public Works Department (Central India Agency), at
Indore. In 1878 he began to number his negatives – no doubt with aims
towards a professional practice – and by 1885 he had acquired a
photography studio in the city. By then he had also created a commendable
portfolio ‘of prominent people, the military and architecture’, as Dewan
recalls, travelled widely within Bombay Presidency and parts of Rajasthan
for photographing monuments, accompanied Lepel Griffin, the new Agent
of central India (1881–88) who succeeded Daly, on a tour of Bundelkhand
(1882–83), and won the silver and gold medals for photography at
exhibitions in Jaipur (1883) and Calcutta (1884) respectively.
Dayal noted in his memoirs that he was very much encouraged into
photography by Daly. His employment in the Public Works Department
would have made him visible to top administrators of Central India, and
also put him in a position ‘to interact with a number of native rulers’.
Therefore, we can anticipate his first professional photographs in the
princely territories of Central India, Gwalior and Bhopal ‘after he started
using negative numbers’.
 Notably, public works projects were riddled with conflicting interests and
bred contestations between colonial officials and princely states. Dayal
would have ‘been exposed to the sensitive politics involved in the work of
the Central India Agency’, as Dewan reminds us, and his photographs of
railways, bridges and landscapes of Gwalior, Indore and Bhopal States, are
testimony to the inordinate skills of diplomacy he also acquired through the
post of a surveyor.
In 1885, Dayal sought a two-year furlough for undertaking photographic
tours. During this period, he vastly extended his network of acquaintances
of British and Indian elites by photographing in Shimla, the summer capital
of the colonial government. At the end of the leave period, he left a secure
employment to embark upon an uncertain career as a commercial
photographer. He relocated to the princely state of Hyderabad, and in 1889
opened a studio at Secunderabad. In 1894, he was appointed the court
photographer of the Nizam, who conferred upon him the title of Raja
Bahadur Musavvir Jung, and following Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee
in 1897, the Dayal Studio received a Royal Warrant, the only photographic
studio in India that operated for Her Majesty.
In a celebration in London of Dayal’s astounding success Sir Mancherjee
Bhownaggree, then a member of the British Parliament, lauded his abilities
of transforming the superiority of skills into profitable industries. The
photograph of the Bhopal State Railway and its placement within an album
of Views of Central India, both, show us the ways in which Dayal crafted a
successful professional career by skilfully negotiating the overlapping
worlds of colonial administration, native courts, emerging urban
metropolises, and marketing and self-promotional practices.
In carefully mapping the successful business of Dayal and Sons, Hutton
and Dewan note that

customers wanting a souvenir of their travels in India […] could

purchase an entire album for Rs 50 to Rs 200 containing anywhere
between 20 and 100 pre-selected photographs handsomely bound
with an embossed leather cover. Gold lettering could be had for Rs
 10 extra. In addition […] Dayal’s photographs were framed and […]
displayed in homes; mounted as cabinet cards […] used as the basis
for engravings in international news magazines […] displayed at
national and international exhibitions, and […] circulated as cabinet
cards and cartes-de-visite.

A Deen Dayal photograph clearly demands a study of the photographic

business, and beckons enquiries into photography’s economic histories that
are largely unknown. It also reminds us to look for the histories of Indian
commercial photographers of the nineteenth century who worked outside
government and royal commissions and sustained their practice by, literally,
bringing photography to the people. Additionally, the many stories which
this photograph can tell us attunes us to note that photographs complicate
the matter of historicizing by exceeding our presumptions of what all they
can mean.

(1885, January 14). ‘A Hundred Years Ago: THE BHOPAL-CAWNPORE RAILWAY’. ProQuest
Historical Newspapers: The Times of India, p. 8.
AZOULAY, A. (2012). The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone Books.
BANERJEE, S. (2014). ‘Not Altogether Unpicturesque: Samuel Bourne and the Landscaping of the
Victorian Himalaya’. Victorian Literature and Culture, 42 (3), 351–68.
DOI:10.1017/S1060150314000035.
BOURNE, S. (1870, March 18). ‘A Photographic Journey through the Higher Himalayas’. The
British Journal of Photography, 125.
DALY, Major H. (1905). Memoirs of General Sir Henry Dermot Daly. John Murray.
DEWAN, D. (2013). ‘Public Works and Princely States’. In D. Dewan and D. Hutton (Eds), Raja
Deen: Artist Photographer in 19th-Century India (pp. 52–79). Mapin & The Alkazi Collection
of Photography.
HUTTON, D. and Dewan, D. (2013). ‘Introduction’. In D. Dewan and D. Hutton (Eds), Raja Deen:
Artist Photographer in 19th-Century India (pp. 16–51). Mapin & The Alkazi Collection of
Photography.
FALCONER, J. (1995). A Shifting Focus: Photography in India: 1850–1900. [Exhibition Catalogue].
The British Council.
PATWARDHAN, G.D. (1994, April 28). Astute Begum. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Times
of India, p. 12.
SHAH, A. (2019, May 9). ‘Bhor Ghat Incline: Triumph and Tragedy’. Live History India.
55
THE GODREJ LOCK
Bombay
First manufactured: 1897

THE SPRINGLESS DOOR LOCKS THAT ARE MANUFACTURED BY the industrial house
of Godrej are more commonly known to Indians as navtals, the latter being
one of its many varieties. First created in 1897 in Bombay, these locks were
marketed under the Anchor Brand. They revolutionized the existing
technologies of lock-making, and remind us to regard the significant
contributions of Indians in designing industrial products and heralding
major technological developments that have often been overlooked within
the world histories of science and technology.
The history of lock-making in the world can perhaps be located from
antiquity within the ruins of the fifth century BCE Assyrian palaces at
Khorsabad near Mosul in Iran. However, the ‘invention’ of the lock by
Romans constitutes the conventional origin story of lock-making, and this
Western historiography maps subsequent developments elsewhere as
improvements in the original Roman technology and design. By the second
half of the nineteenth century, sophisticated locks with an intricate lever
system were being widely manufactured in the West, and those made in
Britain – such as by Chubb and Baron, a reputed firm with a long tradition
of lock-making – were widely used in India.
Eight levers, springless lock, one of the oldest in the Godrej Archives. c. 1925, Godrej & Boyce Mfg.
Co. Ltd., MBO6-01-47-37.

Sketch of the springless lock for the patent obtained in 1908, July 24.

The Indian locks were all handcrafted until the end of the nineteenth
century, often in specialist centres of lock-making, such as Aligarh and
Howrah. The patterns were cast into clay moulds into which molten brass
was poured; the filing, polishing, cutting, welding, fitting and final
adjustments were all done by hand. The Anchor Brand, designed by the
pioneering businessman of the Godrej family, Ardeshir Godrej (1868–
1936), was the first machine-made lock to be made in India, in Bombay.
The ‘work’ on the lock was ‘done on modern methods, with the aid of
modern machinery’, as Ardeshir emphasized, and all the parts were made in
a factory that operated from a tiny shed at Lalbaug, next to Bombay
Gasworks. ‘Even the keys were all deep forged and machine cut and not
filed out by hand.’
Similar to the locks made in Europe, the Anchor brand had levers.
However, in the former the levers worked through springs attached to them,
whereas the levers of this lock were springless. The unique design ‘effected
marked improvements’ as the noted historian of Godrej Industries B.K.
Karanjia reminds us. Often the lever locks of the West would not yield to
the keys: the springs would break and the levers would stick to one another.
The absence of springs in the Anchor Brand eliminated the malfunction,
and the lock’s durability was enhanced by cutting the keys first and then
designing the lock to fit them. The product design established a virtually
unpickable and unbreakable lock.
Ardeshir Godrej manufactured the springless locks at a time when
notable Indians were actively campaigning for atmashakti (self-reliance)
and vigorously promoting the industrial development of their colonized
country. The clarion call soon galvanized the Swadeshi Movement (c.
1905–08), which unleashed, for the first time, a virulent mass movement in
India against the British. The lock received its patent in 1908, when the
Swadeshi movement was at its peak, and Ardeshir’s maiden product proved
to be a brilliant example of self-help. The patent office lauded the factory of
Messrs. Godrej and Boyce as ‘an excellent organization of tools and
processes which should enable the firm to turn out work, both in quantity
and quality, to satisfy the severest requirements’. The recommendation
bespoke the great potentials of the nascent Indian manufacturing industry in
design innovations, and the British expert John Williams, when asked to
give his opinion, wrote that he found the lock
 in design, material and workmanship a most satisfactory piece of
work. The strength and the wearing surfaces are ample […] the risk
of accident is practically eliminated […] and the precautions taken
against fraud are both ingenuous and effective.

The first sales of the Patent Springless lock exceeded ‘even Ardeshir’s
expectations’, as Karanjia tells us. It launched the reputation of Messrs.
Godrej and Boyce as the safekeeper of Indian homes. The power of home-
grown industrial design technology in a colonized India, which the small
machine-made locks demonstrated, illustrates the irony and exploitation of
the colonial economy. For, these locks captured the Indian markets at a time
when Indian expertise and resources were being vigorously exported by the
colonial government to Britain, then the premier industrial nation of the
world, for refurbishing British factories and mills.
The commercial success of his lock encouraged the innovative Ardeshir
to design a fireproof and burglar-proof safe, whose extraordinary first sales
founded the reputation of the Godrej family as intrepid entrepreneurs.
Similar to the lock, the safe too was unpickable, and its great commercial
value is well gauged in the directives of the Archaeological Survey of India
to Messrs. Godrej and Boyce in 1970 to design ‘safe-cum showcases’ for
the display of the ‘precious antiquities’ of Nalanda within the Nalanda site
museum. The Survey substantiated the directives with the stipulation that if
the experiment proved successful, the firm was to service other
archaeological site museums within India with such safes.
The phenomenal success of the indestructible locks and safes inspired
Ardeshir’s heirs to design many remarkable products within the state-of-
the-art, ultramodern factories they built within the Godrej estate at Vikhroli
(Mumbai) after Independence. The Godrej steel almirahs, touch-typewriters
and refrigerators became, like the locks and safes, essential items of the
Indian middle-class home.
The springless lock earns for Godrej Industries a substantial sum of the
annual profits to this day. And in its continued production we see the
enduring legacy of the Indian design technology for building a decidedly
Indian entrepreneurism.

D.O. letter dated 21 April 1970 from K.R. Vijayaraghavan, Superintendent Archaeologist, Indian
Museum (Calcutta), MB-10/14/17/1764. Important Activities of the Survey during 1969-70. File
No. 19/2/4/70-N. Activities of Museums Branch: National Archives of India.
KARANJIA, B.K. (2000). Godrej: A Hundred Years 1897–1997: Life’s Flag is Never Furled.
Penguin India.
56
A FIELD PHOTOGRAPH OF TODA
ANTHROPOLOGY
Nilgiri Hills, near Udhagamandalam, Tamil Nadu
1902
ALTHOUGH PHOTOGRAPHS MAY APPEAR TO US AS INSCRIPTIONS of things out
there, the photographic image, to borrow a Derridean phrase, ‘is never
present in and of itself’. For realism does not reside within a photograph, as
one of the seminal historians of photography, Elizabeth Edwards, reminds
us; it is a discursive formation. Analytical histories of photographs, which
have increasingly emerged over the past two decades, show us that their
creation, consumption, flow and exchange inscribe upon them many
meanings which neither the negative nor the prints can represent in entirety.
In fact, the excess of information which typifies a photograph makes it
potentially unknowable, and therefore one of the most potent objects to
think with. This field photograph of Toda anthropology illustrates the truth
value of the above statement and shows us why it makes more sense to ask
not what a photograph means but how it accrues value.
The photograph depicts a Toda man testing for visual acuity through the
Cohn’s E method. He is standing on a line drawn upon the ground and
holding a board which, unseen to us, is inscribed with the letter E. A person
wearing a hat, possibly P. Samuel, a field assistant, is noting the steps the
Toda man is taking towards a second board – not in the picture – which has
many E’s in different positions. The distance at which the Toda man makes
out the positions of the E’s in the second board by indicating on the board
he holds, is computed to measure his visual acuity. The two other men
sitting nearby, wrapped in the distinct puthikuzhi, the white woven shawl
worn by the Toda, have either been tested or are awaiting their turn.
Toda man tested for visual acuity by Cohn’s E method. Silver Gelatin Print, 1902, MAA:
P.13771.WHR.

W.H.R. Rivers during field study of visual acuity among the Toda. Silver Gelatin Print, 1902, MAA:
P.13801. WHR.

The photograph dates from the first formal anthropological expedition

that was undertaken in India, between January and July 1902, by the British
medic and experimental psychologist William Halse Rivers Rivers (1864–
1922) among the Toda people of Nilgiri hills near Ootacamund, or Ooty
(Udhagamandalam). By then, Rivers was a world-leading figure in field
psychology, having undertaken highly successful fieldwork in measuring
visual and auditory reactions among the natives of Torres Strait (Australia),
in Mabuiag and Murray Island. He had been a team member of the
pioneering anthropological expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898–99,
which was organized and led by the zoologist-turned-ethnographer Alfred
Cort Haddon (1855–1940). After the expedition, Rivers followed the
maiden research by further studying ‘visual acuity and sensibility to light
difference’ in Fly River Valley (Papua New Guinea).
Explaining visual acuity as the ‘resolving power of the eye’, he presented
a graphic description of the Cohn’s E method in the Reports of the
expedition to Torres Strait, stating that

The individual to be tested held in his hand a board on which was

pasted a large E and when any letter was pointed out to him, he
simply had to put the E in his hand position. On the back of the board
was pasted a mark which indicated to me whether he had placed the
E correctly or not. Observations were always commenced at a
distance of 15 metres from the type. This distance had advantage of
being outside at which most could read […] and I was able at this
distance to take them over the large letters of the first four rows till
they became perfectly familiar with the method.

The E method was developed during the late 1860s and required, as
Rivers explained, the plotting of ‘the smallest angle at which the eye
recognised the form of the object’. It entailed testing vision by also
psychological manoeuvring, and complicated formulations and established
truths regarding the differential observations of the ‘civilized and primitive
races’.
Inevitably, the field method and results reflected contemporary
imperialist and racist politics. Thus, we note that although Rivers
successfully proved that the ‘visual acuity of the savage and half-civilized
people’ was similar to that ‘of the normal European’, he asserted that the
‘predominant attention of the savage to concentrate on things around him
may act as an obstacle to higher mental development’. Objective
observations clearly nurtured truth-making myths about the intellectual
superiority of the white man.
Rivers ventured into anthropology and India at Haddon’s encouragement.
As Natasha Eaton tells us

given the complexity of Indian social and religious practices and the
devastating impact of colonization, Haddon passionately believed
that the ‘systematic study of the various races in South Asia’ would
be a corrective to the arrogant, imperial anthropological
entanglement with empire which had splattered the world map with
the ‘red paint of British aggression’.

For Rivers, the promise of anthropological field study in India lay in the
opportunity of developing the genealogical method among the small and
seemingly insular Toda people, whom he would have known through
Haddon’s connections with Edgar Thurston. The botanist-cum-ethnologist
Thurston, who was superintendent of that Madras Museum, pitched a
laboratory tent in the salubrious hill station of Ooty in 1896, and embarked
upon an anthropometric study of the Toda.
Rivers had formulated the genealogical method in Torres Strait by
collecting kinship data. He foresaw the use of the method in unlocking the
social organization of the ‘primitive races’ and aimed his anthropological
study of the Toda, as he himself declared, ‘in the investigation of sociology
and religion’. Despite his intellectual commitments to psychometric tests in
the field, for which he came to Ooty equipped with high-precision
laboratory instruments, Rivers, as we learn from Simon Schaffer’s study,
departed consciously from Thurston’s anthropometric programme. ‘The
anthropometrist Thurston carefully looked at Todas as they were
anonymous things. The anthropologist Rivers instead worked out how
carefully specifically named Todas looked at things’.
 Rivers recorded the ‘pedigrees of seventy-two families, including the
whole of the Toda community’, which he stated was ‘most valuable for
showing the real people’, and which comprised the name of every Toda,
their patrilineal lineages and all their customs. The detailed ethnographic
account in his groundbreaking monograph, The Todas (1906), was
prominently recalled in the 1970s as ‘an outstanding example of precise
documentation’, by Edmund Leach, the eminent anthropologist of South
Asia (1910–1989). The monograph was the first anthropological treatise of
South Asia and remains a masterpiece of in-depth field study.
In Torres Strait, Rivers learnt to use the camera for field documentation,
and as Paul Hockings informs us, he ‘tied the photographic record into his
genealogical charts’ among the Toda. In the Niligiri hills, although he took
field photographs, he also commissioned the photographic firm Wiele and
Klein of Madras, who had newly opened a studio in Ooty, to take
photographs for his study. Under the direction of Samuel, his field assistant
and interpreter, the photographers continued to create for him many
evocative portraits of those he named in the genealogical tables, and scenic
views of the munds (Toda dwellings), dairies and rituals long after he left
India.
Rivers used the potraits at lectures, and they created meaning about Toda
anthropology in Britain. However, they also circulated in Ooty and among
his acquaintances and the people he had studied, as cherished presents from
him. The different histories of consuming a ‘portrait of a Toda’, for
example, reveal the difficulty of pinning down their photographic meaning.
Photographs, inevitably, are memory makers. We recall that the Todas
were described as ‘noble savages’ by the nineteenth-century surveyors of
the Nilgiris, inhabitants of ‘a sort of tropical Switzerland […] draped in a
short toga [with] quite the grand air’. Rivers’s presentation of them as
rational, normal people ‘motivated by the practical necessities of daily life’
made the former studies of their physical anthropology and anthropometry,
including Thurston’s, look like ‘irrelevant statistical observations’ as
Christopher Pinney points out. Rivers brought into South Asia ‘the practice
of fieldwork – a circumscribed period of interaction with another culture
with the sole and express purpose of its social and cultural construction’.
Notably, his field study of the Toda provides a glimpse of the
methodological rigour that was sought for the emerging science of social
anthropology.
The Todas offers a brilliant insight into the cult of the sacred buffaloes
which Rivers recorded through observations that

[…] the care of certain animals, regarded as more sacred than the
rest, is associated with much ceremonial. The sacred animals are
attended by men especially set apart, who form the Toda priesthood,
and the milk of the sacred animals is churned in dairies which may be
regarded as Toda temples and are so regarded by the Todas
themselves. […] The dairies form an ascending series in which we
find increasing definiteness and complexity of ritual; increasing
sanctity of the dairy-man priest, increasing stringency of the rules for
the conduct of his daily life, and increasing elaboration of the
ceremonies which attend his entrance upon office.

Rivers also reported that many once-important Toda ceremonials were no

longer performed, and many key institutions that lasted for centuries would
‘certainly disappear in a few decades’.
The Toda society diminished drastically during the twentieth century.
Afflicted and exploited by mindless governance and ruthless capitalism, the
habitats and livelihoods of the Toda became severely threatened. Even
invasive plants have caused great harm, and recent media reports inform us
that in ‘periods without rain [those] such as the scotch broom, yellow
cassia, wattle and so on have eaten up most of the shola forest patches
especially in the upper reaches of the Nilgiris’, bringing the Toda into
conflict with wildlife. Moreover, their forests have been consistently
encroached by predators who kill their buffaloes, and the Toda find it very
difficult to locate good grazing land. It is also quite striking that the vast
literature of modern dairying practices in India that has followed the White
Revolution seemingly ignores the histories of Toda dairying and herding.
The tribal practices remain confined to the remit of the anthropological
gaze.
Since the Nilgiris were exploited for plantations from the 1830s, the Toda
have increasingly felt pressurized to conform to the norms of ‘civilized
society’ and embrace the religion of the settler populations. We learn from
Rivers that Samuel, who belonged to the Church of England Zenana
Missionary Society, learnt the Toda language to convert (unsuccessfully, for
over ten years) those living near Ooty into his faith. A large section of the
Toda today follow local Hindu beliefs. Many are devotees of the Ayyappan
cult and undertake the annual pilgrimage to Sabarimala. We may therefore
conjecture that if Rivers had visited his anthropological field today he
would not have found any trace of the rituals of the sacred buffaloes and
dairies which he had so meticulously recorded.
Photographs of anthropological intent illuminate rather powerfully, the
photographic embodiment of histories of encounters. This field photograph
jogs our memory of the inordinately long period – more than 200 years – of
surveying and recording India’s tribal population, and directs us, thereby, to
engage with this other India as equals, and intellectually, for establishing
India’s historical narratives.

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Torres Straits, II(1), 12–47.
RIVERS, W.H.R. (1906). The Todas. Macmillan.
SCHAFFER, S. (2007). ‘Astrophysics, Anthropology and Other Imperial Pursuits’. In J. Edwards, P.
Harvey and P. Wade (Eds), Anthropology and Science: Epistemologies in Practice (pp. 19–38).
Berg.
57
JATASHUR, THE MILLSTONE OF
CASTE
Calcutta
Date of publication: 1917

THE CARTOON OF A PORTLY BRAHMIN PRIEST RECITING the shastras and lighting
the sacrificial fire upon a giant millstone, which is being turned by a
smiling skeleton to grind people to death, conveys with brutality the
tyranny of the caste system. The caption in Bengali is Jatashur, which
means ‘the demon of caste’ (jaat in Bengali means caste and ashur is
demon), and the cartoon reminds us to take note of the immense power of
the comic to force a society to self-reflect.
Jatashur is one among the sixteen cartoons that were created by
Gaganendranath Tagore (1867–1938), one of India’s foremost modernist
painters, for his second album of caricature, Adbhut Lok whose English title
he had coined as The Realm of the Absurd. Through the cartoons,
Gaganendranath had sardonically lampooned the greed, hypocrisy and
malpractices of the Brahmins and priests of contemporary Bengal. In
addition to the Jatashur, the other Adbhut Lok which the album illustrated
were the priests who scurried along ‘1, Hindu Street’ tucking whiskey and
chicken under the cover of an umbrella, those who sold benediction in lieu
of gold coins while slyly eying the women devotees whom they purified
with ‘muddy waters’, and those who drank wine, ate meat and sported
women while watching religious texts being thrown outside their windows.
All mock the imperishable sacredness of a Brahmin, invoking laughter and
intense rage simultaneously.
‘Millstone of Caste’, Jatashur. Ink on paper, Gaganendranath Tagore, 440 mm × 300 mm, one of 16
lithographs in Adbhut Lok (1917). V&A: IS.5:17-1987.

In the introduction to Adbhut Lok, Gaganendranath recalled the French

philosopher Henri Bergson’s treatise on Laughter: An Essay on the
Meaning of the Comic (1900) for emphasizing that the comic accrues
agency as society’s brutal critique because it inhabits the realm of the
absurd. Adbhut means ‘strange’ in Bengali, and alludes to the non-reason of
the absurd, of which the Jatashur is a concrete form. The cartoon represents
the physical embeddedness of the ‘millstone of caste’ within the Bengali
Hindu society of the early-twentieth century through the grip of the demon
on the priest, which causes lower-caste mortals to be thrown into the abyss
of the netherworld. It invokes dark humour at the religiosity which oils a
killing machine, and the viewer is provoked to scream at the inhumanity of
the highest of the Hindu castes, also the self-appointed moral guardian of
Hindu society.
The historical evidence of the tyranny of the caste system in colonial
Bengal, which the cartoon depicts, is conveyed very little in the history
books. These mainly focus upon the colonial city of Calcutta, and many
regale us with the achievements and foibles of the bhadralok (literally
meaning good, civilized people), who as a class brought in profound social
and economic changes within the metropolis. The bhadralok were the
anglicized gentry – dapper aristocrats, small zamindars, merchants,
shopkeepers and white-collar workers – who formed the new middle class
of Bengal. They represented, as the historian S.N. Mukherjee had
emphasized, an open de facto social group. Although comprising Brahmins,
Kayasthas and Baidyas – the upper castes of Bengal – the class they
constituted often appeared non-representative of the trenchant Bengali caste
politics. This class favoured modernization and commercialization, and a
large number of its mainly English-medium-educated members had faith in
reforms and in their own ability to change their destiny.
Historians suggest that Bengal was historically less rigidly casteist than
many other parts of India. People of different castes resided in the same
area within the cities, and the schools and colleges of the late-nineteenth
century offered no caste privileges. Following the provenance of most other
characters who feature in the Adbhut Lok, we would be right in conjecturing
that this particular Jatashur resided in Calcutta, and, if so, the cartoon
allows us to recall a distinctly caste-related incident during the 1890s in this
pre-eminent capital of British India. The upper castes had risen in agitation
over the establishment of a water system as they failed to fathom how all
castes could be allowed to use the same taps. The cartoon therefore draws
our attention to the absurd colonial modernity of Bengal which perpetuated
age-old caste-ridden social norms.
Adbhut Lok was published in 1917, and so was Birupa Bajra (Strange
Thunderbolt) Gaganendranath’s first album of cartoons where he
lampooned the immoral lifestyles of the bhadralok. In introducing Birupa
Bajra, Gaganendranath wrote that ‘when deformities go unchecked, but are
cherished by blind habit, it is the duty of the artist to show that they are ugly
and vulgar and therefore abnormal’.
The constant shifts in Gaganendranath’s styles of painting baffled his
contemporaries. And although the cartoons brought him high fame during
his lifetime, his oeuvre was regarded as an expression of the amateur and
dilettante. Nirad Chaudhuri, the eminent social critic of Bengal,
subsequently added to the view by stating that Gaganendranath’s cartoons
failed to rise above their ‘moral-didactic value’, although he rightly
observed that they revealed the artist’s instinctive mastery over the
‘psychological implications of visual forms’. Historians in the twenty-first
century have, however, changed their opinions about Gaganendranath’s art.
Sanjukta Sunderason, who has studied his cartoons in detail, tells us that
through the images of ‘perfect deformity’ he could successfully push
caricature into the ‘realms of grotesque realism’, and thereby place his
humour apart from his peers within a domain that was the ‘opposite of
mirth’. Sunderason has used the phrase ‘opposite of mirth’ from a review of
Birupa Bajra that appeared in the Hindu Patriot in 1917, and which
declared that

a glance at these cartoons will show that Mr Tagore is […] not an

irresponsible humourist only concerned to play with our weaknesses
with the sole purpose of raising a smile […] He is a serious critic of
the many sins of the present day Bengalee life […] What he has felt
is certainly too deep for tears and the humorous verbitage he has
chosen vainly covers the shrieks of his heart. And we have no doubt
 that these drawings will move many, as they are intended to do, to a
feeling which is opposite of mirth.

The review highlights Gaganendranath’s moral and humane commitments

as a social critic who fashioned his caricatural art to convey his beliefs. This
is why the Jatashur and his other satirical images are studied today as
expressionist cartoons that visually create a massive physical impact.
The cartoons, as Sunderason documents, fashioned a ‘new beginning of
caricatural ethic in art’, and ‘set in motion a humanist critique […] that
offers lineages for the social realism more clearly visible from the late-
1930s [particularly] in the wake of war, famine and genocide’.
Gaganendranath, who, unfortunately, became stricken by paralysis in 1929,
did not live to see his unique and seminal legacy. In fact, the self-taught
painter – who took up painting rather late in life, at the age of thirty-eight –
largely ‘preferred to stay in the shadows of his more famous younger
brother Abanindranath, and uncle Rabindranath’, as Partha Mitter recalls.
Yet, today Gaganendranath is deemed the first Indian painter to create a
personal mythology by delving into his own subconscious. Having carefully
studied the complex post-Cubist paintings of the last years of his active life,
the historian of contemporary art Ratan Parimoo found them reflecting ‘the
modern Indian psyche’, delving into one’s own unconscious, and therefore,
belonging ‘completely to the twentieth century’. The caricatures add to
Parimoo’s analyses, and the Jatashur provides a timely reminder of the
artists excluded from textbooks of Indian history, and the need to rectify the
evolutionary tales of the progress of an Indian national art.
The cartoons are usually regarded as an interlude in Gaganendranath’s
painting career, which began with an impressionist phase and culminated in
experiments with ‘prisms, cubes and refracted planes of light and colour’ to
evoke ‘a world of somnambulist fantasy in the cubist compositions’, as
Tapati Guha-Thakurta has noted. Yet, Sunderason’s study also shows that
‘situated right in the middle of his oeuvre’, the caricatures ‘reveal a density
that needs to be retrieved […] both for the genre of visual satire as well as
the political unconsciousness of modernism in India’. Both she and Parimoo
regard Gaganendranath as being light years ahead of his times, and the
Jatashur draws our attention to the continued relevance of this caricatural
art to contemporary modernity.
The Jatashur noticeably looms over the Hindu India of today that
continues to stoke caste conflicts, often by invoking age-old taboos such as
inter-caste marriage, prohibition on commensality (eating together) and
ancient rituals of pollution and purity. The unique Hindu caste system is
based upon the principle of natural superiority and has fashioned a
segmented society of hierarchically ordered four varnas, namely, Brahmin,
Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra.
In tracing origins of caste, historians often refer to the Purushasukta
hymn in the tenth mandala (section) of the Rig Veda, which is a later
addition, and the only Rigvedic hymn mentioning the four varnas.
However, as Sanskritists Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton emphasize,
the hymn ‘may have been included to provide a Rigvedic charter for such a
division in society’. It declares

When they apportioned the Man, into how many parts did they
arrange him?
What was his mouth? What his two arms? What are said to be his
two thighs, his two feet?
The brahmin was his mouth. The ruler was made his two arms.
As to his thighs – that is what the freeman was. From his two feet the
servant was born.

(Rig Veda, hymn. X. 90, trans. Jamison and Brereton)

The varna status which the hymn informs of, is a ‘ritual status’, as
Romila Thapar has reiterated time and again. Its ritual observance possibly
became mandatory from the middle of the first millennium BCE for the
followers of the Brahmanical religion. Regional histories of India, such as
of Bengal where the Kshatriya and Vaishya castes remained glaringly
absent, show us that all four varnas did not exist uniformly in all areas of
the subcontinent. In fact, caste has existed for over two millennia because
of the jati relationships which the system incorporated.
Jati fixes an individual’s caste status through ‘birth’, which is the word’s
literal meaning. It denotes hereditary occupational and endogamous
communities that are placed within the caste hierarchy. Although birth into
a specific jati thwarts individual ambitions to move up the societal ladder,
jati groups have often changed their existing social status by relocating and
changing occupations. Thus, the histories of the various jatis show us the
element of social mobility within a system of social control, namely, caste,
which appears historically fixed.
Through his study of the features of the caste system during the 1950s,
the social anthropologist G.S. Ghurye had noted that in each linguistic area
there were about 200 caste groups with distinct names. Ghurye emphasized
that each caste group in each region tries to prove that it is equal to the
superior caste groups.
The caste system of the Hindu religion sits oddly within aspirations of
democracy, which requires engagement with all as equals. The ordering of a
social hierarchy through caste in India has historically nurtured the
economic poverty of those placed in the lower castes. The ‘millstone of
caste’, against which Gaganendranath raged, continues to crush the lower
orders in a merciless manner. The killing of a Dalit youth by three men of
the Kshatriya caste near Bhavnagar (Gujarat) on 29 March 2018 because
the former owned and rode a horse – which was reported in major
newspapers, such as the Indian Express – starkly embodies the abiding
value of his Jatashur as a strident critic of one of the most ancient, absurd
and tyrannical norms of Hindu society.

GHURYE, G.S. (1992). ‘Features of the Caste System’. In D. Gupta (Ed.), Social Stratification (pp.
35–48). Oxford University Press [original publication 1932].
GUHA-THAKURTA, T. (1998). The Making of New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and
Nationalism in Bengal, 1850–1920. Cambridge University Press.
JAMISON, S.W. and J.P. Brereton. (Trans.) (2014). The Rig Veda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of
India, Vol. 3. Oxford University Press.
KATESHIYA, G.B. (2018, 30 March). ‘For Riding Horse, Upper Caste Men Kill Dalit Youth in
Gujarat’. Indian Express.
MITTER, P. (2001). Indian Art. Oxford University Press.
MUKHERJEE, S.N. (1993). Calcutta: Essays in Urban History. Subarnarekha.
PARIMOO, R. (1996). Gaganendranath Tagore: The Pictorial World. New Delhi: National Gallery
of Modern Art.
SUNDERASON, S. (2016). ‘Arts of Contradiction: Gaganendranath Tagore and the Caricatural
Aesthetic of Colonial India’. South Asian Studies, 32(2), 129–43.
doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2016.1222669.
THAPAR, R. (2003). Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin.
58
MONKEY SKULL TROPHY
Wakching, Mon District, Nagaland
Early 1920s

THERE IS CERTAINLY NO EVIDENCE TO CONFIRM THAT THE monkey skull was

displayed by its collector John Henry Hutton (1885–1968) either in his
home or in his office at Cambridge, at the Department of Social
Anthropology where he was the William Wyse Professor from 1937 until
1950. The skull, possibly of a rhesus macaque, is decorated with tufts of
goat hair dyed red and yellow, and the eye sockets are filled with discs of
sholapith. Hutton made it look like a collector’s item by placing it in a
domed glass case with a red-velvet-lined surface. He retained it in his
possession until his retirement from the University, despite making large
donations of his Naga collection to MAA from the mid-1920s.
Hutton’s hanging on to the object possibly shows his personal attachment
to it, and the valuation he accorded it as a professional item of his long field
research of the Naga people. He had acquired vast knowledge of the Naga
and other indigenous people of northeast India during his administrative
career in the Indian Civil Service (ICS), which he joined in 1909, and which
took him to the Assam–Burma border. He was deputy commissioner of the
Naga Hills during the 1920s, and subsequently the census commissioner of
India for the census of 1931. He acquired a professional academic career in
Cambridge after leaving India and the ICS in 1933.
Decorated monkey skull, mounted inside a domed glass case with red velvet bottom. 155 mm × 153
mm × 155 mm. Bone, Hair, Pith, Plant Fibre, Textile, Wood, Glass. c. 1920s, Wakching, Nagaland.
MAA, 1950.679.

Headhunting Basket. Naga, c. early 20th century. Cane, Wood, Beads, Monkey Skull. NM. 56.84-11
(a).

Hutton’s much younger colleague, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf – the

collector of the Chenchu flute (see ch. 59) who wrote the first ethnographic
account of The Konyak Nagas (1969) – noted in his obituary for Hutton that
‘with [the] enthusiasm and zest of an amateur’, he availed ‘the unrivalled
opportunities for first-hand observation of primitive populations still
uninfluenced by modern civilization’. Lauding Hutton’s parallel careers in
administration and anthropology during his tenure as a civil servant,
Haimendorf summed up Hutton’s achievement as follows:

He had developed into an anthropologist of note and international

reputation long before he came to exchange the responsibilities of a
senior administrator for a life of teaching and scholarship. Like other
British officials he developed a deep and lasting attachment to the
Nagas, and the experience he gained by his penetrating interest in
their cultural and social life became a decisive factor in his
intellectual development. From 1920 onwards he wrote a large
number of articles on topics connected with Naga ethnography, and
his two voluminous monographs The Angami Nagas and The Sema
Nagas, both published in 1921, laid the foundations of his reputation
as an anthropologist […] Hutton saw beyond the region for the
administration of which he was responsible, and spent much effort on
tracing parallels between the Nagas and tribal populations of
southeast Asia and Oceania. Moreover [he] took it upon himself to
stimulate anthropological research by inspiring other members of the
Indian Civil Service to follow his example.

The collections history of the monkey skull takes us to the connected

histories of administration and anthropology, and of the pioneering field
research of many colonial administrators which transformed ethnographic
surveying into the disciplinary realm of social anthropology.
The monkey skull, largely due to its donation as a unique display item, is
one of the prized Naga objects of MAA, whose earliest artefacts from the
Naga Hills date back to the mid-nineteenth century. These were sourced by
Captain John Butler, the British officer who led military forces into
Nowgong (Nagaon, Assam) in 1845. A century later, the British launched
bold and extensive punitive expeditions in the Naga villages to stop Naga
headhunting raids into the tea plantations in Assam – their new and then
most lucrative commercial venture – and for mapping routes between
Assam, Burma and Manipur to increase trade networks. Apart from
destroying many villages in the hills and plains, the military expeditions
changed relationships among many indigenous groups in the northeast,
brought Christianity into the area, expanded British commercial ventures
and enhanced profits from the tea estates. Significantly, they opened up the
area to ethnographic study. Unfortunately, the Western observers remain the
key ethnographers of the Naga Hills, as turbulent politics of the post-
colonial era has hampered research explorations within the area. The reports
of the surveyors show that most were quick to divide the indigenous
population into various tribes, such as the Ao, Angami, Sema, Konyak,
Lotha, Rengma, Sumi and others, and the objects they collected they also
assigned as belonging to particular tribes.
As Julian Jacobs et al. note, the surveys ‘highlight a basic question: were
the Nagas one people or many tribes’, and he informs us that

The complexity of linguistic, cultural, kinship and political patterns

in the hills and plains of northeastern India means that there is no
answer to the question [and] even during the nineteenth century,
different surveyors mapped different numbers of tribes. Thus, a
British military explorer in 1879 had suggested 18 Naga tribes,
although 17 years later another British survey had listed nine. Hutton
had listed 14 in 1921, as had Verrier Elwin in 1961 although not the
same ones; and during the 1970s new surveys gave different
numbers, such as 30 and 38. The changing numbers illuminate upon
the questionability of the category of tribe which the colonial
government fixed upon many inhabitants of South Asia.

Hutton had drawn attention to the integration and realignments of

community identities among the Sema and Angami through their long
histories of migration. He summed up the errors of deriving origin stories
through the statement that the ‘sociological make-up of the Naga is mixed;
there being no unique origin for any of the tribes separately or for the Nagas
as a whole’, and therefore unlike other surveyors demonstrated a clear
understanding of the problems of classification. He noticed that the
categories were inadequate for conveying distinctions in the political and
social structures, and his research remains relevant today as attempts to
classify people into fixed groups and seek unique histories of origins for
establishing group identities increasingly thrive.
Monkey skulls are worn by Naga men as a pendant strung on a string.
They signify a head-taking trophy, and the MAA’s object catalogue for the
skull describes it as ‘worn by young Konyak men when they go courting
after having “touched meat”’. For today’s viewers, the skull in a glass case
might conjure a stereotypical image of headhunting. But, as Mark Elliott –
one of the curators at MAA who displayed the object in the exhibition
Another India (2017) – tells us, ‘although a popular trope, headhunting was
nevertheless regarded with ambivalence by early anthropologists’.
The British saw the Naga in a state of conflict, unmindfully obsessed
with headhunting raids between villages interspersed in the high peaks and
dense valleys of the Naga Hills. The head-takers’ ornaments and tallies
worn by Naga men and women became their popular collecting items from
the region. The colonial government strived to put a stop to the seemingly
barbaric headhunting practices, although British officials knew that warfare
and head-taking was central to Naga beliefs of fertility and soul. The
government, therefore, to quote Jacobs, ‘tried to persuade the Nagas that
they should take monkey heads rather than human ones; but the results were
poor’, because within the cultural world of the Naga Hills ‘monkeys could
stand as symbols for having taken a human head, but not as heads in their
own rights’.
Hutton explained the anthropology of the headhunting ritual in the
statement that

The real life of head-hunting among all the Naga tribes is the belief
that the head is the seat par excellence of the life essence which
 informs human beings as well as in (to a lesser degree, no doubt)
many other animals. This life essence is brought back to the village
in the head which is placed upon the sacred stone (kipuchie) of the
village from which apparently the life essence diffuses itself to the
villagers, their crops and their stock. This explains the necessity of
taking heads to replenish the life of the village when the population
has been weakened by disease or scarcity.

Hutton also saw that head-taking was of great significance in the context
of male marriageability, and that headhunting expeditions provided
opportunities for young men to impress and court young women. Head-
taking implied the acquisition of surplus life force, and if a man ‘has not
“touched meat”, as the expression is, he is not nearly likely to beget a child,
for there is no surplus life hanging about him’. Therefore, it was enough for
a man to be part of a successful headhunting expedition; he did not have to
personally take a head. If the young men touched the head with their daos
(the all-purpose cutting and chopping tool), they were considered to have
‘touched meat’ and were awarded warrior status. It was not necessary to go
on the raid itself, but it was necessary to have had physical contact with the
head.
The catalogue card tells us that the owner of the monkey skull was a
suitor, and in conveying possible stories of courtship and betrothal, the
object provides reasons for interrogating the stereotypical accounts of the
‘barbaric Naga’.
Hutton acquired the monkey skull in the village of Wakching possibly in
the 1920s. Two decades later, William Archer (1907–79), one of Hutton’s
successors as a colonial administrator in the Naga Hills and a brilliant
ethnographer, asked the people of the village why heads were so important
to them. He was told that

since head taking was stopped Wakching has got smaller. Formerly
when illness swept through the village, we took a head, offered it and
the sickness stopped. Nowadays we cannot offer a head and the
 sickness goes on and on […] The fields too have gone off and we do
not get the crops we did.

In conveying the information that the substitution of monkey heads for

human skulls was deeply resented at Wakching, Archer noted that

Kongon [a Konyak Naga] spoke very bitterly of the results which

attended the use of a monkey’s head instead of a man’s when they
made their last log drum […] ten men died and it was all due to that.

The British policies from the 1920s of banning head-taking were to prove
ambiguous as these ignored the practices within the unadministered areas,
unless the raids were made from there into the administered areas. The
British administration often left the Nagas perplexed as they were expected
to respond to the continuous changes of administrative boundaries and
political controls. Additionally, as Jacobs informs us, although the British
intended permanent prohibition of head-taking ‘in the nature of a moral
imperative, the Nagas understood this to be a particular, possibly temporary,
instruction, and thus an aspect of an ongoing political competition’.
By the late 1930s, Wakching had grown into an important trading post as
it came to be seen by the British as a buffer zone between the people of the
plains and hills. The changing status of Wakching is one example of the
drastic transformations of local economies which the British administration
of Naga Hills perpetuated and which ultimately brought the inhabitants at
the centre of a ‘theatre of war’, as historians have rightly described the
venue of Naga Hills in the Second World War. The Naga people bore the
brunt of the Battle of Kohima, which was fought between April and June
1944 by the Allies and the Japanese, and the vital information they provided
led to the victory of the former. After the war, the colonial government
established the Naga Hills District Tribal Council to bring the Naga people
together for a post-war reconstruction programme. The council soon
changed its name to Naga National Council and declared the independent
status of Naga Hills on 14 August 1947. After long negotiations, an Indian
state of Nagaland was carved out of Assam in 1963, although the formation
of the state did not settle issues that were at the heart of the Naga political
demands for secession from India. With the rapid spread of Naga ethnic
groups outside Nagaland, the demands for a Greater Nagaland increased.
These led to frequent border disputes between Nagaland, and Assam and
Manipur.
In directing the need to interrogate elements of the stereotypical within
ethnographies of the Naga, the Monkey Skull, however, affirms the
stereotypical view of colonial rule – in that it bred dire consequences. The
colonial administration of Indian frontiers left inhabitants exposed before
the onslaught of legislations and events over which they had no control but
which sealed their cultural practices and autonomous existence. This
administrative politics created conditions for the eventual Naga political
confrontations with the Indian state. The consequences, we know, have
been brutal.

ELLIOTT, M. (2017). Another India: Explorations and Expressions of Indigenous India. [Exhibition
Catalogue]. Cambridge: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
HUTTON, J.H. (1969). The Angami Nagas—With Some Notes on Neighbouring Tribes. Oxford
University Press.
JACOBS, J., A. Macfarlane, S. Harrison, and A. Herle. (1990). The Nagas: Society, Culture and the
Colonial Encounter. Thames and Hudson.
KUNZ, R. and V. Joshi. (Eds). (2008). Naga: A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Christoph
Merian Verlag.
VON FÜRER-HAIMENDORF, C. (1968). ‘Obituaries’. Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1968 (pp. 66–67). www.therai.org.uk/archives-and-
manuscripts/obituaries/john-henry-hutton.
VON FÜRER-HAIMENDORF, C. (1969). The Konyak Nagas: An Indian Frontier Tribe. Holt,
Rinehart & Winston.
59
A CHENCHU FLUTE
Irlapenta, Telangana
Date of collection: 1940

OBJECTS OFTEN CREATE POWERFUL REMINDERS OF THE vicissitudes in the lives

of their makers, and this flute evokes the travails and tribulations of the
Chenchu tribe, a hunting-gathering and foraging community now living
largely in the Nallamala Hills who claim inalienable rights to the forest
lands they inhabit. They are listed by the Indian government as a
Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group. For centuries the Chenchu have
sustained their livelihoods successfully in the remote habitats of the deep
forests, protected from encroachments of vested interests. However, since
1894, a series of government laws regarding the preservation of their forests
have slowly destroyed their subsistence strategies. They have been forced to
relocate to the edges of their forests and into settled lifeways, which they
are unfamiliar with. The policies of progress and development have
ghettoized the Chenchu into reserved areas, wrested their rights to forest
products and plunged them into stark poverty and abject deprivation.
The flute was procured by the legendary Austrian ethnographer
Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1909–95) from the Chenchu hamlet or
penta of Terkaldari (Irlapenta) in 1940. At the time, Haimendorf was on the
brink of undertaking his pioneering ethnographic study of an unknown tribe
in the Amrabad plateau, then in the domain of the Nizam of Hyderabad. He
was particularly struck by the poverty of the Chenchu material culture,
which he termed the ‘digging stick culture’ as he realized that without the
digging stick the Chenchu man ‘would soon be reduced to starvation’. He
observed that the Chenchu used the digging stick to loosen ‘the surface of
the stony ground’, unearth the ‘roots and tubers’ which are his staple foods
and ‘dibble the seed’ when sowing grain, and he recorded that the Chenchu
man ‘seldom holds anything in his keeping which is not of practical use to
him in his struggle for existence’. Haimendorf’s description of the digging
stick established the ethnographic profile of the Chenchu as a ‘primitive
tribe’ who use ‘simple technologies to live and eat’.
A flute with an engraving of a tiger chasing a stag. Gourd, Bamboo, 80 mm × 340 mm, collected by
Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf from Terkaldari (Irlapenta), Telangana. MAA: 1949.737A.

The Chenchu are regarded as primitive even in the recent anthology of

The Scheduled Tribes (1994), which begins with the statement that ‘the
Chenchu also means a person living under a tree (chettu)’, and the term
‘relates to the Chenchu habit of eating mice’. If we regard the various levels
of primitiveness that are imposed upon the present-day tribal communities
by the ostensibly modern and civilized world, the Chenchu top the list.
During his field studies, which he subsequently published as The
Chenchus: A Jungle Folk of the Deccan (1943), Haimendorf saw very little
‘Chenchu art’ and recorded the rare examples of paintings and engravings
upon bamboo vessels (gidda), hair combs (netichiku) and flutes. This flute
with a figurative art caught his eye as ‘an exceptional object’, and he
promptly procured it for his collection.
Made of a gourd into which two river reeds are inserted, the flute has
holes pierced along its length which produce variations in tone. It came into
the collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography (as the
MAA was then called) in 1949, and the object catalogue records it as a
‘naga (snake) charm’. The description led to the flute being called Naga
Seram and it was certainly derived from the known uses of similar-looking
flutes, or been, by snake-charmers throughout the Indian subcontinent for
controlling the naga and other deadly snakes. The naming of the Chenchu
flute, therefore, illustrates the problem of identifying material culture in
communitarian terms because we can ask: What is a ‘Chenchu flute’ when
other communities also make similar-looking objects?
In the case of this flute, however, the engraving of a tiger chasing a stag
justifies recalling it as uniquely Chenchu. Tigers and Chenchu have
historically lived in a shared habitat, and therefore, it is notable that the rare
figural depiction of Chenchu art on the flute is that of a tiger drawn with
great care. In describing the engraving, Haimendorf declared this to be ‘the
best example of a purely naturalistic scene to embody a spirit very different
from that expressed in the geometrical ornamentation of the gidda, bamboo
flutes and combs, for there is definite movement in the figures’.
Haimendorf ensured the visibility of the engraving within the photograph
he took of the flute being played by a young man, Lingaru, who appears in
many of his photographs of the Chenchu. Significantly, it is the tiger motif
which ‘poignantly foreshadows a later chapter in the Chenchu’s relationship
to their forests and conservation’, as viewers of the flute in the MAA
exhibition Another India (2017) were curatorially reminded.
 A part of the old habitat of the Chenchu communities living in the
Nallamala Hills was incorporated in 1978 within the 3,278 square
kilometres of the Nagarjunasagar–Srisailam Tiger Reserve. And in a bid to
save the tigers, the Government of India now threatens the Chenchu
population – which, ironically, it employs as forest guards – with
foreseeable eviction from the dense forests. On 28 March 2017, the
National Tiger Conservation Authority declared that ‘in the absence of
guidelines for notification of critical wildlife habitats, no rights shall be
conferred in Critical Tiger Habitats (CTH) which is notified under section
38 V (4)(i), of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972’. As The Hindu of 6
May 2017, noted ‘what this means is that the Chenchus will no longer be
able to claim Nallamala as their home’. The declaration highlights the
precarious position of people deemed too close to nature.

Lingaru, a Chenchu, playing the flute. Photographic film, 35 mm, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf,
1940, Terkaldari. SOAS: PP MS 19/6/CHEN/0615.

For over a century, the Chenchu have acutely suffered the management of
their forest lands by the colonial and post-colonial governments of India.
During the 1890s, the colonial government began to tap into Indian forests
for enhancing imperial revenues to regulate the extraction of timber and
other forest produce. The forest acts of the British in India were aimed at
reaping commercial gains from forest products and created reserved areas
inside forests by forcibly evicting the tribal population, who were thereby
denied access to products that were crucial for their sustenance. The intense
revolts organized and headed by Birsa Munda (1875–1900) near Ranchi in
the mid-1890s illustrate the deep anger and resentment of many tribal
communities against the injustices.
As ecologists, historians, geographers and economists point out, for
much of the second-half of the twentieth century the Indian government has
followed the colonial governance pattern of acquiring more and more
powers to manage and take over the richly endowed tribal lands for
commerce and profit. Laws related to tribal affairs are usually drafted with
the assumption that the adivasi communities, especially those living in the
forests, such as the Chenchu, are thieves and poachers from whom the
forests are to be protected. In fact, Haimendorf was forced to remind the
Indian government in 1982 that

while they [the tribal people] were forbidden to take even enough
wood to build their huts or fashion their ploughs, they saw
contractors from the lowlands felling hundreds of trees and carting
them off, usually with the help of labour brought in from outside. The
traditional de facto ownership of tribal communities was […]
replaced by the de jure ownership of the state, which ultimately led to
the exploitation of forest resources with total disregard for the needs
of the tribal economy.

In 1940, when Haimendorf and his wife Betty lived among the Chenchu,
roads for wheeled vehicles through the forests brought contractors into the
region, who besides cutting down age-old trees also collected forest
produce such as fruits, honey, resin and berries, which the Chenchu
communities bartered with nearby villagers for procuring metal tools, cloth
and petty household items. The forest guards had begun to recruit the
Chenchu at nominal pay ‘for work in nurseries and the demarcation of
forest coups’, and the latter expressed bafflement and helplessness to the
Haimendorfs against the ‘ever-increasing inroads into their forests which
they had always considered their undisputed domain’. At the end of his
stay, Haimendorf was moved into writing a report for the Nizam’s
government to protect the Chenchu from further exploitation, which led to
the creation of, to quote him, ‘some 100,000 acres on the upper plateau […]
as a Chenchu Reserve, in which they were enabled to continue their
traditional lifestyle’.
The recommendations of the report provided manifold benefits to the
Chenchu community – the rights to collect for their domestic use all minor
forest produce without payment, to cultivate small plots of land near their
settlements, to hunt with bow and arrow irrespective of whether the area
was included in a game sanctuary, and to graze their cattle within the
reserve free of charge. Additionally, the Forest Department was forced to
purchase, at fixed price, all forest products which a Chenchu would offer
for sale and discontinue the auctioning of minor forest produce to forest
contractors.
By the 1970s, the Chenchu had entered the cash economy through
various government and non-government development schemes, although
these left them, possibly, as India’s poorest tribal community. The paradox
illustrates instances of India’s insensitive policies and the cumbersome
bureaucracy which often thwarts the implementation of even the best-
conceived government welfare schemes. Additionally, the Forest Acts of
the twentieth century created plantations in areas of mixed natural forests,
which resulted in overexploitation, neglect and denudation of India’s forest
cover. A pertinent example of the irreversible destruction of government
intervention is the extinction of the species of gourd with which the
Chenchu used to make their flutes.
To ameliorate the erosion of tribal livelihoods the Indian government
passed a historic legislation in 2006, namely, the Scheduled Tribes and
Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, or
Forest Rights Act (FRA), which was lauded at the time as constituting a
‘significant change in the forest policy of India’ to quote Manisha Verma,
an Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officer who has written extensively
on India’s governance of tribal welfare. She emphasizes that

The FRA seeks to redress a historical injustice by giving rights to

those who cultivate lands, but are classified as ‘deemed encroachers’
due to non-settlement of their rights […] the law confers a legal right
on communities to protect, regenerate, conserve or manage
community forest resources they have traditionally protected.

It is worth noting, however, that the act also elicited anxieties from those
who lauded it, about the harm it could potentially bring upon India’s forest
cover and wildlife. Detailed field research by scholars, activists, civic
societies and NGOs now shows that the act has proved hard to implement,
with cases of ineffectual participation even by state governments, and due
to gross administrative neglect in recognizing the communitarian nature of
tribal lands.
The FRA was passed the same year as the Wildlife Protection
(Amendment) Act, known colloquially as the Tiger Amendment Act. Both
contribute to conflicts between conservationists and social activists about
the ways in which tigers and adivasis, who live in close proximity, are to be
saved. The plight of the Chenchu, who are being forced out of the
Nallamala forest today, shows quite clearly that despite intentions the FRA
has no power to save adivasis.
Although the Chenchu have historically shared their habitat with the
tigers, they are being forced to move away from the Amrabad plateau on
the grounds that any human presence is harmful to tigers. Yet, the fee-
paying tourists come regularly to the reserve to watch the tigers, and the
Chenchu can only remind the government that the tiger population in the
forests of the plateau exists because of them, for they protect the wildlife by
keeping a watch on poachers. They have, no doubt, fiercely resisted the
move, and say, to quote from a report of Survival, an international agency
that works in partnership with tribal people to campaign for their rights,
 If we go to the plains areas we will become addicted to alcohol and
we will drink and die. We live in the forest and we will die in the
forest. The forest is our mother and our life. Wildlife is our life,
without wildlife we cannot live.

A ‘sinister scam’ behind the forcible relocation of the Chenchu was

reported in 2018 through the news that the Telangana government had
ostensibly approved uranium exploration in the Amrabad forests, and the
Chenchu would be evicted on the pretext that tiger numbers suffer due to
their presence. The government would then allow in the uranium
prospectors. The plan is now officially declared shelved, although the new
venue of uranium prospecting seems to be Andhra Pradesh, as we note from
a report in the online news site Scroll.
The Chenchu poignantly predict that in the future they will only be seen
by the world in photographs and videos. They may well add that they will
perhaps also be seen in some of their objects, such as the flute.
The Chenchu flute with a tiger chasing a stag creates a powerful memory
of the symbiotic world of human and animal which has been largely
wrecked by capitalist greed. This world could have been sustained to some
extent by a democratic political system capable of ensuring equal
citizenship rights to tribal people. Instead, they seem to have been made
perennially powerless.

ELLIOTT, M. (2017). Another India: Explorations and Expressions of Indigenous South Asia
[Exhibition Catalogue]. Cambridge: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
(2017, June 15). ‘India: Tribe Faces Eviction from Tiger Reserve – but Uranium Exploration
Approved’. Survival International.
MURALI, S. and K. Venkateshwarlu. (2017, May 6). ‘Forced Out of the Forest’. The Hindu.
SOMASEKHAR, M. (2021, April 11). ‘Saved by a Whisker: Plans to Mine a Telangana Tiger
Reserve for Uranium have been Shelved’. Scroll.in.
VARMA, M. (2013). ‘Rule of Law’. In F. Padel, A. Dandekar and J. Unni (Eds), Ecology Economy:
Quest for a Socially Informed Connection (pp. 208–38). Orient Blackswan.
VON FÜRER-HAIMENDORF, C. (1943). The Aboriginal Tribes of Hyderabad. Vol. I: The
Chenchus. Macmillan.
VON FÜRER-HAIMENDORF, C. (1982). Tribes of India: The Struggle for Survival. University of
California Press.
60
BHARATUDDHAR: A PROSCRIBED
PRINT
c. 1930

THIS IS FROM A SERIES OF PRINTS THAT WERE PRODUCED IN one of the first offset
presses in Calcutta, in 1930. The religious imagery, which the prints often
carried, lent to the visual vocabulary of revolutionary nationalism of the
early-twentieth century, and Bharatuddhar provides an early example. The
high volume of colour printing made possible by the offset press allowed
the prints to be produced cheaply and in bulk. Therefore, local trading and
manufacturing firms often reproduced such prints as calendars and
advertising material. The image displays Gandhi freeing India from the
curse of colonial rule and depicts an allegory, wherein a chosen subject is
shown under the guise of another that is suggestive of resemblance. The
image here refers to Shiva freeing Markandeya, a devotee, from the curse of
Yama, the god of death. It is an anti-colonial nationalist imagery. They
germinated through the production of chromolithographs from the 1880s.
Chromolithographs of Shiva saving Markandeya from the buffalo-riding
Yama were sold in the bazaars from the 1880s, and therefore viewers of this
Bharatuddhar would have grasped the missing referent quite easily, namely,
the Markandeya myth and the logic of allegory. Such early offset prints
created ‘an experimental zone where new possibilities and new identities
[were] forged’, as Christopher Pinney recalls, and came to constitute one of
the ‘key arena’ in the political uses of religion.
Off set print of Bharatuddhar by Prabhu Dayal, 250 mm × 207 mm. Lakshmibilas Press Ltd.,
Calcutta, c. 1930. Shyam Sunder Lal, Kanpur imprints. Tasveer Ghar 639531.

Naman Ahuja, who selected this print as one of the objects for his
exhibition The Body in Indian Art (2013), describes the Puranic story of
Markandeya alluded in the image as follows:
 In the original myth it was prophesised that Markandya would die at
sixteen. He spent the last year of his life in prayer devoted to a Siva-
linga. On the appointed day Yama, the god of death, cast his noose
around Markandya who was holding on to the Siva-linga, and thus
unwittingly drew that too in the Yama’s grip. Siva emerged from the
Linga, dismissed Yama, and bestowed his devotee eternal life. This
myth is reinterpreted here to show a British officer as Yama,
Markandya as a woman hugging the Siva-linga and labelled as
Bharatmata, and Gandhi emerging from the Siva-linga with multiple
arms holding the weapons that will deliver eternal freedom to
Bharatmata. The power of self-sufficiency is symbolised by the
charkha, and the power of the media is shown by the Hindi and Urdu
newspapers held in Gandhi’s other hand.

From the 1910s, chromolithographs of Hindu gods and goddesses and

heroic and romantic Puranic folklore successfully created a visual reality of
the Indian motherland, and a new imagery appeared as a goddess, the
Bharat Mata. Often, the body of Bharat Mata was depicted upon a map of
India, and the manner of depiction – where the body became the map and
the map the body – presented her mighty powers of nurturing the sanctity of
the originary, and ancient, Indian nation. Sari-clad, with her long hair
flowing and in a benedictory pose, the new goddess Bharatmata came to
constitute the physical reality of a British-free India. This image of a seated
and shackled Bharat Mata is therefore eye-catchingly different.
As we notice from the caption, the print was made at a period when the
Indian Congress demanded Purna Swaraj or complete independence, on 31
December 1929 during the Lahore session. Indian leaders rejected the
colonial government’s offer of a Dominion Status for India within the
Commonwealth and unfurled a national flag. The following decade, of the
1930s, saw Gandhi’s rise in the Indian Congress after the Dandi Salt March
(March–April 1930), in which he showed his unique power of rallying
masses for protesting non-violently, in this instance as civil disobedience.
The imagery celebrates the arrival of the Mahatma and creates a view of the
righteousness and revolutionary nature of his anti-colonial campaigns. It
also portrays the propaganda value of the national flag, which is inscribed
in Hindi with the slogan – Victory for Bharat Mata. Pinney records the
image as ‘proscribed’, or forbidden, seen as seditious by the colonial
government. It was banned from circulation through the repressive Indian
Press Act of 1910 that imposed stringent censorship. The status of
proscription would have added to its power as an anti-colonial effigy and
enhanced its potency as a political slogan of freedom.
The print was published by Prabhu Dayal, who was a ‘patriotic artist’, as
Sumathi Ramaswamy tells us. Dayal made consistent uses of the Indian
map with figures of Bharat Mata and Gandhi for fashioning a visual
language of Indian nationhood and his offset prints established the charkha
or spinning wheel as a ‘popular patriotic object […] for Gandhi and other
Khadi enthusiasts [whereby] the nation could literally be woven into being
through homespun labour’. The imagery of Bharatuddhar illustrates the
inseparability that was being visually created at the time, between the
Mahatma and a national territory.
Although Gandhi did not invoke Bharat Mata as much as his Hindu
nationalist contemporaries did, he became her favourite son through the
popular visual productions. Historians of visual culture, particularly Kajri
Jain, have shown that the ‘patriotic, mechanically reproduced art’ of the
Indian bazaars ‘delivered the Mahatma to the masses’. Indians increasingly
saw Gandhi’s sacrifice for India as a sacrifice for Bharat Mata, and ‘in
posters and prints from the 1920s, she implores him to save her, smiles
upon him as he breaks the chains that bind her, sheds tears over his passing,
gathers up his bullet-punctured body into her arms, and receives him into
heaven’. This allegorical Bharatuddhar, we see in this print, not only
encapsulates the popular perception of Gandhi as the rescuer of the nation
but also informs us of the increasing visual fashioning of his Mahatma-like
behaviour in which he appears as the ‘conduit between the terrestrial realm
and the world of the (Hindu) gods’, to quote Ramaswamy. Of the weapons
in his hands, the roll of newspaper expresses the increasing uses he made of
the press and media from the 1930s for mobilizing masses, and Ishita
Banerjee-Dube recalls that

A striking feature of the freedom movement was the gathering of

large crowds along routes of, and often accompanying Congress
processions, as well as at meetings and at sites of pickets outside
foreign goods’ shops. This was possibly a consequence of the
gigantic propaganda campaign that the Congress had launched from
1929, first to oppose the Simon Commission, and later as a mode to
develop a repertoire of powerful oppositional political rituals.

Notably, the figure of Gandhi occupies a large empty space that makes
his physical presence felt all over the picture. The depiction reminds
viewers of Gandhi’s political philosophy, namely, in service to nation the
human body constituted the foremost site for practising ethical politics.
Thus, for Gandhi, swaraj had to be earned by means of a consistent and
strenuous physical self-training towards satyagraha or the pursuit of truth
through the upkeep of the body, by adopting vegetarianism, frugality and
abstinence.
In illustrating the Indian nationalism of the 1930s, the Bharatuddhar
offers an academic lesson of the paradoxical nature of the nationalist quests.
The imagery celebrates traditional India, and besides the Puranic lore we
are shown objects such as a bronze plate and waterspout, which are valued
even today as India’s traditional artefacts. In this it reveals a new nation’s
search for its deep antiquity to exhibit its historical legitimacy. However,
the image also reminds us that the past to which a nation aspires is always
mythical. The reference to aryavarta illustrates the point.
The understanding that India was aryavarta or the land of the Aryan
people imbued the Indian nationalist imagination and was nurtured by race
theories that prevailed in the nineteenth century. Race, as we know, is non-
existent as a phenomenon, and empirical realities of racial types have been
shown spurious for nearly a century now through careful scholarship. Yet,
popular searches for the ‘Aryans’ in India continue unabated. Therefore, we
ought to note that the word arya appears in the Rig Veda as a reference to
the speech of Vedic Sanskrit. However, during the nineteenth century, it was
historicized as a group of people, and, in the early-twentieth-century India it
acquired a Hindu ancestry, largely through the anti-colonial nationalist
historiography. The history-making of the ‘Aryans’ from then on has
proceeded on an entirely erroneous method that converts a language group,
namely, Indo-Aryan, into a group of people. The fact that a genealogical
lineage can only be fictitious since the arya of the Rig Veda is not a group
of people, kin-related, ethnic or of any other kind has not bothered a race-
believing society.
The labelling of the Shiva linga as aryavarta in the print provides a
glimpse of the Hinduization of a linguistic phenomenon and of the Hindu
politics in the Indian freedom movement. Yet, visionary leaders of the
movement, including Gandhi, did not espouse the cause of establishing a
Hindu aryavarta. They led the struggle as an inclusive protest and could
therefore attract mass participation. Bharatuddhar from the British could
thus be successful.
It is ironical that a ‘Hindu’ print of Bharatuddhar cautions a regard of the
inclusive politics of the Indian nationalism. But it reminds us that prints like
this garnered a redoubtable historical legacy of achieving significant
success in raising the clarion call to freedom.

AHUJA, N. (2014). Rupa-Pratirupa: The Body in Indian Art [Exhibition Catalogue]. New Delhi:
National Museum.
BANERJEE-DUBE, I. (2007). A History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press.
JAIN, K. (2007). Gods in the Bazaar: The Economics of Indian Calendar Art. Duke University
Press.
PINNEY, C. (2004). Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. Reaktion
Books.
RAMASWAMY, S. (2010). The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. Duke University
Press.
61
QUIT INDIA PAMPHLET
1942
‘LEAVE HINDUSTAN’ COMMAND THE PRINTED PHRASES IN HINDI and Urdu, the
ferocity of the rage transparent in the handwritten phrases, especially the
mis-spelt ‘lier’, whose writer, despite being inept in English, was clearly
minded to make it absolutely clear to the recipient, by using the latter’s
language, that Indians hated him, and wished him to leave their country
‘sooner […] the better’.
The two flyers were sent to Reginald Maxwell, a member of the
Executive Council of the Viceroy of India, in charge of Home Affairs
(1941–44). They are testimonies of the intense passion and charged
emotions that were unleashed following the announcement of the Quit India
Resolution by the Congress Working Committee at Wardha, Maharashtra,
on 14 July 1942.
The Resolution was historic as it spelt out, for the first time, a national
demand for an immediate transfer of power. It decreed that if the colonial
government rejected the demand, the Congress would be ‘reluctantly
compelled to use all its non-violent strengths for winning the political rights
and liberty of the Indians’. The flyers make it all too clear that by then
Indians considered the British not only unwanted foreigners but outlaws.
They questioned the possibilities of the rightful existence of a British India.
Printed f lyer of a handwritten poster of Free India Calling, 112 mm × 71 mm, CSAS.

Printed f lyer of a typescript of The Voice of India, 120 mm × 180 mm, CSAS.

The Quit India Resolution was endorsed on 8 August 1942 in Bombay

with Gandhi’s passionate speech, best known as ‘Do or Die’, in which he
declared that ‘we shall either free India or die in the attempt; we shall not
live to see the perpetuation of our slavery’. The Resolution instructed all
Indians, including the residents of princely states, to consider themselves
free. More importantly, it sanctioned them to be their own guides in
adopting the best methods of achieving freedom. Gandhi saw it as the final
fight to the finish, in which mere jail-going was not enough. The colonial
government retaliated by arresting all senior leaders of the Congress who
gathered in Bombay and incarcerating them far away. Gandhi was
imprisoned in the Aga Khan Palace in Poona, and many Congress stalwarts
found themselves in the fort at Ahmednagar. Additionally, the government
sequestered the files and funds of the Congress, banned the party’s national
and provincial committees and arrested most of its members.
The news of the Resolution and the immediate arrest of the Congress
leaders sparked violent protests, in a manner much like the Rebellion of
1857 (see ch. 52). The revolt spread through cities and provinces in quick
succession. As Ishita Banerjee-Dube records, ‘Delhi suffered heavy
casualties on 11 and 12 August, Bombay was rocked by strikes and
demonstrations between 9 and 14 August and Calcutta between 10 and 17
August.’ In the first instance, students and workers spearheaded the
rebellions through marches, strikes and hartals, and even the proud workers
of the Tata Steel Plant in Jamshedpur, who revelled in the importance of
their labour of making steel for the nation, went on a strike for a full week
between 13 and 20 August, proclaiming that they would resume work only
after a national government was formed. Mid-August onwards, student
protesters from towns led peasants in rural areas to rebel and Bihar saw
some of the most violent acts of rebellion. Following the brutal repression
of a mammoth march in Patna on 11 August, villagers in every district of
Bihar rose against the government. They destroyed railway stations and
trains, roads, bridges and embankments, burnt police stations, looted
treasury buildings, cut telegraph wires, and killed unarmed British and
European officers in an attempt to root out foreign presence.
Moreover, the rebels revelled in underground activities for sabotaging the
war efforts of the British. They disrupted communication and adopted new
and diverse methods of spreading incendiary propaganda that included
using clandestine radio stations such as the one run by Usha Mehta, ‘the
Congress Radio calling on 42.34 from somewhere in India’, as she recalled
in her later years for the BBC. A young Mehta, aged 22, with two others,
went underground to run this secret radio station from 14 August 1942, the
date of the first broadcast. They were arrested in November. They operated
their Congress Radio clandestinely from different sites in Bombay and
transmitted ‘all sorts of news’ that spoke of the progress of the Quit India
Movement, including instances of merchants refusing to sell rice. The
Radio fiercely defied the colonial government’s attempts to ban news of the
movement, and as Mehta recounted, ‘when the press is gagged and all the
news banned, a transmitter certainly helps a good deal […] in spreading the
message of the rebellion in the remotest corners of the country’.
From September 1942, anti-British sentiment crystallized through the
many national governments that were being established in various places.
The best known of these were the ones at Satara (Maharashtra), Midnapur
(Bengal) and Talcher (Orissa), and they all demonstrated the administrative
qualities of a well-organized government.
The ‘Voice of India’ in the signature on one of the flyers tells us that the
Quit India Movement was national in scope. This perception ignored,
strategically, the non-participation of the Hindu Mahasabha, which
condemned the movement, to quote from a history book by Sekhar
Bandyopadhyay, as ‘sterile, unmanly and injurious to the Hindu cause’. In
fact, the August rebellions were anything but that, and their ferocity
shocked the British to their core, and demoralization and defeatism quickly
spread within their ranks. The powerful force of the rebellions sustained
well into the middle of 1943 and showed them the stark possibilities of the
quick dismantling of their Indian empire, and they retaliated ruthlessly with
draconian measures to wrest control, which included aerial bombardment,
shooting at sight, public flogging and fines on entire villages.
Maxwell declared that the police fired on the civilian population 538
times, 940 people were killed in the firings, 1,630 injured and over 60,229
arrested. Viceroy Lord Linlithgow (1936–43) conceded that the protests,
although dispersed, represented ‘by far the most serious rebellion since that
of 1857’. A year later, in 1943, the new Viceroy Archibald Wavell (1943–
47) felt compelled to report to Prime Minister Winston Churchill that the
repressive force necessary to hold India after the war would exceed British
means even if world opinion permitted such an effort.
The injunctions in the flyers to quit India, invoke the pent-up fury of
Indians which stemmed from the British administration of India during the
Second World War. Britain not only dragged India into the war without
consent but continued to prevaricate on the issue of giving Indians a share
in the governance of the country. Although the Viceroy’s Executive Council
included eight Indians out of its twelve members by July 1941, the
important portfolios remained in British hands. Maxwell headed Home
Affairs, and a new post of War Production was given to Edward Benthall,
who at the Round Table Conference of 1931 and 1932 had ‘explained to his
colleagues that they had nothing to fear from Indians in government as long
as Defence, Finance and Home remained in European hands’, as Benjamin
Zachariah reminds us. Moreover, the Cripps Mission (March 1942), which
failed spectacularly, made it clear that there was little room for negotiations
of Indian representations in the government. The missives to Maxwell to
quit India at once express the ferocity of Indian dissent, and we may be
right in conjecturing that such ‘letters’ were sent to all senior officers and
the elite corps of the colonial government, including Wavell, the
commander-in-chief, Jeremy Raisman who headed Finance, Benthall and
even Linlithgow.
As the war progressed, Indians realized that Britain was going to make
no efforts to ease their deprivations. The poor were hit by the steep rise in
food prices, and the rich by high taxes, forcible collection of war funds and
sales of war bonds. The man-made famine, which Britain created in Bengal
in 1942, fully unmasked the mockery of their benevolent rule of India, and
the abject British defeats in Burma, Malaya and Singapore exposed rather
starkly the vulnerability of their self-styled ‘invincible’ Raj. In informing a
member of the Viceroy’s Council that his belief in the existence of a British
India is synonymous with that of British Germany, the poster enshrines the
Indian creations of a mythical and, thereby, non-existent British India.
 The presence of the Quit India flyers in Maxwell’s personal archives
brings up questions: Why did he choose to retain them? Was this a
conscious decision, or did the documents remain forgotten in the large
collection of his service years which he brought back to Britain? Did he
ever encounter them in his personal archives in later life? And if so, did he
reflect upon the violence which his Home Office perpetrated in 1942?
The flyers prompt reflections of the practices of collecting,
documentation and archive-making. They occasion a reminder of the
histories of selections and erasures in the archives we study, and of the need
for careful ethnographies of even those which appear created in quite a
straightforward manner, such as the personal collections of the British who
administered India.

BANERJEE-DUBE, I. (2014). A History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press.

ZACHARIAH, B. (2005). Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930–50. Oxford
University Press.
BANDYOPADHYAY, S. (2015). From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India. Orient
Blackswan.
(2020, August 15). ‘The Fiery Indian Student Who Ran a Secret Radio Station for Independence’.
BBC News.
62
REFUGEE MAP
Retreat from Burma into Manipur
1942
IN DECEMBER 1941, THE JAPANESE MOUNTED FULL-SCALE attacks in Burma by
ruthlessly blitzing Rangoon. They were invigorated by their success in
Malaysia, where they had defeated the British forces in Perak, Penang and
Selangor, and after Burma, they hoped to launch attacks in India. By
January, they had rapidly moved up the river valleys of the Salween, Sittang
and Irrawaddy, infiltrated the dense jungles and surrounded the British army
wherever they encountered resistance. The fall of Singapore to the Japanese
army on 15 February gave Japan moral ascendancy on the battlefield, and
by 21 February, the Japanese bombing of Rangoon virtually destroyed the
once great metropolis. The city ‘stank […] bloated rats scurried in deserted
streets […] as the setting sun peered through the smoke of fires set by
arsonists’, note C.A. Bayly and Tim Harper.
The British defeat in Burma is remembered as the ‘Dunkirk of the East’.
Britain ruled Burma as a part of British India from 1919 until 1937, and
from then on as a separate crown colony. Within days of the first Japanese
bombing of Rangoon on 13 December 1941, the Burma Office planned total
evacuation. Recalling poignantly his family’s participation in the British
war against the Japanese, Raghu Karnad stated that
Map of the shortest exit route out of Burma in 1942. Cyanotype, 390 mm × 32 mm, 1942, CSAS.

[The] officials had recognised the impossibility of defending

Rangoon at least a month earlier, but its residents were given only a
forty-eight-hour notice, after which they were told, neither trains nor
petrol would be available. The last boats left the docks at Taungup
and Akyab, and those left behind were stripped of any choice but
one: to cross the remaining length of the country and reach India by
foot. […] Ancient Mandalay became an immense refugee camp until
the bombers reduced it to acres of ash and cinders. The refugees
moved on, into northern Burma, where the British roads gave way to
long smears of mud, monsoon downpour and human waste.

This Refugee Map is a rare surviving example of the shortest and safest
routes over land from Burma to India. It shows ways to reach Tamu
(Sagaing region) from areas near the river Chindwin. A motorable road
linked Tamu to Dimapur (Manipur), 216 kilometres away, where trains
awaited for various destinations in India. It has an imprint of a child’s
muddy shoe on the reverse side, and the fold lines on the surface indicate
that it had fitted a breast pocket. In all likelihood, it was used by its owner,
A.W. Jaffrey, in April 1942 after the Japanese captured ports of southern
Burma, and its name, Refugee Map, appears in the acquisition papers of the
Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge.
The route which the map depicts was most certainly reserved for the
exclusive use of the British – their military men and civilians – and the
small cadre of European elites who lived in Burma. Thus, the nomenclature
Refugee Map appears ironic, considering that it illuminates the most
despised rumour that prevailed in India and Burma at the time, namely, that
the British Army ‘had enforced separate White and Black routes; so little
did Indian lives count in the end’, to quote Karnad. The map serves as a
vivid reminder of the ignobility of the British Empire towards its subject
population during the largest human migration until then, from Burma to
India, which followed British defeat in Southeast Asia.
The escape routes through sea and air were more or less organized and
controlled. But they closed with the fall of Rangoon in January 1942 when
began the long march through land, which is possibly one of the most
desperate, harrowing and perilous evacuations in human history. More than
6,00,000 people, mainly Indians who lived and worked in Burma, walked to
India through the forbidding and treacherous terrain, of whom over 80,000
died on roadsides and in transit camps. Of the known routes through which
they attempted escape, one is recalled as ‘the road to hell’. It led through
the Hukawng valley to Assam, and is described by Bayly and Harper as

a green hell of mud, human excrement and chaos snaking through the
hills [where] the only way to make progress was to slither along the
roots of trees by the side of the track. Women and children collapsed
and drowned in the mud. Cholera became epidemic as exhausted
people sheltered in bivouacs to escape the rain and relieved
themselves on the floors. Porters refused to touch the dead so that
they lay decomposing until medical staff arrived with kerosene to
 burn them. The butterflies in Assam that year were the most beautiful
on record. They added to the sense of the macabre as they flitted
amongst the corpses.

The route through Hukawng went over Chaukan Pass, at the north-
western end of the mountains dividing India and Burma. It rose over 9,000
feet and descended to swamp-like terrains. Only five Europeans had crossed
it before the summer of 1942, and certainly not during the rainy season. The
above description of the 300-mile-long trek contrasts sharply with situations
on the motorable road from Tamu to Dimapur, on which high officials and
home civilians of the British Empire travelled. The rest, as Karnad recalls,

spoke of the anguished tale of their abandonment by the Raj […] of

Anglo-Indian families whose darker-skinned daughters were turned
away from the camps for Europeans; of columns of Indian refugees
held back until Europeans had passed, so the roads would be less
begrimed; of elephants struggling up the slopes, hind legs quivering,
as they carried mahogany desks out over the bodies of children.

By the spring of 1943, however, Tamu bore the grim nickname of the
City of the Dead where British patrol, which began to penetrate the routes
taken during the evacuation of Burma, found ‘skeletons still reclined in
derelict cars, sat at decaying tables, lay collapsed in bed’. The city
subsequently saw Indians fight fellow Indians as the British Army
encountered the Indian National Army (INA) created by Subas Chandra
Bose in 1942, in the fierce martial bid to overthrow the British. Bose had
joined forces with the Axis powers, and his INA was able to capture large
parts of Manipur by 1944.
In April 1942, as Philip Mason, an ICS officer, recalled, the British had
lost an army in Malaya and another in Burma, and were acutely aware that
‘there was no division in India to fight’. The defeats not only enhanced the
racist administration of the colonies, especially of those in which the British
themselves were losing, but more importantly brought into plain sight the
abject vulnerability of the empire. The rulers, as Indivar Kamtekar reminds
us, appeared ‘set to flee, their government looked marked for oblivion’.
The British retreat from Burma was a rout, and fuelled strong rumours of
an imminent Japanese invasion of India. If Singapore and Rangoon could
fall, so could Calcutta, said the Indians caught up in the hysteria of the
possibilities of Japanese rule over India. Japanese ships were being
constantly sighted, falsely as we know in retrospect, on the shores of India’s
east coast, and the fears of Japanese attacks were so real that many citizens
of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay decided to pack up and leave. Thus, in
Calcutta, as Kamtekar also tells us, ‘as early as January 1942, Marwari
businessmen […] were selling their stocks at reduced prices, and […]
moving in large numbers to central and north India’, Bengali middle classes
were transporting their entire families to the countryside where they had
relatives or business, and many ‘colleges shifted parts of their teaching
work to district towns’. Even the eminent historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar was
worried about being driven out of Calcutta and wished, ‘to cling [to his]
library to the last moment possible’. Without it, he feared ‘migration
elsewhere would enforce idleness’ upon him.
Kamtekar attends to the historical importance of regarding the anxieties
and fears in India of a Japanese invasion. He demonstrates that by regarding
the event which did not happen, we note that the ‘unity nationalism
frequently claimed, but never previously achieved, was induced in 1942 by
the Japanese threat’. By determining to overthrow British power, the Quit
India Movement, which began that year, set itself to remove the provocation
to the Japanese to invade India. The movement’s success would have
allowed India to exit from the war, and ‘may account’, as Kamtekar
reminds us, ‘for the relative lack of a class or communal dimension’ in its
initial make-up. For, ‘the passion of nationalism no doubt moved many of
the Indian people, but the fear of Japanese invasion [and] effects of high
prices, touched most of them’.
The map not only jogs our memory of the horrors of racism, migration,
deprivation and gripping fear which the British defeats in Southeast Asia
unleashed, but also of the inhumane costs incurred by the natives, of which
the Bengal Famine remains the most gruesome. By the 1940s, 15 per cent
of India’s rice came from Burma, and the fall of Burma not only cut off an
important supplier of rice for India, but, as Bayly and Harper note, ‘the
[British] authorities panicked into a scorched earth policy’. They destroyed
the boats that plied near the Arakan frontier along the great canal networks
which linked producers, bazaars and consumers, and scorched ‘all motor
vehicles and carts’ and ‘even elephants from Chittagong and its surrounding
countryside up to the Assam border’. Therefore, ‘farmers and merchants
who were already terrified of invasion and price controls could not get their
produce to the markets even if they wanted to’. By then, the British were
aware that they had shipped far too much of India’s rice into the Middle
East and Ceylon for their war efforts, and very soon nature lent a hand to
their unkind policies. On 16 August 1942, a huge cyclone engulfed the
entire coast of Bengal and Orissa and destroyed the autumn rice crop. The
colonial government refused to counter-command orders to send Indian
food overseas, and more than six million people died of starvation.
The Refugee Map reminds us of histories conveniently forgotten by the
colonial government. In fact, Hugh Tinker, a British soldier who served in
the Burma campaign of 1942, recalls that ‘the official version of the march’,
for which there were demands from the Indian legislature in 1943, was
never submitted on the grounds that it would be ‘impossible to present a
clear picture […] without including matter that might be of great value to
the enemy’. Therefore, ‘the story of the march by the Indians out of Burma
faded out of the public consciousness, and now – more than thirty years
later – many of the participants are dead, and the story is forgotten’.
Tinker’s recollections find an echo in the statement to The Independent
by one of the map’s curators, Kevin Greenbank, who remarks, ‘It’s an
Empire story which isn’t great, but it’s a failure story, which really isn’t
great. We like to think of the Second World War as a positive tale and this is
a massive, embarrassing rout for the British. We got absolutely thumped by
the Japanese in Burma.’ Greenbank has successfully digitized a fragile and
incredible cine film from 1942 which documents a rescue operation
launched by a group of British tea planters of Assam. As he aptly
comments, ‘for the men, women and children who made it out of Burma
[…] sheer survival was a sweet enough victory. Seventy years on, it’s surely
worth saluting that triumph of the human spirit.’
In coaxing out memories, policies, events and politics of the war in
Burma, the Refugee Map highlights the need for more studies on the Fall of
Rangoon to understand the histories of the subsequent Indian independence
movements. For as Bayly and Harper emphasized,

the prestige, the face, the izzat of British rule had barely survived the
Japanese typhoon. In Burma it was never restored and in Malaya it
would be restored because Malays and Chinese businessmen saw it
in their interests to give the British Empire a temporary new lease of
life. In India, as almost everybody knew, war, the Bengal famine and
the Indian National Army had made independence inevitable […] It
was an Indian army, Indian business and Indian labour which had
played the major part in the victory on the Burma front and Indian
initiative would now flow into politics.

The devastating consequence of colonialism imprinted upon the Refugee

Map allows us to also anticipate the historic moves ahead to free India.

BAYLY, C.A. and T.N. Harper. (2004). Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945. Allen
Lane.
KAMTEKAR, I. (2002). ‘The Shiver of 1942’. Studies in History, 18, 81–102.
KARNAD, R. (2015). Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War. Fourth Estate.
MACKRELL, G. (1942). ‘Dihing Valley and Rescue Operations, Assam’. [Archival film]. University
of Cambridge: Centre of South Asian Studies. www.s-
asian.cam.ac.uk/archive/films/collection/mackrell-collection/.
MASON, P. (1974). A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men.
Jonathan Cape.
TINKER, H. (1975). A Forgotten Long March: The Indian Exodus from Burma, 1942. FEP
International.
WILLIAMS, H. (2012, March 17). ‘Dunkirk of the East: How Thousands of Brits Travelled the
“Road of Death” in Burma’. The Independent.
63
THE WESTLAND WAPITI
Date of production: 1928–32

First of all we are imperialists, and wish to see the empire defended
as securely as possible. Second we are all taxpayers, so we want the
defence as economical as possible …

SO DECLARED WING COMMANDER CHARLES EDMONDS (1891–1954), the first

instructor of the Royal Air Force Staff College (near Lincolnshire,
England), during his lecture on Air Strategy before the Royal United
Services Institution on 12 December 1923. The last surviving fighter
aircraft, Westland Wapiti documents the colonial government’s thrift in
policing its realms and occasions a reminder of the amazing feats of the
very small squadron of Indian airmen during the Second World War. The
feats are memorable because they were accomplished with the use of old
technology and despite very little government support for the operations.
As the airplane’s social historian Aashique Iqbal tells us, the Westland
Wapitis were

[…] far from the cutting-edge flying machine of its time. Air gunners
had to be tied to their seats with a ‘monkey chain’ to be kept in place
in the two seater biplane. The Wapiti often needed to be manhandled
by teams of men into flying position and threw up great plumes of
dust with its rotors. IAF Wapitis did not always come equipped with
radios, meaning that pilots sometimes had to carry caged messenger
 pigeons with them in order to send important communications to
ground stations.

Possibly the only surviving example of the Westland Wapiti (K813, Wapiti IIA). Displayed in Indian
Air Force Museum, Palam, New Delhi.

The two-seater aircraft was fitted with two machine guns and designed in
Britain by Arthur Davenport to the air ministry’s specifications. However,
in order to save money, the manufacturing specifications called for the uses
of as many components as possible from the older Airco DH9A aircraft,
which the Wapiti was to replace. The Airco was made by the company
Westland, which also bagged the contract for the production of the Wapiti,
and the new aircrafts, created at Westland Aircraft Works, entered the
service of the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1928. They soon earned the
nickname ‘What a Pity’ by all airmen who flew them. They were produced
until 1932, the year when the Indian Air Force (IAF) was founded, and
during the 1930s the old planes were widely used in India and the Middle
East for imperial policing The RAF provided four Wapitis to the one-
squadron-strength IAF, which had only five airmen, and subsequent
commanders of the organization recalled the provision as ‘swaddled in the
castaway garments of the Royal Air Force’. The planes were used by the
IAF until the end of 1942. In fact, the timely sighting of a Japanese fleet on
the Bay of Bengal near Vizagapatam by a Wapiti that year remains one of
the memorable feats of the aircraft’s long Indian career.
The demand by the British government for maximum thrift in the
safeguard of the British Empire met ‘a compelling solution’ through the air
force, which offered ‘a way of holding the margins of the Empire without
straining the metropolitan economy’, as the historian of Indian Voices of the
Great War David Omissi has demonstrated. The provision of the Westland
Wapiti to the IAF was an example, as the planes were ‘passed down’ from
the better equipped and much larger RAF. However, the ‘hawa sepoys’ as
the Indian pilots were called, sharpened their skills in improving
performance from the Wapitis they flew, and thus the faultily designed,
cumbersome planes made them some of the best pilots of the Second World
War.
The British were forced to establish the Indian Air Force to gain Indian
goodwill. However, they soon saw the utility value of the small contingent
for policing the North-West Frontier Provinces. ‘Bombing’, as Omissi has
noted, ‘was cheap, quick and often effective’, and the IAF was consistently
used to bombard livestock, villages, crops of tribesmen, and, often,
meetings of the tribal chiefs. In justifying the bombing of innocent people,
the colonial government grandly declared that since tribal justice functioned
on ‘collective responsibility’, the entire community was answerable for the
sporadic acts of resistance that were committed by a few.
The Indian airmen thus learnt to fly over immensely high and difficult
terrain while also undertaking photo reconnaissance of the areas they flew
over. They learnt to repair and maintain the Wapitis in formidable and
inaccessible terrains, and they also developed a distinct style of flying low
and slow to avoid detection, as Iqbal tells us. The long uses of the Wapitis
therefore ‘served them well in the jungles of Burma’ where they won praise
for ‘keeping the planes running in tough condition’.
The IAF today is one of the largest air forces in the world with some of
the most sophisticated aircraft. The display of the last surviving Wapiti,
noticeably without the engines, in the eponymous museum appears
providential. It not only evokes the successful career of the IAF, launched
during the Second World War, but also displays the thrift of the colonial
government that reluctantly created the Organisation through meagre
means.

IQBAL, A.A. (2014, October 27). ‘The Last Westland Wapiti’. Object Archives.
OMISSI, D.E. (1990). Air Power and Colonial Control. Manchester University Press.
OMISSI, D.E. (2014). Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18. Penguin Books.
64
INDIA’S JADEITE NECKLACE
1949
THE PARTITION OF 1947 SAW THE BIGGEST UPROOTING AND displacement of
people in recent human history. More than 15 million people were forced to
migrate over great distances to terrains unknown to them, more than 2
million were killed, of whom a large number were children and infants, and
countless women were systematically raped and victimized. This first
partition for ‘nation-formation’ in South Asia severely compromised the
possibilities of peaceful coexistence of people of different religions and
sects; the dismal political legacies of violent religious fundamentalism
which it has bred are yet to be fully excavated.
The humanitarian costs of the Partition have been deftly tucked away by
India and Pakistan into the corners of their official histories of nation-
making, and despite the efforts of academics, analysts, writers and
filmmakers of the two countries, especially over the last two decades, the
two national cultures continue to express ‘uncertainty and anxiety about the
place of Partition’, to quote Suvir Kaul. This is perhaps because, as Kaul
reminds us, ‘Partition remains the unspoken horror of our time.’
‘Archaeologically, the partition of India’, as The Hindu declared at the
time, ‘appears to have been negotiated by a fairy exchanging children
puckishly.’ The Islamic Republic of Pakistan lost the premier Islamic
monuments of South Asia, such as the Qutub Complex (New Delhi), Jami
Masjid at Ahmedabad, Gol Gumbad (Bijapur), Mausoleum of Sher Shah
Suri (Sasaram) and the grand Mughal forts, palaces and tombs of Delhi and
Agra. The Republic of India lost all traces of its early civilizational ancestry
through the territorial loss to Pakistan of the Bronze Age Indus Civilization,
homeland of the Vedic Culture, in the Sapta Sindhu (western Punjab),
‘classical’ art of Buddhism at Gandhara, and Taxila, which was a premier
cosmopolis and reputed seat of learning in Ancient India.
India’s Jadeite Necklace of Mohenjodaro, c. 2600–2400 BCE. Jade, Agate, Jasper and Gold beads,
and modern Silk tassel. NM: 49.244 -105.

The ‘Jadeite Necklace’ and other contents of the copper jar in which it was found, Plate 148 in
Marshall 1931, Vol. III.
 The dismemberment of a shared cultural legacy accompanied the official
acts of creating a new national heritage for India and Pakistan, which
entailed dividing aspects of the historical collections of the Archaeological
Survey of India that was instituted anew in 1902. Antiquities, archives,
libraries and field and laboratory equipment deemed historically precious
by scholars and officers of the Survey were divided between the two new
nations, and the jadeite necklace of Mohenjodaro was among the select
artefacts which was physically dismembered for providing them, ostensibly,
with an equal share of the ‘spoils’. The afterlife of this necklace as a twin
specimen, one each for India and Pakistan, calls for an interrogation of the
politics of ownership in the national projects of heritage-making.
The representative necklace is more or less a carbon copy of the parent
necklace, which was twice the size and recovered from Mohenjodaro during
the excavations of 1925–26. The original necklace had more than ten finely
crafted barrel-shaped beads of jade, ten beads of agate and jasper, and more
than 55 smaller disc-shaped beads of gold. It ended in seven pendants made
of beads of banded agate and jasper, and skilfully strung on the main cord
of gold through a thick gold wire that was thinned at the top to create a
loop.
The archives of the Archaeological Survey in New Delhi record India’s
share as ‘5 jade beads, 27 spacers of gold disc, 4 pendants and 5 semi-
precious stones’. India thus got one pendant more than Pakistan which
received only three because it got one extra bead in the division of a gold
necklace from Taxila (No. 8885, Sirkap). Notably, the minutes of the
Archaeological Survey’s Museums Branch of 29 July 1947 noted that ‘out
of 145 objects of gold and silver jewellery in the Taxila Museum only 47
had been brought to India’ and in ‘terms of gold in tolas, about twice as
much of gold has been left behind in the Taxila Museum’.
The logic of destroying necklaces of inestimable archaeological and
historical value defy all norms of curatorial practice. However, the policy of
partitioning and dividing antiquities, which was implemented by the
Steering Committee of the Partition Council and given the go-ahead by the
outgoing British director general of the Archaeological Survey of India,
R.E.M. Wheeler (1944–48), illustrate the fraught politics of heritage-
making which archaeological discoveries often precipitate.
The official correspondence suggests that the partitioning of the
antiquities was deemed by the policymakers as a natural, lawful and fair
manner of distributing the archaeological heritage of British India. There
seem to have been no ethical qualms expressed at the time regarding the
possible destruction of the antiquities. Instead, the interest and attention was
on who got what, and the brief note by Wheeler to his successor, the new
director general of the Archaeological Survey N.P. Chakravarti (1949–50)
illustrates the matter-of-fact process. Wheeler wrote:

On Tuesday, the 14th [November 1949] we completed the

partitioning of the Royal Academy collections and on Wednesday
squared everything with the customs authorities […] As usual, India
won the toss on two occasions when a toss had to be held for odd
things.

The archaeological discovery of the Indus Civilization in the 1920s

allowed ‘India to take its rightful place, along with Mesopotamia and
Egypt, as an area where civilizing processes were initiated and developed’
to quote Sir John Marshall, who directed excavations at Mohenjodaro the
year the jadeite necklace was found. The Indian loss of the Indus
Civilization, which caused the distribution of the Indus antiquities that were
once stored at the site museums of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, Central
Museum, Lahore, and Victoria Museum, Karachi, culminated in the
division of more than 14,000 objects of this Bronze Age so that India could
have a representative collection.
The deliberations about the quota of share for India and Pakistan were
acrimonious, and the Partition Council proposed varying ratios of 70:25,
70:30 and 60:40, which were initially drawn upon ‘territorial basis’.
However, the final negotiations for the distribution were completed on the
basis of educational needs, and the council found it ‘necessary to transfer to
India additional antiquities over and above her present share’ because it
assumed that ‘museums in Pakistan would fill up their coffer with future
excavations of the Indus Civilization, of which India would have little
chance of future accession’. The artefacts from the then-known sites of the
Indus Civilization, especially Mohenjodaro, Harappa, Amri and Mundigak,
displayed today in the Harappa Gallery of the National Museum at New
Delhi, are the bounties which India received by suitably negotiating the
Council’s legislation.
If we go through the excavation reports of Mohenjodaro and Harappa for
information regarding the antiquities that are in the National Museum’s
collection, we realize that the officers of the Archaeological Survey had
consciously searched for duplicates and twins to facilitate a fair share. But
this also meant that bangles and brooches got separated from their pairs,
and bowls, vases and other pots got dismembered from the ordered series
that would illustrate aspects of unknown histories of manufacture. Yet, the
injunctions for an equal share of antiquities must have confounded the
distribution of those that are singularly unique, such as the Priest King,
Dancing Girl, Male Torso, Limestone Head, seals with the gilgamesh and
pashupati motifs and Statue of a Dancer. The criteria for their allocation to
either India or Pakistan remains unexplored. We note that the Survey
archives in India inform us only of the trepidations of the nation in losing
out the ‘plum objects’, as mentioned in the remarks of V.S. Agrawala, then
the head of Museums Branch of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI),
and among those who officiated the distribution of the spoils.
The partitioning of the Indus antiquities acquires a more complex history
because of the valuations of over forty pieces as masterpieces of Indian art,
initially through their selection for display at the Inter-Asian Conference in
Delhi (March–April 1947) and then through their displays in the first
international exhibition of The Art of India and Pakistan, hosted by the
Royal Academy at London (November 1947–February 1948). The exhibits
included gold ornaments from Harappa and Mohenjodaro, amongst which
were the jadeite necklace and the carnelian girdle, and those from the Indo-
Greek city of Sirkap at Taxila. All of them were partitioned on their return,
in 1948, to New Delhi.
 At the time of its archaeological recovery, the jadeite necklace was
located under a foundation wall in the area labelled DK at Mohenjodaro and
found inside a small silver vessel that was covered with a lid. The
excavators believed that the vessel belonged to a jeweller because the other
contents were scraps of silver, two twisted bangles of gold and a ‘useless’
silver ring with a square bezel. They suggested that the deformed silver and
gold objects were intentionally stored inside the vessel for future purposes
of melting and reuse, and that its find spot revealed evidence of
concealment. It is ironic that a precious object of antiquity, which was
retrieved in its pristine condition from the place of its hiding of 4,000 years,
was thereafter destroyed because it was deemed inestimable in the world in
which it was brought back to light.
Albeit with occasional bouts of safekeeping in locked vaults, the
specimen jadeite necklace is among the longest displayed objects of the
National Museum. Between 1950 and 1961, when the Museum functioned
from the State Rooms of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the necklace was
displayed with the other partitioned jewellery of the Indus Civilization and
Taxila in a case guarded by ‘special guards’ who were ‘posted to keep
watch’. In December 1961, when the Museum opened in its own buildings
at Janpath, the necklace was displayed in the Prehistory gallery with other
objects of the Indus Civilization, Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods. In
April 1994, the National Museum inaugurated a special jewellery gallery
for exhibiting its rich ornaments collection, and those in its Harappan
Collections (namely, of the Indus Civilization) made up the first case. The
new Guide to the National Museum (1994) gave prominence to the ‘variety
of necklaces, bangles, wristlets, girdles, pendants, armlets, headpins,
needles, earplugs, fillet and brooches’ by declaring them to be of ‘great
antiquarian value’ because they illustrated that ‘besides gold, the highly
civilized and prosperous Indus people [had] used several semi-precious
stones’.
The jewellery gallery closed in 2006, and a state-of-the-art gallery for the
objects, Alamkara, was opened to public in November 2014. The ornaments
of the Indus Civilization are now grandly displayed in the first two cases of
this gallery, and the specimen jadeite necklace is exhibited in the first case
with the label: ‘Indus Valley, Mohenjodaro, c. 2600–1900 BCE, Gold, Jade,
Agate, Jasper.’ At a quick glance visitors might fail to notice that the
necklace comprises modern elements. A careful view directs the eye to the
modern cord that strings the necklace. The gold wire of the original jadeite
necklace was spliced during the division, and therefore the beads were
restrung on a silk thread.
The three display cases that follow the one with the jadeite necklace
exhibit other halved objects, and amongst them a few necklaces are very
visibly so. Yet, in aiming to ‘enrich the visitor’s experience of the Jewellery
Gallery’, the handbook of the objects displayed in Alamkara fails to inform
viewers why they are shown ornaments that look quite visibly halved. This
and the object labels, which inform of provenance and date, convey the
curatorial reticence of engaging with a controversial history, and the
omission is a glaring example of the acts of forgetting and erasure that are
nurtured by the politics of nationalism.
Notably, India’s share of the Indus objects following Partition are
classified as belonging to the AA category, which constitutes the most
important national antiquities. Therefore, the Indian government has denied
loan requests of the Indian jadeite necklace and carnelian girdle for
international exhibitions in the United States, which aimed at presenting
them as they were found during excavations. Many scholars of the Indus
Civilization also express hope that the Indian and Pakistani jadeite
necklaces and carnelian girdles would some day be joined together. The
question that arises is: Who shall be the custodian of the re-joined artefacts?
India or Pakistan?
The history of the partitioned necklace inevitably brings us to regard the
logic of fashioning national heritage through relics of the past. For surely,
the inhabitants of the Indus Civilization did not see themselves as belonging
to India or Pakistan, or even as South Asians. The uses of antiquities that
pre-date nation states and new cultural and political geographies for
historicizing their deep ancestry therefore appear as a glaring anomaly,
which as the story of the jadeite necklace conveys, bring us to question the
wisdom of claiming ownership of the past.

BALAKRISHNAN, U. (Ed.) (2014). Alamkara: The Beauty of Ornament, the National Museum
Collection of Indian Jewellery. New Delhi: National Museum.
CHAUHAN, R.R.S. (1994). A Guide to the National Museum (4th ed.). New Delhi: National
Museum.
GUHA, S. (2019). ‘Decolonizing South Asia through Heritage- and Nation-Building’. Future-
Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory and Criticism, 16(2), 31–45.
KAUL, S. (2002). ‘Introduction’. In S. Kaul (Ed.), The Partitions of Memory (pp. 1–29). Indiana
University Press.
LAHIRI, N. (2012). Marshalling the Past: Ancient India and Its Modern History. Permanent Black.
MARSHALL, J.H. (Ed.) (1931). Jadeite Necklace. DK 1341. PL XCLVIII. Mohenjodaro and the
Indus Civilization, 2. Arthur Probsthain.
‘Review of Ancient India, 4.’ (1949, March 6). The Hindu.
D.O. letter from R.E.M. Wheeler to N.P. Chakravarti, 18 November 1949. File 33/62/47, Partition –
Division of Museums and Archives. National Archives of India, New Delhi.
65
A MODEL VILLAGE
Maharashtra
Mid-20th century

THE SET OF TWO MODELS – OF AN IDEAL VILLAGE AND PADDY cultivation –

create a regard of the complex phenomenon that representation constitutes,
wherein a particular thing often simultaneously denotes something else that
lies hidden. The models were made for the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad City
Museum, Mumbai, and are among the last of the extensive tableaux that
came into the institution’s collections. They are displayed in custom-built
cabinet cases, presenting, as the object labels mention, a diorama. They
offer a vision of the model village, and thereby take viewers to times before
and now – reminding them of the colonial and national pedagogies of
development, and of the present-day rural distress in India with more than
76 per cent of farmers willing to give up farming if they can find alternative
livelihoods. The models not only show the propensity of things to carry
excess information, but convey the possibilities of diverse types of viewing.
They constitute, in a nutshell, the problem of controlling how things are
seen.
‘Diorama’ is a Greek word meaning ‘through that which is seen’. As is
well known, the invention of the diorama in 1822 by Louis Daguerre and
Charles Bouton led to increasing explorations of the utilities of visual
experiences. Dioramas furthered the pedagogic possibilities of three-
dimensional vision, and came to mean, as the Oxford English Dictionary
tells us, ‘small-scale model of a scene, building-project, or […] a miniature
set’ that comprise ‘three-dimensional figures or objects displayed in front of
a painted background’. The miniature models conveyed considerable
information in relatively little space, and as the nineteenth century
progressed, they gained ‘ever more prominent places’, as historians of
science Soraya Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood inform us, in ‘new
teaching regimes [becoming] the key medium of traffic between the
sciences and wider culture’. Institutions, prominently museums, began
commissioning and acquiring them for their ability to create authentic
experiences. Notable as much for their craftsmanship as for their wormhole
views of reality, they increasingly came to represent museum
professionalism as they allowed focus on visitor experience.

Diorama of ‘An Ideal Village’, 1955–56, Exhibition model, Clay, Wood, 2180 mm × 1040 mm × 220
mm, BDLM: 143.

Diorama of ‘Paddy Cultivation’. 1955–56, Exhibition model, Half-Baked Terracotta, Wood, Mixed
Media, Pigments, 620 mm × 1020 mm × 2180 mm, BDLM 145.1.
 Notably, ‘ideas about town planning, water management and street
lighting were presented as dioramas’ at the new local museum of the
Bombay Presidency, which opened in 1872 as Victoria and Albert Museum
and Gardens. In 1975, it changed its name to Dr. Bhau Daji Lad City
Museum. The museum was aimed as a repository of Bombay’s industrial
arts and economic developments for ‘producing a community of view […]
desirable for improvement of the mind’, as the committee members
declared, and began to acquire large dioramas of everyday life in the
Presidency during the first decade of the twentieth century, in the wake of
the ravages of the endemic bubonic plague.
The plague began in 1896 and killed more than half the population of the
city of Bombay and its booming textile industry. It created, to quote an
assessment by Ira Klein, both ‘financial delirium and urban improvements’.
The Museum’s curator Cecil Burns, who took office in 1903, saw the logic
of evoking memories of the vibrant city for increasing visitor numbers, and
actively sought a collection of elaborate tableaux depicting the hustle-bustle
of quotidian life, also in the countryside. Scenes of civic life, in well-laid-
out localities, with schools, houses, places for outdoor exercising, provide a
glimpse of the intrusive colonial administration of a ‘sanitary utopia’, to
borrow Mark Harrison’s phrase, that followed the plague, in the diehard
belief that the disease did not demand knowledge of ‘principals of
bacteriology’ since it spread through ‘unhealthy conditions of various
elements: bad water, foul gases and want of food’.
The dioramas were made in-house with assistance from students of the
prestigious Sir J.J. School of Art (founded in 1857), and many were
duplicates of those sent as parts of the Indian pavilions for the international
world fairs. The indigenous (read Indian-made) dioramas most certainly
added to the authentication of the benefits of British colonial rule in India
internationally, showcasing, no doubt, that the sanitization of the plague
was a way of conquering native squalor.
The museum’s collection of models, mainly in clay and wood, of native-
types, occupations and scenes grew substantially by the end of the colonial
era, and they illustrate, as Christopher Pinney reminds us quoting W.J.T.
Mitchell, the colonial concern with the ‘philosophy of things in which
things seemed more and more to be built, arranged, handled or consumed as
signs of something further’. The dioramas of the ideal village and paddy
cultivation present the concern as also that of the Indian nation’s, and
thereby encourage a careful look into the colonial and national
transpositions of the properties of indexicality.
The dioramas display the quintessential India of villages, a historical
truth which the British could, ostensibly, uncover through their surveys and
scholarship. They also embody the key event of the times in which they
were made, namely, the First Five Year Plan (1951–56) of India in which
the agricultural sector received topmost priority. Additionally, they
constitute the museological mode of looking, which the British brought into
India, and which entailed typification, miniaturization and displays of an
aggregate of things classified as Indian for all to see.
The well-planned village with tree-lined roads, neat rows of houses in
demarcated plots and community buildings in earmarked spaces provides a
view of the national pedagogy of development. Significantly, the village
seems sanitized of segregated spaces for caste- and religion-based groups.
The identical houses appear airy and spacious, opening into wide porches
and with many windows. The temple in the village centre, and another,
possibly of a folk god, at the edge of the village next to a mazaar, or shrine,
a large community-looking building at another end, and two toilets at the
far end, create a view of a well-managed communitarian habitat. The larger
houses with chimneys and toilets, and also kitchen gardens and well-made
cowsheds, bring to mind the vision of the colonial sanitary utopia, although
they showcase intensely modern nationalist schemes of improving rural life.
The vista of cultivating the paddy fields creates a view of the discourses
of food, which, to quote Sunil Amrith, ‘remained at the centre of Indian
political culture since Independence […] if the promise of “development”
has stood at the core of the post-colonial state’s claim to legitimacy, it is
through the state’s control of food that this promise of welfare has often
taken concrete form’. The political and emotional force of hunger,
following the experiences of the Bengal Famine and Partition, shaped
India’s First Five Year Plan that invested in expanding agriculture through
various schemes, prominently land reclamation and improvements in
farming technologies. By the end of the 1950s, nearly 25 million acres of
land had been brought under cultivation, and the men in the model –
sowing, tilling, ploughing and working in the paddy fields – remind us that
area under rice cultivation increased the most, by over 40 per cent.
The First Five Year Plan guided diverse agrarian projects – domestic
production of fertilizers, nutrient maps of villages, rural electrification
programmes, soil-testing laboratories, government-sponsored education in
agricultural technologies and large dam-building irrigation schemes, which
the Bombay State largely undertook in areas on the left bank of the
Ghataprabha river. The plan conceptualized the establishment of
cooperative farming societies with the aim, summed up in a report of the
Indian Planning Commission delegation to China in July 1956, that it would

offer opportunities for utilizing a part of the labour force for

improving village communications and housing and for the provision
of other social amenities. Planning at the village level will become
possible. Besides, it will provide opportunities of working together
for the various groups of people now held apart by social and
communal divisions and thus bring about increasingly an emotional
integration of the people into a living entity.

The diorama of the ideal village showcases such a cooperative society. It

is a communitarian space, seemingly sanitized of the squalor of the
historically segregating Village India.
The First Five Year Plan sought to eradicate the problem of absentee
landlords holding vast swathes of land in which landless farmers toiled
without managing to eke out even a meagre livelihood. The diorama of the
rice fields of the Bombay State reminds us that this aim of the plan had a
regional precursor in the Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act passed by the
Bombay government in 1948. The act, according to agricultural economist
Mohanlal Dantwala (1909–98), was the ‘most advanced’ within India at the
time, stipulating that a tenant who held his land continuously for six years
was a ‘protected tenant’. Subsequently, in 1961 the Maharashtra
government imposed a ceiling on holdings of the perennially irrigated lands
of paddy within assured rainfall areas to 14.6 hectares. The following
decade celebrated the Green Revolution as a triumph of development to
‘combat scarcity and dominate nature’, and the unfortunate effects of
‘diseased soils, pest-infected crops, water-logged deserts and indebted and
discontented farmers’ were yet to be noted, as India’s foremost
environmental activist and scholar Vandana Shiva emphasizes. Shiva also
reminds us that the development philosophy which was articulated through
policies such as those mooted in 1952 through ‘the British American-
sponsored Colombo Plan, were aware of the power of the peasantry in
Asia’. They were based upon the understanding that the peasants were to be
seen as ‘incipient revolutionaries, who, if squeezed too hard, could be
rallied against the politically and economically powerful groups’.
The Green Revolution, assisted by foreign capital and planned by foreign
experts, was prescribed for Asia as a techno-political strategy that would
create abundance in agricultural societies and reduce the threat of
communist insurgency and agrarian conflict. Its short history in India, and
elsewhere in Asia, illustrates, to quote Shiva, the ‘major schism’ that it bred
between indigenous and international science.
The diorama occasions us to recall that rice is the staple of nearly half of
humanity, and in South Asia, farmers cultivated and bred for over a
millennia an estimated 1,10,000–2,00,000 varieties. Scientists began to
breed rice in India during the 1910s, first in Bengal, and by the 1950s they
had developed some 445 improved Oryza sativa Indica varieties for
specific stress situations or resisting particular diseases. The careful
strategies of producing more rice in India by the Central Rice Research
Institute, established in Cuttack in 1950, were, however, totally overlooked
in lobbying support for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).
Established at Los Banos, Philippines, in 1960, the institute was sponsored
by the United States and was a cartel of multinational seed companies that
hoped to direct rice research in Asia. The aims aptly echoed, as the
environmentalist Claude Alvares tells us, a plant-breeders’ dictum that ‘he
who controls the supply of rice will control the destiny of the entire Asiatic
orbit. [For] in Asia, food is rice.’ Significantly, as Alvares documents, the
IRRI was implicated in ‘a great gene robbery’ of an Indian rice research
databank, even as it ridiculed and sought to displace the traditional cultivar
with its products of the semi-dwarf high-yielding variety (HYV).
Unsurprisingly, the Green Revolution in rice ended as a very ‘small
accomplishment’ for India, possibly an increase in yield of about 0.31
tonnes per hectare with HYV.
Today researchers of rice show us that abstract notions of crop yield are
often used for packaging the commercialization of new seed technologies as
pro-poor. For example, Joe Hill informs us that although scientists often
recommend ‘creative approaches to privately funding hybrid rice research
for the benefit of poor farmers in India […] missing from their research is
any examination of how small farmers – who are the majority in India –
actually benefit from growing’ this kind.
Following the economic reforms of the 1990s, Indian farmers have
increasingly faced hardships, largely due to the gradual withdrawal of state
investments from the vast and complex agrarian economy that looks after
many allied occupations, such as potters, weavers and other craftspeople.
Additionally, over the past seventy years, landholdings in India have
become increasingly fragmented, and 85 per cent of farmers today own less
than two hectares. The problems of small holdings compound with the
requirements of plentiful water for paddy cultivation. Farmers are forced to
dig expensive borewells in lands that barely feed them and their families,
without any clue of the number of cropping seasons the new depth of
available water would sustain.
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, over 300,000 farmers
have killed themselves in India, and the Farm Bills of September 2020
demonstrated quite starkly the dire consequences of allowing the corporate
sector to move into agriculture and the ensuing competitive free market
economy that would thrive through governmental non-interference in
matters of farming and its commercialization. The diorama of a Model
Village showcasing the national promise of food security and rural
development, therefore, raises a ghost for the future within the disciplined
view of governance it provides, namely, the spectre of the chaos and
disaster of a strategically disengaged and lawful non-governance.

ALVARES, C. (1986, March 23). ‘The Great Gene Robbery’. The Illustrated Weekly of India.
AMRITH, S. (2008). ‘Food and Welfare in India, c. 1900–1950’. Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 50(4), 1010–35.
CHADAREVIAN, S. and N. Hopwood. (2004). ‘Dimensions of Modelling’. In S. Chadarevian and
N. Hopwood (Eds), Models: The Third Dimension of Science (pp. 1–15). Stanford University
Press.
DANDEKAR, A. and S. Bhattacharya. (2017). ‘Lives in Debt: Narratives of Agrarian Distress and
Farmer Suicides’. Economic and Political Weekly, 52(21), 77–84.
DANTWALA, M.L. (1950). ‘India’s Progress in Agrarian Reforms’. Far Eastern Survey, 19(22),
239–44.
HARRISON, M. (1990). ‘Towards a Sanitary Utopia? Professional Visions and Public Health in
India, 1880–1914’. South Asia Research, 10(1), 19–40.
HILL, J.K.W. (2015). ‘F1 Hybrid Rice in Eastern India: Silver Bullet or Capital Ploy’. Capitalism,
Nature, Socialism, 26(3), 73–88. doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2015.1051565.
KLEIN, I. (1973). ‘Death in India, 1871–1921’. Journal of Asian Studies, 22(4), 639–59.
PINNEY, C. (1990). ‘Figures of Caste “Types” Including a Sadhu, Musician, Government Employee,
Muslims, Pandits and a Coolie’. In C.A. Bayly (Ed.), The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947
(pp. 288–89). London: National Portrait Gallery.
SENGUPTA, J. (2018, December 13). ‘Time to Take up Issues of Marginal Farmers’. Observer
Research Foundation.
SHIVA, V. (2016). The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and
Politics. University Press of Kentucky.
ZAKARIA MEHTA, T. (2009). The Restoration and Revitalization of Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai
City Museum. Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum Trust.
ZAKARIA MEHTA, T. (Ed.) (2022). Mumbai: A City through Objects – 101 Stories from the Dr.
Bhau Daji Lad Museum. HarperCollins.
66
LIC LOGO
1956

THE IMAGE OF THE TWO HANDS PROTECTING THE FLAME OF A DIYA, or an earthen
lamp, appear ubiquitous in India, visible everywhere, in all cities, towns and
villages, and every Indian possibly knows that it symbolizes jeevan bima or
life insurance – even if unable to read the words underneath, which are
from the Bhagavad Gita, and declare ‘yogakshemam vahamy aham’ that
translates as ‘your welfare is my responsibility’. The logo was designed in
1956 by Advertising Sales Promotion (ASP, Bombay). In recalling the
commission fifty years later, the painter Jhupu Adhikari (1927–2013), who
was the art director of the company, provided a rare glimpse of the heady
times

I still remember the excitement when Sylvie [Sylvester da Cunha]

rang me from Delhi to tell me the good news and asked me to meet
him at Santa Cruz airport. As we drove back to the office we worked
out the details of the initial press campaign to be released in the
national dailies announcing the birth of the corporation and its
symbol – the first ad went in on 1 September, 1956. Simultaneously
we also worked out the follow-up campaign that would target each
section of India’s salaried class separately. We got a lot of kudos for
that first LIC campaign – especially for such niche targeting that
broke new ground at the time.
Advertisement for the launch of LIC in 1956 featuring the logo designed by Jhupu Adhikari.
Advertising Sales Promotion Bombay.

The commission was bagged by Sylvester da Cunha who headed ASP,

and who exactly ten years later would procure for the firm the commission
for the logo of Amul butter. Both the Life Insurance Company (LIC) logo
and Amul Girl (see ch. 70) provided visibility to invisible objectives – in
this instance, the safety and protection that LIC assured to ‘the public at
large [and] to the citizen of India’, to quote from the first advertisement.
Life insurance companies proliferated in colonial India with the
establishment of Oriental Life Insurance in 1818. The British-owned
companies set the trend of assuring European lives (not native) despite the
fact that by the 1830s, prominent Indian businesses, such as those of
Dwarkanath Tagore and Rustomjee Cowasjee, floated many insurance
companies and saved many from bankruptcy.
As the official history of LIC, Saga of Security (1970), records,
Europeans and their descendants born in India paid extra charges, ‘probably
on account of expectation of heavy mortality due to residence’ in the
country. However, in the few instances when selected Indian lives were
insured, the charges were higher still. Significantly, the LIC traces its
official history from 1870 when Britain passed the Life Insurance
Companies Act that compelled insurance companies to be ‘more
serviceable to the society and nation’. The act propelled an increase of life
insurance companies in India, and the Bombay Mutual Life Assurance,
established in 1871, pioneered the insurance of Indian lives without
discrimination. Bombay became the operational hub of the life insurance
industry, to a large extent because of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1870,
which greatly increased the commercial prospects of the international port.
In 1935, Bombay Mutual moved to a grand building at the juncture of busy
commercial roads – Pheroze Shah Mehta and Hornby – with a landmark
dome soaring high above all other buildings. The building portrayed, as the
annual report stated, ‘Bombay’s commercial and architectural progress’.
Indian-owned life insurance companies grew in number from the
beginning of the twentieth century with the Swadeshi movement. With the
passing of the Indian Life Insurance Companies Act in 1912, a conscious
attempt was increasingly made to check malpractices within a rapidly
growing industry and the Insurance Act of 1938, as Kamal Nayan Kabra
explains, finally ‘imposed the necessity of making deposits with RBI […],
quinquennial actuarial valuation and submission of returns to the
superintendent of insurance’.
Histories of insurance inform us of social, economic and political
histories of nation states. Those of the British life insurance companies in
India show British constructs of racial identities and the changing
transactions between British and Indian financial partners. They also
illustrate the networks and entanglements of local and transnational
commercial histories within the histories of banking and shipbuilding. The
increasing number of Indian-owned insurance companies of the early-
twentieth century document the growing strength of nationalist politics,
which made moves in the 1950s to nationalize life insurance for developing
India as a welfare state.
 The insurance business facilitates raising large resources with relatively
small initial investments. The resources rest with insurers for long periods
during which policy-holders have little control, and ‘since insurers
accumulate substantial funds, they also diversify investment risks for their
stakeholders in diversifying portfolios’ to quote Dorrim Nissim. The
nationalization of life insurance in India was, thus, largely aimed at
accruing capital for national projects. And in helming the move, which
displayed his firm belief in the importance of social control over financial
institutions, C.D. Deshmukh, the then finance minister (1950–56),
categorically stated in an All India Radio broadcast of 19 January 1956, that

Nationalisation of life insurance will be another milestone on the

road the country has chosen in order to reach its goal of socialistic
pattern of society. In the implementation of the Second Five Year
Plan, it is bound to give material assistance. Into the lives of millions
in rural areas it will introduce a new sense of awareness of building
for the future […] It is a measure conceived in a genuine spirit of
service to the people.

The Life Insurance Corporation Act of 18 June 1956 nationalized 154

Indian and 16 non-Indian insurers and 75 provident societies into a single
entity ‘to serve’, as Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared in his
inaugural address, ‘the individual and the state. The profit motive goes out
of it and the service motive becomes dominant.’ The myriad projects, rural
and urban, relating to housing, electricity, water supply and other such
welfare schemes undertaken with LIC resources well until the 1980s,
provide a glimpse of the visionary politics of building the nation on the
logic of securing benefits for all its citizens.
The nationalization of the LIC has been critiqued retrospectively as the
Indian government’s pursuit of social objectives at the cost of consumers.
Yet, despite the cronyisms and malfunctioning which this engendered, and
the stiff competition which the LIC has faced in the long post-liberalization
era from 24 other life insurance companies that came up, it continued to
keep its stature within the Indian insurance industry with the highest market
shares. The long success story of the LIC as a nationalized industry appears
unique, and its visual histories allow us to gauge some of the reasons.
Savita Bhave, who wrote the history of the LIC, Saga of Security (1970),
informs us that ‘life insurance advertising became a specialized subject’ and
posters, hoardings, neon signs, bus panels, films, exhibitions and even
puppetry were strategically placed ‘in every nook and corner [of India] to
spread the message of life insurance to the illiterate millions’. One may
infer that the logo, which simply and elegantly conveyed the vision of
financial security, influenced decisions to nurture the ‘appeal to the eye
[which] was one of the steps that the Corporation took right from the
beginning’, and thereby created for itself a strong and an enduring public
profile.
Significantly, the logo illuminates the power of the visual world to keep
alive a particular institutional history and nurture the truths of its beneficial
legacy.

ADHIKARI, S. (Ed.) (2006). Jhupu: A Life Drawing. Gallerie Alternatives.

BHATTACHARYA, A. and O’Neil Rane. (2003). ‘Nationalisation of Insurance in India’. Centre for
Civil Society, No. 397. ccsindia.org/internship_papers/2003/chap32.pdf.
BHAVE, S.R. (1970). Saga of Security: Story of Indian Life Insurance. Life Insurance Corporation of
India.
CHIKERMANE, G. (2018). Policies that Shaped India: 1947 to 2017, Independence to $2.5 Trillion.
Observer Research Foundation.
India. Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India. (2007). History of Insurance.
IRD/GEN/06/2007.
KABRA, K.N. (1986). ‘Nationalisation of Life Insurance in India’. Economic and Political Weekly,
21(47), 2045–53.
NISSIM, D. (2010). Analysis and Evaluation of Insurance Companies. Centre for Excellence in
Accounting and Security Analysis, Columbia Business School.
‘LIC through the Years’. (2020, February 5). The Hindu.
67
MOTHER INDIA, THE FILM POSTER

DIRECTED BY MEHBOOB KHAN AND RELEASED IN 1957, MOTHER India remains an

iconic film of early independent India, conveying the hopes, courage and
struggles of the young nation. Depicting contemporary rural India, this
production of the Bombay film industry glorified the nurturing of kin, land,
and community by an indomitable woman who through sheer determination
saves the fortune of her entire village against heavy odds. Her determined
fight against prejudice and hardship is majestically portrayed as the way
forward for the young nation to establish a utopian society. The film
idealizes the simple life of Indian villages and their cultural traditions, and
advocates bringing progress to villagers through new technologies of
irrigation. The poster, created in 1980 with the re-release of the film, speaks
of an abiding classic that is memorialized to date as a national epic.
Mother India is the story of Radha (played by Nargis), who comes to a
new village as a young bride and finds her household indebted to an
unscrupulous moneylender. She eventually raises her three children alone in
dire poverty, is forced to kill her eldest son who becomes a criminal, and
inspires her village to build a dam, which brings the promise of prosperity
for all by irrigating the until-then- untillable parched and rocky lands. To
the villagers, Radha is the nurturing mother who is, as film historian Sumita
Chakravarty recounts, the ‘embodiment of the values [of] mythology, cult
worship, social traditions and customs’. She abides by traditional norms,
which add to the moral authority she is able to gather for herself for
successfully leading her village to ‘the transition of a new mechanized
India’.

Mother India Film Poster. 1957, Mehboob Studio (Bombay), 1,020 mm × 760 mm.

Mehboob Khan conceptualized the film in 1952, and his choice of the
title was deliberate. Mother India was well known at the time as a book by
an American journalist, Katherine Mayo. The book was published in 1927,
and it painted in vivid details the barbarism and cruelty of Hindu society
towards its women. It spoke of rampant child marriages, appalling
conditions of widows, the abject callousness towards hygiene and,
consequently, the high rates of infant mortality.
Mayo strove to document the benefits of colonial rule at a time when
Indians demanded Home Rule, and although the book acquired wide
publicity through the many reprints in the United States, Great Britain and
colonial India, it attracted considerable notoriety. Some Western readers
were decidedly convinced about the cruelty, lethargy and backwardness of
traditional India. However, Indians were expectedly outraged. Gandhi
fiercely denounced Mayo and her book as a ‘report of a drain inspector’
that had come to the wrong conclusion that ‘drains are India’. Through his
Mother India, Mehboob Khan aimed at a grand rebuttal to Mayo, which the
film poster substantiates rather effectively.
Mayo, as many scholars have noted, cleverly appropriated ‘Bharat Mata’,
the national goddess of India, who was conceived at the beginning of the
twentieth century to helm the nascent nationalist movements that rose with
the colonial plans, in 1905, to partition Bengal. By the 1920s, as the essay
on Bharatuddhar informs us (see ch. 60), Bharat Mata, or Mother India,
embodied the resplendent geo-body and soul of the Indian nation. Mayo’s
conveyed ‘a pathologised mother’.
Bharat Mata had a hymn of her own – the song Vande Mataram, which
was composed between 1875 and 1881 by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
(1838–94) who incorporated it in his debut novel Anandamath (1882). The
Mother India poster directs our eyes to the following stanza of the song that
asks

Who sayeth to thee, Mother, that thou art weak?

Holder of multitudinous strength
 I bow to her

The woman who holds high her heavy plough despite incurring great
physical pain exemplifies Mother India who represents strength, endurance
and willpower. She nurtures the new nation, and the imagery mocks Mayo’s
creation. As Divia Patel informs us, the poster was ‘refined and redefined’
from the cover image of the souvenir booklet of the film which was made
by L.L. Meganee in 1957 for Mehboob Studio, with the release of Mother
India. In the latter Radha is shown with her arm outstretched, pulling a
plough, and the image is evocatively captioned: ‘The grain of rice on your
table does not tell of the toil which grew it’. The poster powerfully conveys
the intended effect of the above image through scale and differential
perspective. Patel notes that

Radha’s heroic struggles were immortalised in one inspirational

iconic image. […] A sense of monumentality is achieved through the
depiction of her body from a low viewpoint so that the viewer looks
up at her. The viewer’s eye is drawn from Radha’s tightly clasped
hand, down her outstretched arm, which forms a diagonal across the
poster and comes to rest on her face. The expressive nature of the
painting impresses upon the viewer the feeling of anguish and pain
seen on her face and her straining neck, along with the ache of the
taut muscles in her fingers. Behind her the great expanse of land and
cattle is matched by an equally large expanse of sky and glorious
sunset, all in rich shades of orange, red, yellow and brown. The three-
dimensional lettering adds to the scale.

Mother India was one of the most expensive films made in India in its
time and earned the highest revenues. It won the All India Certificate for
Best Film in 1957, and was India’s first submission, in 1958, for the
Academy Awards in the category for Best Foreign Language Film.
Unfortunately, it lost the award by a single vote. The film begins and ends
with two poignant screenshots of an aged and infirm Radha, who is being
led to the canal by the men of her village. She is shown picking up a clod of
earth soaked in the waters of the canal, and smearing it on her face. Behind
her are tractors and machinery, and we see the water of the canal gushing
into the fields. The shots illuminate the promise of Nehruvian policies of
nation-building through the social implementation of modern technologies.
Significantly, they capture the unique modernity of the newly independent
India, which Nehru dreamt of, that accommodated tradition in planning
change.
Cinema has been one of the foremost advertisers of nationalism all over
the world, and researchers now enquire into the manner in which the
medium allows the nation to be conceptualized as a communicable space.
Mother India beckons us to enquire into the shifting constructs of such
popular nationalisms.
Cinema came into India in 1896, a year after the pioneering invention, by
the Lumiere brothers Auguste (1862–1954) and Louis (1864–1948), of the
motion picture camera and projector. The cinematograph films (from where
the word ‘cinema’ is derived) of the Lumiere brothers were shown in
Bombay that year, and others followed. The first film produced entirely
through the Indian expertise of film technology and sets was the
mythological Raja Harishchandra directed by D.G. Phalke. It was shown in
1913. Alam Ara, released in 1931, was the first Indian talkie, or film with
sound.
Directors initially advertised their films through newspapers.
Subsequently, they commissioned the production of film booklets, which
Patel notes are unique to Indian cinema. The booklets incorporated the
lyrics of the songs in the film, and provided, as the one of Mother India
illustrates, a step-by-step guide to the story of the film, which included its
making. With the booklets came film posters, and the imagery illustrates
developments towards an Indian art. We may trace the histories from the
realist paintings of the renowned painter Ravi Varma (1848–1906), which
were produced in bulk as chromolithographs from 1894 in the printing press
he established in Bombay. The press was subsequently shifted, in 1899, to
Malavali (near Lonavla, Maharashtra).
 Varma used the modes of European realism and art techniques for
developing features of ‘Indian art’. His style was highly influential until the
beginning of the 1910s when the Swadeshi ideology castigated the realisms
in his iconography as foreign imports. The flourishing Bombay and
Calcutta schools of art now situated the authentic Indian within the Ajanta
paintings (see ch. 18), and the synthetic combination of an Indian past and
indigenous style, which these schools deemed the art of Ajanta to represent,
fashioned the look of Indian art in film posters and booklets. A change
occurred during the 1930s when Indian artists courted the styles of art deco.
However, the experimentation was short-lived as the resurgent nationalist
movements of the mid-1940s increasingly sought modernity on Indian
terms.
The two prominent studios of Hindi cinema which emerged at this time
in Bombay were Mehboob Productions, founded by Mehboob Khan in
1942, and R.K. Films, by Raj Kapoor in 1948. Both established their
reputations by conveying with clarity the anxieties of the young Indian
nation, which was poised to modernize but which feared the loss of its great
traditions, and the films they made gained great renown for the apt portrayal
of socio-realist subject matter.
Whereas the films of R.K. Studio explored the city and urban-scape, and
documented the erosion of traditional societies and their moral values, those
of Mehboob Studio, as Patel recalls, ‘idealised village life and made it the
basis of their projection of a national identity’. The opening lines of the
souvenir booklet of Mother India informs of the endeavour. They are a
quote from a public lecture given during the nineteenth century by the
German Indologist Max Müller (1823–1900) which declare

And if I were to ask myself from what literature we in Europe […]

may draw that corrective which is most wanted to make our inner life
more perfect […] more truly human […] again I should point to
India.
The images in the booklet of Mother India show a quintessential Indian
rural landscape. The emotional intensity which they evoke, Patel tells us,
‘was achieved through the artist’s use of expressive and exaggerated brush
strokes, colour and texture’. Importantly, the painting style, ‘which involved
overpainting of photographic prints with gouache or oil paints’, became
widely used in the poster art of the 1970s, and can be seen in the posters of
the two mega blockbusters of the time, Deewar and Sholay (both in 1975).
The poster of Mother India builds upon the booklet’s imagery for a
powerful visual vocabulary of a toiling and truly human India. The
emphatic style which it successfully disseminated has been widely copied
in designing many film posters well into the twenty-first century.
Usually, film posters comprise elements that are meant to be immediately
and universally understood. They depict key components of the film’s
complex cultural meanings, and the star’s portrait is often aimed at
‘triggering deeper level of recognition and understanding in those who have
the appropriate cultural knowledge’. Mother India, it is often said, cannot
be imagined without Nargis, who retired from the film industry after
completing this film and went into the world of social work. The poster’s
visual memory, in the depiction of a Muslim woman denoting Bharat Mata,
one hopes is apparent to its viewers today who are aware of the remarkable
shift in the politics of the cultural historicization of Indian nationalism since
the production.
Mother India continues to encourage its audiences to reflect upon the
embedded contradictions of India’s nation-building projects, which
increasingly aspire for the hegemony of modernity by reifying traditions.
Moreover, the advertisement of the film as ‘one of the greatest Indian films
ever made’ demands societal introspection, since Mehboob Khan, to quote
the souvenir booklet, ‘proudly, and yet humbly’ presented ‘his motherland
to the world with the prayer’ from the Quran, the first sura, al Fatiha:

Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Raheem
Al-hamd-u-līĪah-i-Rabbil Alameen
Ar-Rahman-ir-Raheem
 Malik-i-yanm-id-deen
Iyyaka nabudu wa lyyaka nasta’een
Ihd-nassarat al mustaqueem
Sirat-al Lazeena ana’mta alaihim Ghair-il
Maghdoob-i-a’laihim wa laddallin. Ameen.

(In the name of Allah, The One Who Acts with Mercy, The Source of
Mercy
May Allah, the Lord of the worlds, be praised
The One Who Acts with Mercy, The Source of Mercy
Ruler on Judgment Day, We are devoted to You and we ask for Your
help
Guide us to the sure path
The path of those on whom You have bestowed Your grace, not of
those who misguide themselves [Amen])

The above dedication to the nation of a Muslim director of India’s iconic

national film needs to be heard quite explicitly now when everything of
national worth is being subsumed as representations of India’s Hindu
legacy.

CHAKRAVARTY, S.S. (1996). National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987. Oxford
University Press.
PATEL, D. and R. Dwyer. (2002). Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film. Reaktion Books.
SCHLESINGER, P. (2000). ‘The Sociological Scope of “National Cinema”’. In M. Hjort and S.
Mackenzie (Eds), Cinema and Nation (pp. 19–31). Routledge.
TALBOT, I. (2016). A History of Modern South Asia: Politics, States, Diasporas. Yale University
Press.
68
THE AMBASSADOR

1958–2017

The Ambassador, it’s a keeper, because it gives you wings like no

other old memory can.
– Dharamvir Saini, 2014

EVER SINCE ITS MANUFACTURE CAME TO A FINAL, AND long-foreseeable, halt on

25 May 2014, the Hindustan Ambassador, India’s first passenger car, has
gained an iconic status as the memory-maker of the aspirations of the young
India at Independence. The Amby, the nickname which the car acquired by
the 1970s, was, to quote its admirers, the ‘king of Indian roads’ for over
half a century – from 1958 when it rolled out for the first time from the
assembly lines of the factory at Uttarpara, West Bengal, until the mid-
1980s, when the more compact and seemingly easy to manage Maruti cars
began to take over its market supremacy. The Ambassador was a ‘truly
Indianized car’, as its nostalgic historians such as Sudarshan Pawar are at
pains to remind us, whose every problem could be fixed by the
neighbourhood mechanic with a ‘hammer and wrench’, and whose spare
parts could be found even in remote villages. The sturdy-looking spacious
car notched several levels higher in appeal over the other two passenger
cars that were also manufactured in the newly independent India, namely,
the Fiat, in Kurla (Bombay, 1964–2012) and Standard Herald in
Perungalathur (Madras, 1961–88). As the motoring journalist Hormazd
Sorabjee states:

One of the two official Ambassadors of the Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi. On
view is the wireless antenna and the red light on the bonnet.

A ‘Calcutta Taxi’.

The back seat was its trump card. Modern cars in their quest for
sleeker styling and better dynamics come with lower rooflines. They
can never match the Ambassador’s high seating position and
generous headroom. This made getting in and out easy, while the
 car’s low front bench gave rear passengers a fabulous, uninterrupted
view of the road ahead. Today’s cars with their big bucket seats, thick
pillars (structural uprights that support a car’s roof) and high window
lines just don’t have the same sense of airiness.

The large boot and room for at least six passengers – four in the back and
two in front with the possibility of squeezing in an extra person – appeared
to be a godsend for big Indian families travelling with vast amounts of
luggage. And the ‘beefy leaf spring suspension and 15-inch wheels’
appeared specifically designed for the unique Indian road – potholed and
poorly laid.
While the Fiat lived much longer than the Herald and was popular among
the middle classes, especially in western India, the Ambassador scored over
them both by becoming India’s official government vehicle. It is recalled
today as the ‘natural car’ of prime ministers, politicians and civil servants,
to quote a report by Lekshmi Priya.
A white Ambassador with the red beacon, or lal batti, on its roof
constituted the most visible display of power in India. ‘Moving either as
part of a secured motorcade, or independently with the lal batti switched on,
rotating in high speed and the [police] siren blaring’, it represented,
according to Manish Thakur, who has written extensively on the beacon, the
ultimate symbol of the state. The privileged passengers exuded ‘modern,
sophisticated, legitimate, political power’, which the print advertisement of
the car aptly captured in the declaration: ‘We are still the driving force of
the real leaders’.
The national pride which the Ambassador garnered soon after its
production, shines through a remark made by the Indian Prime Minister Lal
Bahadur Shastri (1964–66). On being asked why he stuck with the
Ambassador while receiving foreign dignitaries when his predecessor
Jawaharlal Nehru had often used a Cadillac for the purpose, Shastri
reportedly replied: ‘It makes no difference to me what the foreign
dignitaries think as long as they know that the Indian Prime Minister is
travelling in a car which is made in India.’
 The Ambassador, thus, conveyed the Make in India initiative half a
century before the terminology was formally coined. In this, it represented
the Indian will to economically decolonize by promoting import
substitution of foreign-made goods through the development and protection
of home-grown industries. Therefore, although modelled upon the Morris
Oxford Series III, which Morris Motors Limited manufactured in Cowley,
UK, from 1956 to 1959, the Ambassador was created as avowedly
indigenous – a genuine domestic product whose manufacture was facilitated
through in-house developments of the ancillary industries. However, its
biography represents the complex problems of protected markets which, as
Tirthankar Roy explains in one of his histories of the Indian economy, kept
the public sector industries profitable, made them ‘go easy on innovations’
and eventually made them ‘outdated in marketing, technology and
management style’. Notably, Sorabjee recalls that

For the best part of 30 years, the Ambassador got only minimal
cosmetic upgrades. […] The old 1.5-litre BMC engine from Britain’s
Austin Motor Company was replaced with a more modern 1.8-litre
Japanese Isuzu motor – bringing a 50% increase in power. When I
tested the Ambassador for an automobile magazine in the mid-1990s,
it was the fastest accelerating car in India, outpacing the more
modern Fiats and Maruti-Suzukis of that age. That it needed the
length of an airport runway to stop it was another matter. The maker
had barely upgraded the brakes.

The production histories of the Ambassador create a regard of the

connected histories of politics, businesses, trade unions, industries and
engineering institutions. More importantly, they inform us of the ills that
befall the towns and workforces of giant factories that collapse and fade
into oblivion. The growing memorials of the defunct Ambassador in India
today – whether for crowd-pulling, as in grand malls for enticing shoppers,
or as installations, such as for exploring the possibilities of the avant-garde,
as the renowned sculptor Subodh Gupta’s exhibits of the car seem to
suggest – inform us of acts of heritagization. In recalling the Ambassador,
we therefore begin to see the mutations of brand design and heritage-
making in creating the iconicity of earmarked objects.
Hindustan Motors, which manufactured the Ambassador, was founded by
the Birla Group, the doyen of Indian business families, in 1942 at Port Okha
in Gujarat. Significantly, as Roy recalls, at the cusp of Independence the
British directors of British firms in India worried that because ‘the big
Indian firms, like the Birla Brothers […] finance the All India Congress
[…] Congress will have a debt to pay to them, and that payment will result
in the elimination of British business interests’. The demands for an
automobile industry in India materialized in the 1930s when politicians,
such as the Diwan of Mysore Mokshagundum Visvesvaraya, or Sir MV
(1860–1962), began to advertise the potential benefits – as ‘motor for
India’s industrial progress’ in creating production units of ancillary
industries, and thereby a large job market. Although enterprises for
automobile manufacture were floated by the early 1940s – by G.D. Birla
through Hindustan Motors Limited and Walchand Hirachand through
Premier Automobile Limited, which in 1964 launched the Fiat 1100 – the
colonial government showed no interest. For, an Indian car industry would
have harmed investments of the British and American motor companies in
India which operated plants that were, as the communist politician B.T.
Ranadive recalled, ‘mainly assemblage of cars and nothing more’.
In 1947, the National Planning Committee Report designated automobile
as one of the ‘vital key’ industries and estimated that a state-sponsored
industry, in this instance at Bombay, would provide employment to about
33,000 people. Importantly, this committee, Stefan Tetzlaff explains, ‘put
relevant technical education and engineering profession on top of the
planning agenda’. In foregrounding the necessary connections between
engineering and education, the planning initiatives nurtured the Indian
Institutes of Technology, or the IITs, the first of which opened at Kharagpur,
West Bengal, in 1951. The Government of India banned the import of
completely built vehicles in 1949, and from 1953 refused permission to
Indian manufacturers to assemble imported vehicles without increasing
local content. The result was the withdrawal from India of General Motors
and Ford, and the grip of the Indian duopoly – Hindustan Motors and
Premier Automobiles – on production. The rapid growth of clusters of
industries producing automobile parts may be gauged from figures in
Bengal, which, as Tetzlaff tells us, rose from 8 in 1950 to 100 in 1961.
The Ambassador, manufactured at two plants, Uttarpara and
Sriperumbudur (near Chennai), remains India’s longest-produced car. It was
also India’s first diesel car and, similar to the Premier Padmini model of the
Fiat, it constituted the iconic taxi fleet of a metropolis, in this instance,
Kolkata, which was served by the main plant at Uttarpara for close to sixty
years. And here too it scored. It was voted in 2013 by Top Gear, the BBC’s
global automotive programme, as the world’s best taxi. ‘It’s so tough that
[…] with a quick wash and brush up, it could be back in service tomorrow
probably,’ the statement said.
Yet the Amby had a habit of breaking down, and anyone who has owned
or driven one would instantly sympathize with Sorabjee’s long litany of
malaise, of which some are: the fuel in the pump would evaporate causing a
vapour lock; one needed strong triceps to work the ridiculously heavy
steering and nearly stand on the brake to make the car stop; shifting gears,
especially from second to third, was an art form; the hand brake rarely
worked. Yet, despite its ‘appalling’ problems, buyers waited patiently for up
to eight years for their brand-new Ambassadors.
The 1980s brought the first winds of change within the Indian automobile
sector with the launch of the Maruti 800, the ‘aesthetically pleasing and
economically attractive [car] from the point of view of the consuming class
accustomed to shoddy and expensive products’, to follow a description by
Anthony D’Costa. However, the Ambassador ‘combined’ with the Maruti
‘to constitute a fixed and stable hierarchy. ‘With some exception, the rich
and elite drove Ambassador, and everyone else able to afford a car drove a
Maruti,’ as Kenneth Nielsen and Harold Wilhite remind us. With the de-
licensing of industries producing passenger cars in 1993, the auto industry
of India rapidly internationalized, and this is when the Ambassador finally
lost out to the sleek, luxurious-looking and fast-paced cars that are today’s
‘totems’ and ‘marker assets’ of the Indian upper middle classes.
Despite the concerted efforts from 1992 until 2008 to enhance appeal,
through change of engine, redesigning, including the entire dashboard
console, and opening export possibilities, such as to the UK, the
Ambassador steadily slipped into the category of a bygone car. The sale of
2200 Ambassadors in 2013, which amounted to a fraction of the 1.8 million
cars sold in India during the year, sealed the fate of Hindustan Motors,
which finally shut down its only operating plant, in Uttarpara, in 2014. In
2017, the still Birla-owned company sold the Ambassador brand, including
the trademarks, to the French car manufacturer Peugeot with the intention
of using the sale proceeds for clearing the dues of employees and lenders.
However, the plight of many former workers of the Uttarpara plant coaxes
us to ask how much, if at all, does the laid-off staff benefit from sales of
sick industries, whose production, even when drastically reduced, they had
supervised and facilitated. As a former quality control technician – who did
not receive his salary for six months ‘when production stopped’ and has no
choice but to live in the factory house he was allotted – laments:

They have created a situation where we are forced to leave the

quarters. The entire civic structure is paralysed so that people run
away from this colony. If they can manage to do this, they will win
this fight. This is turning into a ghost town where living conditions
are unthinkable. […] After the sun goes down, the whole area gets
dark. All the power lines are cut.

The ruins of many former industrial towns increasingly dot the landscape
of India. They do not make it to the heritage lists even though they parented
products whose iconicity is memorialized. One hopes that the invocation of
the Ambassador today coaxes a critical reflection of this anomaly of
heritage-making, which fetishizes things whose histories of production also
inform us of the wilful destruction of manpower.
PTI. (2013, July 7). ‘Ambassador Car Ranked the Best Taxi in the World’. News18.
D’COSTA, A.P. (2011). ‘Globalization, Crisis and Industrial Relations in the Indian Auto Industry’.
International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management, 11(2), 114–36.
doi.org/10.1504/IJATM.2011.039540.
NIELSEN, K.B. and H. Wilhite. (2015). ‘The Rise and Fall of the “People’s Car”: Middle Class
Aspirations, Status and Mobile Symbolism in “New India”’. Contemporary South Asia, 23(4),
371–87. doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2015.1090951.
PAWAR, S. (2016). ‘Hindustan Motors Limited: The Forgotten King of Indian Roads’. International
Conference on Business, Management and Social Sciences. Nagpur. ISSN: 2249–7463.
PRIYA, S.L. (2019, January 22). ‘Icons of India: How the Legendary Ambassador Conquered Indian
Hearts … and Roads’. Better India.
RANADIVE, B.T. (1953). India’s Five-Year Plan: What It Offers. Current Book House.
ROY, T. (2018). A Business History of India: Enterprise and the Emergence of Capitalism from 1700.
Cambridge University Press.
SAXENA, S. (2014, July 1). ‘Dharamvir Saini: Meet the Proud Owner of an Ambassador Who
Won’t Let Go of the Car’. Economic Times.
SHAH, K.T. (1947). National Planning Committee Series. Reports of the Sub-Committee on
Manufacturing and Engineering Industries. Vora.
SORABJEE, H. (2014, July 8). ‘An Epitaph for India’s “Appalling” National Car’. BBC News
Magazine.
THAKUR, M. (2020). ‘Lal Batti’. In R.B. Nair and P.R. de Souza (Eds), Keywords for India: A
Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century (pp. 381–82). Bloomsbury Academic.
69
INS VIKRANT
1959–2014

THE MANY LIVES OF INDIA’S FIRST AIRCRAFT CARRIER INS Vikrant display
rather majestically the centrality of objects in national histories. Notably,
the abiding presence of Vikrant as India’s pride also reveals the active
meaning-making by objects through their multiple originals even when they
physically cease to exist.
Laid down on 12 October 1943 as the Light Carrier HMS Hercules, one
among six, for the British Royal Navy, the vessel was built at Newcastle
upon Tyne by Vickers Armstrong. With 75 per cent of the body fitted at the
end of the Second World War, it was left to languish on the base of river
Clyde for almost a decade until 1957, when Britain sold it to India for the
new and upcoming Indian navy. It was formally commissioned for the
Indian Navy in 1959, and thereafter completed in Belfast, by Hartland and
Wolf, according to Indian specifications, which equipped it with an angled
deck and modified island for operating Sea Hawk fighters and Alize ASW
that it was expected to carry. Renamed Vikrant (meaning courageous in
Sanskrit), it set sail for India in March 1961 after a ceremonious send-off by
Vijayalakshmi Pandit, the Indian High Commissioner to the UK, and
arrived at Bombay’s Ballard Pier in November to a grand reception by
Prime Minister Nehru.
The INS Vikrant at the end of its life near a ship-breaking yard at Darukhana, Mumbai. Photograph,
28 May 2014, Imtiaz Shaikh.

With Vikrant, India acquired Asia’s first aircraft carrier, and the
acquisition, as we may glean from James Goldrick’s account, coincided
with ‘the long desired indigenous construction programme’ for the Indian
Navy. The building of survey ships, harbour defence motor launches and
inshore minesweepers, which were committed to during the First Five Year
Plan of 1951, was now undertaken. New shipyards were built and old ones
refurbished, and Indian acquisition of Goa from Portugal in December
1961, at the time of the arrival of Vikrant in Indian waters, facilitated the
creation of a naval air station near Dabolim. Allocations for the Indian
Navy, however, remained low throughout the 1960s despite the two major
wars which India fought. The decade also saw Pakistan creating a naval
fleet that included the country’s strategic acquisition of a submarine, PNS
Ghazi, and the aggressive stances of Indonesia to transform the Indian
Ocean into an Indonesian Ocean by viewing the Andaman and Nicobar
islands as extensions of Sumatra. Yet, as a former vice admiral of the Indian
Navy G.N. Hiranandani noted, with ‘the sterling balances built up during
World War II […] and indigenous construction acquiring momentum’, a
modest naval force was eventually built, although not called into action
even when Pakistan intruded into the Rann of Kutch in September 1965. At
the time, Vikrant was on a dry dock in Bombay undergoing modifications,
and its air squadrons operated from land. Yet, rumours in Pakistan that she
had been sunk by the Pakistani Navy reveal the fame and fear she
commanded. She proved her mettle in 1971 while serving the newly created
Eastern Naval Command.
The commanding officer N. Krishnan noted that PNS Ghazi, which
Pakistan specifically deployed in the Bay of Bengal to destroy Vikrant, was
‘looking for’ the carrier off Madras on 23 November. The Indian Navy set a
ruse by using INS Rajput as a decoy, and the Ghazi subsequently exploded
during the early hours of 4 December, sinking off the coast at
Visakhapatnam. With the threat of torpedoing removed, Vikrant’s famed
ability was strategically brought to bear upon the possibilities of an Indian
naval victory.
On 12 December, to follow Krishnan’s narrative, Vikrant was at a striking
distance from Cox’s Bazar and Chittagong. It ‘steamed north. From 0600
onwards, 29 Seahawk strikes armed with 500 pounds bombs and rocket
projectiles were flown against shipping and other targets around
Chittagong. The very first strike made at least six direct hits on the runway’,
and the carrier’s day’s work was reported to the Flag Officer Commanding-
in-Chief Eastern Naval Command (FOCINCEAST) as

At the end of twenty-four hours of continuous sorties […] Cox’s

Bazar and Chittagong airfield have been rendered inoperative in the
near future. There is no merchant ship of any size in the Chittagong
harbour or approaches which have not been struck and incapacitated.
There is complete absence of shipping along the entire coast from
Khulna eastward […] upto Cox’s Bazar and Southward.

By cordoning off the entrance to the harbours, Vikrant successfully

blocked supplies, and tied Pakistani vessels to the ports, denying them use
of the sea. On 16 December, Pakistani forces in the east surrendered, and
the damage inflicted by Vikrant’s airstrikes was estimated as 57,000 tonnes
of merchant ships and the Pakistani gun boats PNS Jessore, Comilla and
Sylhet. Hiranandani summed up the achievements as ‘beyond anyone’s
expectations […] without Vikrant the limited number of ships that
constituted the Eastern Fleet could not have coped with the faster merchant
ships’.
Significantly, Vikrant had steamed only on three boilers of the four, and
faced serious hazards as many returning aircrafts approached the deck
lower than normal. Yet, she assisted in contraband controls, and is
gratefully recalled to this day by the Indian Navy for the additional service.
After the 1971 war, she sailed to Madras, and more or less the entire city
turned up at the port to see her arrive, giving her a tumultuous reception.
For the liberation of Bangladesh, INS Vikrant was awarded two Mahavir
Chakras and twelve Veer Chakras – India’s gallantry awards. Subsequently,
she steamed over 499,066 nautical miles, equivalent of going around the
world by sea 15 times, showed flag in many parts of the world, and was
feted wherever she berthed. On 31 January 1997, she was decommissioned
in the face of rising costs of constant repairs.
To the newly independent India, Vikrant epitomized the hope of
command over the seas, which she greatly fulfilled, and the nation
considered the preservation of its peerless fighter by displaying her grandly,
as a museum ship. However, prohibitive maintenance costs determined its
ultimate fate, and in 2014 Vikrant entered a ship-breaking yard, Darukhana,
near Mumbai, despite the public interest litigation brought before the
Bombay High Court to stop the destruction. A former captain of the carrier
described her final years as ‘caught in the cross fire between politicians and
scrap syndicates’.
Vikrant, however, lives on rather conspicuously. The Bajaj manufacturing
group, of three-wheelers and motorcycles, immediately saw the promise of
recouping parts of the body for designing ‘invincible’ commuter bikes.
These were launched as Series V15, and the fuel tank comprised Vikrant’s
steel. The company marketed the product as: ‘Lakhs of Indians can now
touch the metal of the legendary INS Vikrant.’
More importantly, a Vikrant now sails the Indian seas as Indian navy’s
home-built and home-designed Indigenous Aircraft Carrier (IAC). It is the
first of the Vikrant series IAC-1, that has been built at Kochi shipyard since
2009. Considering the Asian geopolitics of today, with mounting chances of
aggression on the south seas, it is likely that this Vikrant shall helm the
annals of Indian naval command for the foreseeable future.
Vikrant’s memorials, we note, constitute its imperishable material
presence.

GOLDRICK, J. (1997). No Easy Answers: The Development of the Navies of India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, 1945–1996. Lancer.
HIRANANDANI, G.M. (2000). Transition to Triumph: History of the Indian Navy, 1965–1975.
Director Personal Services (DPS). Lancer.
KRISHNAN, N. (1980). No Way but Surrender: An Account of the Indo-Pakistan War in Bay of
Bengal, 1971. Vikas.
PTI. (2016, February 1). ‘Bajaj Auto’s New Bike “V” Makes Use of INS Vikrant Metal’. Economic
Times.
Staff Report. (2020, July 30). ‘India Keeps Construction Work of Indigenous Carrier INS Vikrant on
Track Despite COVID-19 Pandemic’. Swarajya.
For Vikrant Series IAC, see: naval-technology.com/projects/vikrantclassaircraft/.
70
AMUL GIRL BILLBOARDS
1966–present

THE CHARMINGLY IMPISH, SMART, CHEEKY, INTELLIGENT moppet in a pigtail and

dress of polka dots, who spouts catchy one-liners that are topical, often
provocative and always funny, has created the image that Amul is the only
butter that is made and consumed in India. India, however, produces many
kinds of butter besides Amul, although the Amul Girl is the only brand
ambassador of a product that has also come to represent the uniquely Indian
milk-marketing system, which is based on farmer cooperatives, and which
was conceived before Independence, in 1946, in the sleepy little village of
Anand (Kheda district, Gujarat).
The Amul Girl, as she soon got nicknamed, after her creation in 1966
appeared prominently within six months on six large billboards placed
along some of Bombay’s prime spots, including at the traffic lights at
Chowpatty, where, as the theatre personality and advertising professional
Alyque Padamsee remembers, ‘one invariably stopped’. Soon after, recalls
Padamsee, ‘Amul became a major brand in Bombay and the Polson family
[which produced Polson butter, Amul’s biggest competitor in the 1950s]
quietly faded away! And since then, Amul has become the most popular,
and in fact, the only butter in India.’ The immediate public response to the
missy on her first appearance, in October 1966 on lamp kiosks and bus
stops in Bombay, was ‘How cute!’, which firmed up the advertising
decision to build an outdoor campaign around her. She appeared on
horseback with the slogan ‘Thoroughbred, Utterly Butterly Delicious
Amul.’ Her slogan in the late 1960s ‘Bread without Amul Butter – Cholbe
Na Cholbe Na’ (will not do, will not do) illustrates the quick and decisive
shift towards topicality that took place in the Amul advertising campaign
within a very short span of less than three years. The slogan, among the first
to document the shift, relates to the hartals that gripped Calcutta in those
years, and the poster provides a glimpse of the manner in which Amul
advertising has creatively exploited current events to come out with
deliciously timed messages that are appropriately cheeky, but which make
people chuckle and take note of the selling product. The intelligent and
witty advertising has kept, to quote Padamsee, ‘the magic of the brand
intact’.

‘Toast without Amul? Cholbe Na! Cholbe Na!’, in response to hartals in Calcutta. Amul Poster, c.
1969–70.

Amul butter has been in the markets since 1956 and was initially pitched
for sales as ‘processed from the purest of milk under the most hygienic
conditions by a dairy cooperative in Gujarat’. In 1966, the advertisement for
the butter was clinched by Sylvester da Cunha who then worked for
Advertising Sales Promotion (ASP), which had bagged the commission of
the LIC logo (see ch. 66), and the brilliant visualizer and cartoonist Eustace
Fernandes created the Amul Girl. She appeared in the billboards first as
kneeling next to her bed and praying ‘Give us this day our daily bread’
while licking her lips to the taste of the ‘utterly butterly delicious Amul’.
The double-barrelled adjective is undoubtedly one of the most memorable
slogans in Indian advertising, and the innocent-looking missy immediately
perked up the sales of Amul by conveying the realness of a pure, precious,
priceless and an entirely trustworthy product. She was to make Amul ‘the
toast’ of the nation.
By the early 1980s, Amul hoardings were changed every two weeks and
viewed as apt expressions of a nation’s psyche, as they revealed and
documented the irritations, joys and fears of India’s steadily growing urban
middle class. The social commentator Santosh Desai recalled that the
‘bracing stock of good humour’ which they represented proved extremely
effective in taking to task acts of political and moral corruptions and
incompetence. Tracing the history of the success Desai noted that

The nature of the Amul intervention was very simple […] The act of
being a spectator, of merely marking out the moment and presenting
it in a manner that caused us to smile […] Amul used the platform it
had in the national consciousness with restraint: By not overplaying
its hand and being led away by its ability to frame debates, Amul
avoided the corrosiveness that can come to the habitual commentator.
Tracing Amul’s journey through the decades is in many ways akin to
tracing India’s journey, albeit through a specific and special vantage
point.

More than 4,000 different Amul hoardings later, the advertising remains,
as Sylvester da Cunha reminds us, ‘probably the only campaign in the
world with the theme and style unchanged in nearly fifty years […] The
Amul Girl has not aged since 1966’, and in her strikingly unchanged form
she has come to ‘represent a history of modern India acted out by a little
heroine, healthy and confident about the future’.
In an India where girls are often treated as a burden on the family and are
required to comply with many obscurant traditions, the uncritical
consumption of an erudite and ‘Westernized’ girl does provoke surprise.
The wholehearted public reception therefore opens up areas of enquiries
into issues of gender and its perceptions.
The visual history of Amul’s India shows us a country coming in touch
with itself. This history celebrates the launch of the milk-marketing
cooperatives in India that heralded India’s White (read milk) Revolution,
and unleashed the potential of poor farmers to create national wealth. The
Amul products, among others, ghee, cheese, condensed milk and milk
powder, represent the successful experimentations in dairy management that
were undertaken at the cusp of Indian independence, for releasing local
farmers from the clutches of middlemen. In 1946, freedom fighter and
Gandhian Tribhuvandas Patel (1903–94) started a cooperative movement to
democratize dairy farmers of Kheda (earlier known as Kaira) district,
Gujarat. Due to the vision, expertise and tireless efforts of an engineer, Dr
Verghese Kurien (1921–2012), the movement initiated by Patel was able to
gather phenomenal potential and become pan-Indian in scope, involving
millions of farmers who formed local milk cooperatives in their respective
villages and subsequently created an incredible 120-billion-rupee company.
Kurien had reluctantly taken a job at the government research creamery at
Anand in 1949 after he returned from his studies in the US. He soon took
charge of managing the affairs of the Kaira Cooperative Union, whose first
product, in 1950, was Amul butter. He was able to turn the fledgling
venture into a modern profit-generating business industry, and in his
memoir, I Too Had a Dream (2004), he recalled that

Much of the success of the Kaira Co-operative – or the ‘Anand

pattern’ of dairy cooperatives, as it came to be known widely – has
its roots in the democratic structure of the experiment. In 1946,
Tribhuvandas Patel began his experiment modestly with two
cooperative societies and a couple of hundred litres of milk. Today
[i.e., 2004], Anand alone has a district cooperative union with 1017
village cooperative societies federated into it. Each village has its
own cooperative milk society and the farmers become members of
their village cooperative.
 The ‘Anand pattern’ has worked for over fifty years in India, and has
provided local farmers the means to seek better livelihoods. The federal
system of representation, which it fashioned, illustrates the possibilities of
democratic institutions that the young India aimed at establishing. As
Kurien explained with reference to the Kaira Cooperative Union

Each year, because the farmer members produce more, they get back
that much more. All this has been happening without anybody giving
any subsidy. The farm family is producing a commodity called milk
which it markets and on which it makes substantial profits. The dairy
cooperative movement, inspired by Amul, is India’s largest
employment scheme and has more than doubled family incomes.

Kurien noted that ‘the story of Amul, however, is not merely the story of
garnering profits for farmers. As the cooperatives started working
something far more unique began taking place in the villages of the Kaira
district.’
Farmer couples started to own and share the animals as equals. The
income which the wives garnered through the sale of milk soon became
equal to the income their husbands could procure from the produce of the
fields. Since queues for milk collection were ruled on a first come, first
served basis, they undermined social hierarchies and caste prejudices in a
village. Harijans and Brahmins had to stand patiently behind each other to
await their turn in the dairy for processing the milk which they brought.
Additionally, the requirements to keep the collection centres clean created a
regard for sanitation amongst villagers who began to see the benefits of
efficient medical facilities through the services of veterinary care for their
buffaloes. Thus, the Anand pattern of cooperatives gave villagers the
instruments of development in their hands and created governance and
institutional structures they could command. In these, it exhibited to rural
India the core concepts of a democratic government, namely, a government
that governs least and finds a way to mobilize the energies of its people. In
serving the rural poor financially, it also demonstrated the benefits of
nurturing India’s greatest national resource, her large pool of labour.
The decade-long successful ventures in Kaira district, which also
included producing milk powder from buffalo milk, led to the establishment
of the National Dairy Board in 1964. This organization planned and
implemented Operation Flood in 1965, which sought to replicate the Anand
pattern in all major milking sheds of India. The objective was to make India
entirely self-sufficient in milk production through non-governmental and
non-bureaucratic structures, and the aims and endeavours enhanced the
national democratic vision of the 1960s and the 1970s of a decentralized
rural economy.
Operation Flood unleashed India’s White Revolution, making India the
largest milk producer in the world with costs of production nearly 40 per
cent lower than in all other countries. It demonstrated the strengths of
community ownership for creating lucrative and people-serving markets.
Kurien had declared that ‘had it not been for Amul and then Operation
Flood […] butter imports would have gone up from 500 tons [in 1956] per
year to 12,000 tons’. Despite the policies of economic liberalization,
aggressive capitalism and increasing instances of political and bureaucratic
interference, the cooperative movement which Kurien strove to perfect
continues to sustain itself and its members.
The Anand pattern has provided India with the blueprint for planning and
managing rural economies at a profit, and developing academic research of
animal husbandry and dairy. It has also created a dedicated professional
human resource team for promoting sustainable, eco-friendly and equitable
socio-economic development of rural people through the Institute of Rural
Management, Anand (IRMA), established in 1979.
The Amul Girl reminds us of the great achievements of community-led
projects in early post-colonial India that were aimed at empowering the
marginalized and poor for creating economic wealth. Moreover, cricket
commentator Harsha Bhogle observes that ‘while not shying away from a
jab at those in power’, the Amul Girl and the Amul brand celebrate India.
Although the Amul Girl has consistently served the urban milieu, she
continues to tug at the heart of the nation by spoofing elitisms, scams,
events and policies that erode the voices of minority, and adversely affect
destinies, including those of women. The advertisements of the ‘utterly
butterly Amul’ convey an ‘unmistakable patriotism’.
By making billboards speak for nearly seven decades, this tongue-in-
cheek chronicler of the India of our times is one of the foremost visible
flag-bearers of the self-reflecting patriotism which sustains the vision of the
Indian democracy.

BENEGAL, S., H. Bhogle, S. da Cunha, S. Desai, A. Padamsee, et al. (2012). Amul’s India: Based on
50 Years of Amul Advertising by da Cunha Communication. HarperCollins India.
KURIEN, V. (2005). I Too Had a Dream. Roli Books.
71
A MODERN KAAVAD
Late 20th century

THE KAAVAD IS A UNIQUELY DESIGNED ARCHITECTURAL object which draws its

viewers into its depths and makes them experience the wealth of the stories
it carries. It is best described as a storyteller and collector of stories,
although many modern specimens such as this with Hindi numerals are
created as educational toys, and seemingly bear no resemblance to the
historical object of an oral tradition. They are, however, important to
consider as they create visibility of India’s storytelling traditions and
illustrate the propensity of the material world to nurture them.
Traditionally, a kaavad constitutes a portable shrine, and looks like a box
or a cupboard. It has multiple panels that fold back upon themselves, and
small drawers and holders at the sides and base for storing little items. The
panels open and close as doors, or a kivaad, and they lead to the innermost
sanctum, or the garbha griha, allowing viewers to virtually enter into the
various thresholds inside, as if in a temple, to see the stories that appear
hidden from the outside world.
A traditional kaavad can be very large, with ten or more panels. They are
usually painted red on the exterior and have an image of the sun god on the
top. The interiors are always profusely painted, usually with images of
gods, goddesses, local saints or bhakts, heroes and warriors. Many kaavads
depict events from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Puranic and local
mythologies, and all take their viewers on a visual journey – a pilgrimage to
sacred places, ancestral lands and heroic pasts.
A kaavad teaching arithmetic with numerals in Hindi. Wood, Metal, Paint, 170 mm × 320 mm × 690
mm, late 20th century. CSAS.

A traditional kaavad carved and painted, late-19th to early-20th century, Rajasthan. Wood, Metal.
NM: 74.64 (5).

Kaavad banchana, or storytelling through the kaavad shrines, is possibly

400 years old, and similar to that of the phad of Pabuji (see ch. 30), the
tradition is exclusive to Rajasthan. The kaavads were historically made by a
particular community of carpenters in Mewar who call themselves the
basayati suthars, for a distinct group of itinerant bards of Marwar, the
kaavadiya bhats. The suthars once lived only in the village of Bassi near
Chittor, and the bhats, who carry the kaavads upon their shoulders from
place to place telling its stories, trace their homeland to the districts of
Jodhpur, Nagaur and Kishangarh. The kaavads were commissioned by
jajmans, or patrons, whose heroic acts, and those of their families, the bhats
recount during the banchana. Therefore, together with tales of devotion,
war, heroism, romance and morality of times gone by, the kaavads carry
histories of some of the erstwhile lineages of Rajputana.
The suthars proclaim themselves as the sole creators of the kaavad, the
kaavadiya bhats the sole storytellers, and their jajmans fashion their unique
ancestries through the stories. Thus, the kaavad, as one of its historian Nina
Sabnani tells us, offers unique identities to all who are involved in the
‘making, telling and listening’. It allows self-representation while enabling
the preservation of a remembered past.
Oral traditions, as the kaavad and phad remind us, employ visual devices
to bring to life the tales, and this kaavad with Hindi numerals denotes an
innovative adaptation. Made for teaching numbers, it has images of
Saraswati, the goddess of learning, in the garbha griha, and Lakshmi, the
goddess of prosperity, in the second chamber. The makers, no doubt, aimed
at illustrating the importance of numeracy for education as well as for
acquiring wealth. Such educational kaavads are often made for schools.
Notably, many NGOs increasingly commission educational kaavads for
disseminating environmental and social issues and use them as manuals in
training programmes in villages and towns.
The use of kaavads today for disseminating information, often for an
unlettered audience, follows the traditional lineage of harnessing the power
of storytelling. Additionally, it denotes attempts at reviving the
craftsmanship of a virtually extinct tradition. Scholars tell us that only a
handful of craftsmen and kaavadiya bhats survive. Inevitably, the
increasing crafting of such heritage items for utilitarian purposes raises
questions such as those asked by the artist and designer Ishan Khosla:
‘What happens when a craft innovates so much that it loses its initial
purpose? Does that matter or does just the survival of skilled artisans is
what matters in the end?’
Khosla has used the ‘vehicle of the kaavad itself to tell its own story’, by
commissioning one of the few surviving craftspersons, Mangi Lal of
Udaipur, for the storytelling of the craft and its artisans, like him. The
commission is notable as ‘crafts in India, never tell the story of its own
plight – but instead their beauty and intricacy tends to belie the real state’ of
their being. The modern kaavads carry themes to attract buyers. Therefore,
even the one which Mangi Lal was asked to make was given captions in
English because those who buy such traditional, and expensive, kaavads
today, as Khosla explains, ‘are English-speaking tourists who tend to be
unaware about the rich history of this beautiful craft as well as the stories
they showcase’.
The resurrection of kaavad-making in the twenty-first century may foster
doubts, such as Khosla’s, about the valuation of the richly illustrated and
intricate wooden boxes by people who have little knowledge, or interest, in
the historical traditions of the kaavad banchana. However, the new avatars
of the grand old portable shrines endow the latter a public visibility,
informing larger numbers of people of the inordinate storytelling power of
this architectural object. Importantly, the designer kaavads also create a
memory of the many stories, which a traditional kaavad tells. Thus, we note
the evocation of Gulammohammed Sheikh who has created poignant
installations of kaavads, two of which he famously entitled Journeys and
Returning Home. He calls them the space where the traditional and modern,
private and public, inside and outside are being continually splintered and
reunited, and finds their continuing relevance as offering a ‘kaleidoscopic
vision, encompassing the local, global and personal realms [which] speaks
not only of a complex present but also of the complexity of human cultures
as lived histories’.
The designed kaavads of today, including such educational ones with
numerals, keep alive the historic memory of the traditional ones that bridge
and create temporalities within confined spaces through the many stories
they carry and evoke. One hopes that the non-linear modes of storytelling
the latter fostered are nurtured by the many-purposed kaavads that are made
today, and they too would facilitate the exploration and interrogation of the
world in infinite ways.

KRISCHER, O. (2013, July–August). ‘History through a Kaleidoscope: Gulammohammed Sheikh’.

ArtsAsiaPacific, Issue 84.
KHOSLA, I. (2016, December 5). ‘The Kaavad: From Devotion to Decoration’. Garland.
SABNANI, N. (2009, July). ‘The Kaavad Storytelling Tradition of Rajasthan’. Design Thoughts, 28–
33.
SABNANI, N. (2011). ‘The Kaavad Phenomenon of Rajasthan: A Lesser-Known Fold Tradition’. In
A.L. Dallapiccola (Ed.), Indian Painting: The Lesser-Known Traditions (pp. 92–107). Niyogi
Books.
72
ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINE
21st century
I wanted to feel that experience [of voting], I wanted to press the
button on EVM and I wanted to see how it functions. I am very happy
because from now on I will be considered the citizen of this country.
(Hiral, a young first-time voter, 2009: Banerjee, 2014)

THE THRILL OF CITIZENSHIP WHICH HIRAL EXPERIENCED BY pressing a button on

the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) conveys the forceful agency of touch
technology in affecting the feel and physicality of presence. Today, when
we are poised for the benefits of the new haptic devices promising us
experiences of tactility over great distances and almost-touch virtual
objects, the push-button technology of voting may, no doubt, appear
primitive. Yet, the uses of EVMs in Indian elections from November 1998
onwards has heralded a truly radical technological innovation by
transforming forever the experience of casting votes. The machine presents
an opportunity for critically reflecting upon relationships between
technology and governance, especially in a ‘country of subcontinental
dimensions and logic-defying diversity’, as S.Y. Quraishi, a former chief
election commissioner (2010–12), reminds us.
Photograph accompanying an article on the potentials of using blockchain technology to prevent
malpractices in the recording of votes through the EVM. Mint, 26 June 2017.

A sample of an ‘Indian Electronic Voting Machine’.

EVMs are used by many countries besides India and represent the arrival
of electronic voting in the world. However, their use in India demonstrates
the need for exploring the little-known consequences of information
technology upon public administration, electronic rule-making and digital
governance. The EVMs direct us to ask questions such as: Does technology
broaden and deepen citizen engagement? How do public trust and political
forces nurture the diffusion of new technologies? Does technology affect
trust in the electoral system, and has it democratized political fundraising?
Such questions allow us to recall a study of ‘Current Research in Voting,
Elections and Technology’ by Micah Altman and Gary Klass which shows
that the ‘continuation and expansion of these lines of research is likely to
have tremendous impact on our understanding of […] how politics is
conducted’, and that ‘we are only at the beginning of this process’.
EVMs draw us into the fascinating histories of the Indian electoral
democracy that made Indians ‘voters before they were citizens’, as one of
the historians of India’s electoral institutions Ornit Shani informs us. The
processes of drafting the procedures of universal adult franchise, between
1947 and 1950, demonstrated that the ‘procedural equality for the purpose
of authorizing a government was institutionalized ahead of the enactment of
the constitution. Moreover, turning all adult Indians into voters before they
became citizens with the commencement of the constitution [was done]
against many odds.’ The creation of an electoral democracy has ‘required
an immense power of imagination’ in the face of Partition and mass
displacement of people, ‘myriad social divisions, widespread poverty and
low literary levels [and] doing so was India’s stark act of decolonisation’, as
Shani reminds us.
Electoral institutions of colonial India gave weightage to separate
electorates, which were created by allocating seats along religious,
communal and professional lines. The electorates were governed by laws
that defined voters as members of communities and groups rather than
exclusively as individuals. In sharp contrast, as Shani has documented,

the production of a gigantic registry of India’s would-be citizenry,

through […] engagement of officials at all levels with the people
throughout the country, made the universal franchise a political and
 social fact that contributed to the creation and survival of a
democratic collective imaginary in the world’s largest democracy.

The colossal project of making India democratic began with the

preparation of a draft electoral roll from September 1947. The Constituent
Assembly Secretariat (CAS), which masterminded the project, adopted the
strategy of narrating the procedures in press notes. The chronicling of ‘what
happened first, what happened next, where things stood, and what should be
expected, infused the universal franchise with meaning’, and facilitated
people to ‘connect to a popular democratic imagination’, as Shani explains.
The storytelling effect provided transparency of the Secretariat’s efforts,
and the use of EVMs in polling booths for casting votes is part of the long
and continuous efforts to maintain the visibility of the integrity of elections
by the Election Commission of India (ECI). The Commission which was
created in 1950 as an independent constitutional authority.
As careful evaluators of the EVMs of India, such as Prabir Purkayastha
and Bappa Sinha, note, parliamentary democracy of the Indian kind
demands ‘that elections must not only be fair but also seen to be fair’. The
inroads of new and sophisticated technologies in Indian elections began
from the twenty-first century, although the use of EVMs, which, according
to Quraishi was the ‘biggest technological innovation […] in the election
process’, was already mandated by the ECI in 1982.
The voting machines were used in the constituency of Paravur
(Ernakulam district) that year during the Legislative Assembly elections in
Kerala. However, the ‘experiment with the innovative method’ was soon
challenged by a losing candidate, following which the Supreme Court
imposed a ban upon its use without parliamentary approval. It was only
after a law was passed in Parliament in 1988, which amended the
Representation of the People Act of 1951, with the addition of a new
section 61A, that the ECI acquired the mandate of the uses of EVMs. The
governance of the Supreme Court provides a glimpse of the intricate
networks of checks, in the Indian Constitution, even against perceptions of
the arbitrary uses of power by the ECI.
 The integrity of the ECI has long contributed to the international
valuation of the Indian electoral democracy. The ECI has shown
‘monumental forbearance’ in curbing ‘undemocratic latencies’, and
therefore election in India, as Mukulika Banerjee notes through her
ethnographic research, ‘emerges as the most open and secular institution
that mediates between Indian state and its citizens.’ They provide ‘a rare
moment in social life’ when every Indian is able to ‘exercise the most
fundamental of their rights as individual citizens’ and see ‘the transcendent
utopia of equality supersede the immanent reality of inequality’.
Banerjee tells us that Hiral’s description of casting her vote illuminates
the ‘legitimacy’ which Indians experience ‘solely on […] their citizenship
rather than [through] membership of any caste, community or religion’. Her
words substantiate perceptions regarding the act of voting in India, which
encodes ‘principles of equality, fairness, efficiency, rights and duties’.
Moreover, elections in India, as the political theorist Bhikhu Parekh
emphasizes, ‘provide a glimpse of the political vision which democracy
promises’ but fails to convey. For, in comparison to the two other
‘components of the democratic systems’, namely, public deliberation and
peaceful protests, elections have for long remained ‘largely free and fair and
exceptionally well-organised’. Keeping in mind the mammoth-like
operational logistics which all Indian elections have entailed, the increasing
scepticism of large numbers of voters towards the electoral process as the
agent of social and political change is deeply unfortunate.
The first general elections of India held in 1952 were noted at the time by
the first Chief Election Commissioner Sukumar Sen (1950–58) ‘as the
biggest experiment in democracy in human history’, and may have well
been ‘among other things, an act of faith’ as Ramachandra Guha now
reminds us. The sheer size of the electorate numbered 176 million Indians
from above the age of twenty-one, of whom about 85 per cent could not
read or write, and ‘each one had to be identified, named and registered’. In
highlighting the scale of problems, Guha recalls that in ‘the case of remote
hill-villages, bridges had to be specially constructed over rivers, in the case
of small islands in the Indian Ocean, naval vessels were used to take the
rolls to the booths’. Additionally, a ‘massive social problem’ was the
‘diffidence’ of many women in north India to provide their names for the
electoral registration, as they saw no reasons for lodging their identity any
differently from the way in which they referred to themselves as wives,
daughters, or mothers. The unlettered electorate required innovative
designing of the ballot papers, and therefore parties were asked to select
pictorial symbols, or motifs, which were ideally ‘drawn from daily life’.
Separate ballot boxes, marked with the party symbols, had to be placed in
polling booths so that voters could simply drop their ballot in the boxes they
could visually recognize as representing the party of their choice. The most
ingenious innovation that followed the elections, and which now represents
the unique symbol of an Indian election, was the marking of the left index
finger with ‘a variety of indelible ink’, which was developed by Indian
scientists to prevent voter fraud. A total of 3,89,816 phials were used in the
first elections, and the voter mark soon became a coveted badge of pride
across India, creating thereby the peer pressure to go and vote.
The sheer operational scale of general elections in India to date can be
gleaned from a note by Quraishi regarding the elections of 2009, in which

[The] ECI used almost 1.4. million electronic voting machines

(EVMs) and more than eleven million polling staff were deployed in
and outside 8,34,944 polling stations […] Over 2000 observers, all
senior officers of the IAS and allied services were also deputed, as
were almost 1,40,000 micro-observers and […] yet the picture is not
complete. You have to add deployment of 40,599 digital cameras,
119 special trains comprising 3,060 coaches for transporting central
police force all over the country, 55 helicopters to do more than six
hundred sorties and airlift security personnel and the innumerable
election material; and complement it with countless buses and jeeps,
tractors, motorcycles, bullock carts, mules, camels, and elephants for
transportation of men and material.
 Quraishi reminds his readers that the above statistics represent the polling
exercise and not those of pre-polls, which were just as enormous.
Therefore, ‘managing elections in a country of subcontinental dimensions
cannot be done easily without the application of user-friendly technology’.
The present-day euphemism Twitter Elections aptly conveys the opinions
of the commentators of elections today, namely, that social media now
constitutes the new election battleground. Yet, as the procedures for
maintaining electoral rolls and casting votes become increasingly tech-
savvy, with use of Electronic Photo Identity Cards (EPIC) that are now
made in braille for the blind, and a wide range of systems, such as Electoral
Role Management System (ERMS), SMS poll monitoring, and
Communication for Election Tracking (ComET), there seems to be rising
scepticism, justifiably, about the impartial governance of the electoral
procedures.
A notable murmur of controversy that followed the general elections of
2019 relates to the probability of the relatively easy manipulation of the
EVMs. A report of an investigation by a few reputed civil societies of India,
helmed by the Constitutional Conduct Group, Jan Sarokar and People First,
which was released to the press in August 2022, finds evidence of the
manipulation of EVMs, and therefore urges the redesigning of the voting
process that are ‘software and hardware independent’ so that they are
‘verifiable or auditable’.
Considering that with EVMs India entered the world of electronic
elections which, supposedly, provides robust protection from miscreants,
the allegations are noteworthy, because experts suggest that the Indian
machines are unique in that they are non-networked, with no operation
system, nor facilities of internet connections that allow hacking. The
‘technological safeguards’ and ‘procedural checks’ that are in place with
respect to the design, conditions of manufacture, elaborate coding, and
administration of use during elections seemingly make ‘large scale rigging
of these voting machines improbable’ as Purkayastha and Sinha had
emphasized. Additionally, Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trial (VVPAT) was
introduced in 2013 for tracking accuracy in recording the votes collected by
EVMs, and therefore as a provision of a suitable foil towards machine
tampering.
A field record of an election day documents the careful monitoring of the
storage and installations of EVMs. Banerjee’s research team informs us of
the uniquely Indian protocol of ‘sealing’ EVMs, and notes that

The day began at 5 AM. Before the doors to the polling station could
be opened to the public at 7 AM, a mock poll was conducted in the
presence of the party agents who then ‘witnessed’ and signed a
‘clean’ machine, after which the EVMs were sealed […] The sealing
process itself was an elaborate one. The first sealing strip was signed
first by the party agent and then by the Presiding Officer. After the
consent of the polling agents, a tag with details of the EVM and
Polling Booth was attached to the machine, which was then sealed
again with wax and marked with a stamp. Finally the flap of the
EVM was shut, the address tag detailing its exact location on the day
of polling was attached, and the machine automatically recorded the
time that this process was conducted. After this was done, the wait
for the voters began.

The field research emphasizes that illiterate voters find EVMs ‘particularly
liberating because having to press a button’ appears to them ‘far less
awkward than having to handle papers and stamps’. Many approach the
polling booth as a garbha griha into which ‘no one except the devout can
enter’ and inside which the EVM, supposedly, sits ‘like a god’. The
veneration of EVMs as objects of worship, to which one may do puja,
illustrates the uniquely Indian social lives of many modern technologies.

ALTMAN, M. and G.M. Klass. (2005). ‘Current Research in Voting, Elections and Technology’.
Social Science Computer Review, 23(3), 269–73.
BANERJEE, M. (2014). Why India Votes. Routledge.
GUHA, R. (2007). India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. Macmillan
UK.
PURKAYASTHA, P. and B. Sinha. (2019, April 28). ‘Large-scale EVM rigging is almost impossible
– but Election Commission must act to reassure sceptics’. Scroll.in.
QURAISHI, S.Y. (2014). An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election.
Rupa.
SHANI, O. (2018). How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of Universal
Franchise. Cambridge University Press.
SRIBHASHYAM, S.S.R. (2017, June 26). ‘Is it Time to Block and Chain the EVMs?’ Mint.
The Citizen Bureau. (2022, August 15). ‘Civil Society, Politicians Vow to Combat 3Ms: Machine,
Money and Media Power’. The Citizen Bureau.
73
BHIMAYANA: AMBEDKAR’S HEROIC
EPIC
2011
MUCH LIKE THE RAMAYANA, WHOSE NAME IT EVOKES, THE Bhimayana tells us
an ancient story of India, but one which is not epical and heroic. It of the
smallness of humans in establishing hidebound traditions of brutal
exploitation. Through the life of its protagonist Bhim – or Bhimrao Ramji
Ambedkar (1891–1956), the eminent Indian jurist and economist who is
best known for piloting the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution –
this fabulously illustrated biography imprints upon readers’ mind the
‘experiences of untouchability’, to quote the subtitle. It also reminds readers
how little Ambedkar has appeared until now in histories of Modern India,
and how little we know of his radical, humane and cosmopolitan political
vision of a truly equal subjecthood for all citizens of India.
Although conceptualized in the early 2000s when the graphic book genre
more or less emerged, Bhimayana defies ‘the conventional grammar’ as its
publisher and lead author Siriyavan Anand emphasizes. The artists of the
book, Durgabai and her husband Subhash of the Pardhan Gond community,
famously declared that they would ‘not force [their] characters into boxes’.
They knew nothing about Ambedkar when they began work. However, as
tribals, exploited and oppressed in the service of civilization and state, they
could ‘understand his hurt [and] internalized the stories’. Using the
traditions of their art form, they innovatively succeeded in producing a
powerful history of ‘corporeal experience across generations’, as John
Berger, the eminent critic, painter and writer, reminded us through his
foreword for the book. Significantly, Berger deemed it important to
emphasize that ‘stories are being told like this all over the world. They are
seldom printed and published.’
A copy of the Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability, Navayana, 2011.

Placing the past and present histories of injustice towards dalits. Digna drawings by Durgabai Vyam
and Subhash Vyam, c. 2008–09, Bhimayana 2011: 46–7.

Bhimayana promises a salutary balm against the error-ridden historical

scholarship of unilinear developments that seek origins and evolution. It
places present-day news items with incidents from the life of Ambedkar and
thereby lays bare the brutal ‘system’ of caste, stripping the phenomenon off
its evolutionary history that contributes to its existential legitimacy in the
modern world as a unique and enigmatic object of India’s innate social
tradition.
Born into the untouchable Mahar community, but in a family with service
histories in the British army on both his parents’ side, Ambedkar grew up in
Satara, Maharashtra, with all the humiliations that outcasts faced from
savarna, or caste Hindus. The realization that he was not a human being for
the ‘touchables’ dawned upon him while at school, which he could attend
because of new legislations. Irrespective of a background similar to that of
his middle-class classmates, he was forced to stay physically apart from
them, and, as the Bhimayana narrates, denied ‘so elemental a feeling as
thirst’ as he was prohibited from drinking water from ‘their’ taps. Even the
barbers who sheared goats and buffaloes refused to cut his hair. During a
visit to his father in Goregaon, near Bombay, the young Bhimrao got a taste
of the lifelong exploitation that awaited him when he and his siblings were
ferried to their destination in a cart. The cart driver made them drive the
cart. He walked behind and charged them double the fare for the journey.
Bhimayana recalls that ‘Ambedkar never forgot how it felt to be excluded
and despised’.
An exceptionally bright student, Ambedkar, the first Mahar to matriculate
with a high first, secured a scholarship from the progressive ruler of
Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad III (1863–1939) to study at Columbia
University, New York. Here he wrote a path-breaking anthropological essay
on ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’, in which
he challenged the theories of the eminent ethnographers of the time, such as
Herbert Risley (1851–1911), and demonstrated that caste was a social, not
racial, phenomenon. Ambedkar studied further at London during the 1920s
and earned two doctorates, in economics and law, but had to return to India,
and Baroda, in 1917, to abide by the terms of the scholarship. Once again,
he was put in his place, and the novel forms of ostracism are evocatively
described by the renowned author Arundhati Roy, who notes that
 Afraid of even touching Ambedkar, clerks and peons in his office
would fling files at him. Carpets were rolled up when he walked in
and out of office so that they would not be polluted by him. He found
no accommodation […] his Hindu, Muslim and Christian friends,
even those he had known in Columbia turned him down. Eventually,
by masquerading as a Parsi, he got a room at a Parsi inn. When the
owners discovered he was an Untouchable, he was thrown onto the
street by armed men.

Ambedkar realized then ‘that the person who is Untouchable to a Hindu

is also Untouchable to a Parsi’ and saw the full violence of caste in the
denial of entitlement to opportunity, knowledge, land and wealth.
Bhimayana presents the continuity of this violence in the twenty-first
century through snippets of news items of thrashings, killings, rapes and
other violations of Dalits in their attempts to use the tanks and ponds,
hospitals and other livelihood amenities that are in public places in India
today, apparently for all. It is a graphic narrative of the denial of human
needs, and Durgabai and Subhash have used the free-flowing Pardhan Gond
digna design-pattern to direct the eye to the continuing atrocities of the
casteist civilization of India. To the Pardhan Gond the digna symbolizes
auspiciousness and purity, and the artists have dedicated their labour as a
‘digna for Bhim’ to ‘make Ambedkar’s story universal’.
Ambedkar today would be called a Dalit, a word that means ‘broken’ or
‘crushed’, which gained currency among the Untouchables from the 1970s
with the rise of the Dalit Panther movement in Maharashtra. The movement
aimed at an all-India political consciousness of Dalits as a Nation of the
Oppressed. Dalit writers and academics, such as Badri Narayan declare that
‘it is a lively word […] a cultural and political context’, and Sukhdeo
Thorat reminds us that it embodies ‘the struggles of those […] oppressed on
the basis of their caste, or on economic, cultural and political grounds’. Yet,
Ambedkar, who awoke the ‘broken and crushed’ communities to their rights
and possibilities of aspiration, did not use the term. He staunchly used the
word Untouchable, with a capital U, and the phrase ‘Depressed Classes’,
even when Mohandas Gandhi began to relentlessly woo those who shared
his social position, the lowest in the hierarchy, as Harijan, or god’s people,
after his victorious Poona Pact of 24 September 1932.
The historic Pact brought into the open the unbridgeable differences of
opinion between Ambedkar and Gandhi, and the Hindu-led Congress party,
regarding the implications of bringing about social justice in Hindu-
majority India. By then Ambedkar had aided the Southborough Committee
(1919) to arbitrate on electoral reforms by demonstrating the unjustness of
the policies of territorial representation, organized the First All India
Conference of Depressed Classes (Nagpur, 1920), founded the Bahishkrit
Hitkarini Sabha (Society for the Upliftment of Outcasts, 1924), led the
Mahar Satyagraha (1927) in which Untouchables asserted their rights of
access to public waterbodies, publicly burnt the Manusmriti (December,
1927) after violent Hindu mobs attacked the peaceful satyagrahis, and
formally tabled his demand for a separate electorate for the Depressed
Classes at the First Round Table Conference in London (1930) which the
Congress boycotted. However, as Ambedkar emerged as the natural
spokesperson of Untouchables he came to be increasingly castigated by
Congress members as, supposedly, a British collaborator betraying the
Indian cause. And because his personal experiences had shown him the dire
need for placing the right to equality at the forefront of the Indian national
movement, Ambedkar felt compelled to declare in 1931 that

It is foolish to take solace in the fact that because the Congress is

fighting for the freedom of India, it is, therefore, fighting for the
people of India and of the lowest of the low […] The question
whether the Congress is fighting for freedom has very little
importance as compared to the question for whose freedom is the
Congress fighting for.

On being reprimanded by Gandhi for his strident criticism of the Congress,

Ambedkar famously replied, ‘Gandhiji, I have no homeland […] No
Untouchable worth the name will be proud of this land’.
 Ambedkar rightly exhibited caste as India’s main political problem. He
felt arm-twisted into signing the Poona Pact, whereby he was forced to give
up his demand for a separate electorate for Untouchables to stop Gandhi
from martyrdom, as the latter entered his most dramatic fast unto death.
Significantly, Gandhi directed his fast to stop Ambedkar’s demand. He had
no issues with the Communal Award of a separate electorate to minorities
such as Muslims and Sikhs. As he said, ‘I can understand the claims
advanced by other minorities, but the claims advanced on behalf of the
untouchables is the unkindest cut of all.’ Typically, the ‘touchable’ Gandhi
saw untouchability as a domestic problem, a social problem of the Hindus,
and a ‘blot’ on Hinduism that needed eradication through reforms and acts
of great penance. Ironically, he claimed his ‘own person to represent the
vast mass of untouchables’ and denounced Ambedkar as an unfit leader
whose ‘experiences had warped his judgement’.

The event of the Poona Pact, illustration on boundary wall of Deccan College (Pune) near Ambedkar
Nagar.

The Poona Pact, as journalists today aptly recall, ‘represented a clash of

[…] citizenship and caste’. The historic significance of the Pact remains
rather visible in the city of its origin, colouring contemporary politics, as
the iconography on a boundary wall near the Ambedkar Colony
exemplifies. Gandhi’s first ever fast on the issue of untouchability was
‘against the Dalits themselves, to force them to give up their demands’ as
Bharat Patankar and Gail Omvedt recall. Rather than fast against the
oppressive caste system, he wanted his Harijans, as Teresa Hubel also
emphasizes, ‘to be educated, taught personal hygiene and dissuaded from
eating carrion […] not expected to break caste taboos, go on strike, fast or
participate in any other form of protest against untouchability’. In effect, he
asked them to ‘remain non-resistant at the very moment when their
resistance might have effected profound change within the Hindu society’.
Bhimayana reminds us that Ambedkar rose to the challenge and rallied
his luckless communities to ‘educate, organize and agitate’. Shown sporting
the Brahmin shikha, the tuft of hair in which he physically carries his
people, he declares in the cameo that ‘ours […] is a battle for the
reclamation of human personality’.
Following the successful sale of the book, the publishers chose to bring
out Ambedkar’s powerful indictment, the Annihilation of Caste (1936),
which was the text for a lecture he was invited to deliver in 1936, at the
annual gathering of the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (Forum for Break-up of
Caste) at Lahore, a radical faction of the Arya Samaj. However, its
members cancelled their invitation to Ambedkar after reading his pre-
circulated text. Roy’s poignant recollection of the text is telling:
‘Ambedkar’s anger gives us all a little shelter, a little dignity.’ His utopian
dream of annihilating caste rested upon his firm belief in constitutional
morality, and we note his reproach:

Are you fit for political power even though you do not allow a large
class of your own countrymen like the Untouchables to use public
schools […] public wells […] wear what apparel or ornaments they
like […] eat any food they like? […] Every Congressman who
repeats the dogma of [James] Mill that one country is not fit to rule
another country, must admit that one class is not fit to rule another
class.
 In 1951, Ambedkar felt morally obliged to resign from the Indian cabinet
as India’s first law minister when the Hindu Code Bill he had painstakingly
amended for providing rights to Hindu women was vehemently opposed. A
disillusioned Ambedkar subsequently declared in the Rajya Sabha in 1955,
a year before he passed away, that ‘the Constitution was a wonderful temple
we built for gods, but before they could be installed, the devils have taken
possession’.
Since the 1990s, statues, mainly in cement, of a smartly dressed,
bespectacled Ambedkar in a three-piece suit of his favourite blue, with a
pen in his breast pocket, the Indian Constitution in his right hand, and the
index finger of the left pointing towards the sky, have literally exploded in
every nook and corner of India. The slightest incident of disrespect towards
them ‘can easily turn into bitter confrontation’ Nicolas Jaoul reminds us.
However, in recalling Ambedkar’s ‘missing story’, his grandson-in-law and
one of India’s finest civil rights activist, Anand Teltumbde, forewarned that
‘memorials make sense if the mission of the man is respected and
progressed’. In thinking through the frequent absence of Ambedkar in our
histories, and those of many Dalits today, including Teltumbde, who is
languishing as a political prisoner without trial in a jail since 2018, the
Bhimayana conveys a chilling experience of a society that showcases
commitments of political redress while nurturing deeply unequal identity
pride.

AMBEDKAR, B.R. (1917, May). ‘Castes in India, Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’.
Indian Antiquary, 46, 81–95.
AMBEDKAR, B.R. (1929). ‘Statement on Education of the Depressed Classes in the Bombay
Presidency: 29 May 1928’. In S. Thorat and N. Kumar (Eds), Perspectives on Social Exclusion
and Inclusive Policies (pp. 105–08). Oxford University Press.
AMBEDKAR, B.R. (2014). Annihilation of Caste. Edited and annotated by S. Anand, and with an
introductory essay 'The Doctor and The Saint' by A. Roy. Navayana (Original work published
1936), 17–179.
HUBEL, T. (1996). Whose India: The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and
History. Duke University Press.
JAFFRELOT, C. (2005). Analysing and Fighting Caste: Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability.
Permanent Black.
JAOUL, N. (2006). ‘Learning the Use of Symbolic Means: Dalits, Ambedkar Statues and the State in
Uttar Pradesh’. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 4(2), 176–207. DOI:
10.1177/006996670604000202.
JYOTI, D. (2019, October 1). ‘Gandhi, Ambedkar and the 1932 Poona Pact’. Hindustan Times.
KUMAR, A. (2015). Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Risk of Democracy. Stanford
University Press.
PATANKAR, B. and G. Omvedt. (1979). ‘The Dalit Liberation Movement in Colonial Period’.
Economic and Political Weekly, 14(7/8), 409–24.
PYARELAL. (1932). The Epic Fast. M.M. Bhatt.
TELTUMBDE, A. (2015). ‘In Thy Name Ambedkar’. Economic and Political Weekly, 50(40), 10–
11.
74
A KASHMIR NOVEL, MUNNU
2015
MALIK SAJAD’S DEBUT BOOK IS A GRAND EXPOSITION OF THE graphic novel as a
cultural artefact of the political world. Within India, this literary genre of
the visual–verbal, to follow scholarly description, emerges from the mid-
1990s as a powerful medium of protest and resistance against the
authoritarianisms of the establishment through books such as River of
Stories (1994). Munnu builds upon this genealogical heritage, also within
its homeland where Kashmir Pending (2007) was the first graphic novel to
be published. However, it is also unique, especially within the South Asian
context, in providing glimpses of the ways in which we may conceptualize
the possibilities of a visual historiography.
Munnu literally shows us the tactility of the visual, or rather our acts of
seeing and grasping the tangible, and the ways in which the visual endows
historicity. It also tells us graphically how the visual creates an immediacy
of corporeal experiences, which we also note in Bhimayana (see ch. 73). It
is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story of a Kashmiri boy who
grows up in violence-afflicted Srinagar of the 1990s, and conveys an
attempt, to quote Sajad, at ‘extensive and cumulative storytelling’, which
the literary form of the graphic novel permits. The decade witnessed the
emergence of armed insurgency in the Valley of which Munnu builds up a
clear historical narrative by mapping the vicious politics of colonization and
decolonization that have brutally disenfranchised Kashmir of territorial
sovereignty and abjectly disempowered its people, seemingly for the
foreseeable future. As Sajad explains, ‘It is only by sharing stories that a
place like Kashmir begins to exist.’ His fine brushstrokes that resemble the
chiselling of intricate woodwork, especially on walnut wood which
Munnu’s father practices, and the deft depiction of small details in each
storyboard draw readers into a growing sense of spatial familiarity.
Kashmiris as endangered Hangul deer. Drawing and text Malik Sajad, pages 194–45 in chapter
‘Aeroplane’.
A summary of the traumatic history of the paradisical Kashmir. Drawing and text Malik Sajad, pages
200–01 in chapter ‘Footnotes’.

Munnu is an intensely poignant tale of all the munnus, or little ones, of

Kashmir who grow up in war and who hope to forget history that only
rationalizes the punishments they are subjected to. It powerfully conveys
hapless Kashmir’s political betrayal by all who have ruled, through the
artful transposition of entities that we know are related but which we often
distinguish as opposites, such as nation and nature, antiquity and future, art
and commodity, and politics and naivety.
Significantly, Sajad draws Munnu, his family and all Kashmiris as the
Hangul deer, or the red antelope of Kashmir, now on the brink of extinction
due to the destruction of their habitat through the perennial conflicts in the
Valley. Francesca Recchia, who has interviewed Sajad, points out that the
Hangul-like Kashmiris with ‘big diamond-shaped eyes […] seem to reflect
the complexity of their existential and political condition […] these hybrid
creatures are a powerful metaphor of life’s uncertainties’. Everyone else,
whether Indian or others, are drawn in the human form.
The unique graphic depiction of the Kashmiri as distinct because of near
extinction echoes semblance with the iconic graphic novel Maus that first
appeared in December 1980 as a comic strip in the ‘underground zine’ Raw.
‘40 years on’, as one of its interlocutor Sam Leith reminds us, ‘it remains a
monument in the genre.’ Created by Art Spiegelman, Maus is, to quote
Leith, ‘partly a family memoir, partly an act of historical documentation
[…] and partly a self-reflective account of its own creations’. Munnu fits
the above description and Spiegelman’s authorial direction that ‘it is
important to show that there is nothing ennobling about being victimised’.
Notably, Spiegelman had drawn the Jews as mice and Germans as human-
bodied cats in Maus, where he explored his complex relationship with his
father, a Holocaust survivor. In drawing his own kind as the endangered
specie, the 17-year-old Munnu, known by then through his ‘grown-up’
name Sajad, emphasizes that

India, Pakistan, the Dogras, Britain, the Sikhs, Afghans, Mughals or

Huns, whosoever invaded, bought or sold Kashmir … the progress of
the world only meant new innovations in techniques of torture and
documentation.

Munnu grows up in Batamaloo, a few kilometres away from the old

Srinagar where his grandparents live and where his father grew up. His
daily life encounters are the regular, and often brutal, identity parades
orchestrated by the Indian army, and the crackdowns, interrogations,
curfews, lockdowns, stray shoot-outs, tear-gassing, barricading and armed
patrols that follow. His school is often closed for inordinate lengths of time
as the teachers are taken away for long periods of interrogation. So he
spends many a day drawing and copying, often the ‘unrecognisable
disfigured people from the newspapers’. When school opens, he makes
friends by showing off his artistic capabilities of supplying drawings of
AK-47 assault rifles, and to meet the growing demands he carves the image
in erasers and begins to use them as stamps.
Although Munnu’s tightly knit family is resourceful in evading several
raids, they are plagued by survivors’ guilt. After the Indian army kills a
close acquaintance, Munnu begins to have severe nightmares which, as
Torsa Ghoshal points out, is creatively ‘illustrated as a distorted landscape
with floating bodies in a page length panel’. Yet, Munnu’s days are also
fun-filled. With his father, he often visits the old city and its grand and
beautiful but decaying buildings, and these visits he treasures as rare treats.
However, his father, who makes a living by selling carved wood blocks to
the arts and crafts shops in the city, can no longer find a clientele because,
as he is reminded by his old-time buyers, ‘angrez rarely visit the burnt-out
valley now, and Indians only want fake and cheap artifacts’. He is advised
instead to engrave the same design on copper utensils that sell like ‘mutton
during the wedding season’. Such graphic depictions of the slow death of
Kashmir’s home-grown crafts portend the death of all things Kashmiri.
Like the author, Munnu begins to make political cartoons for a local
newspaper at a very young age, and after finishing high school embarks
upon a professional career in the field by securing a job with Greater
Kashmir, the English-language newspaper with the largest circulation in the
Valley. The narrative of Munnu’s boyhood and growing into a young adult
is developed through ten chapters with cryptic headings, such as
‘Chocolates, Toffees, Almonds and Cashews’, ‘Pomegranate and Salt Tea’,
‘Koyas Koyas’, ‘Ink and Orange’, ‘A Shoe and Nylon Rag’ and ‘Inside and
Out’. They alert readers to look out for the other stories within each chapter.
Thus, for example, ‘Paisley’ is about Munnu falling in love with an
American girl of that name, and about the many Western teenagers on
journeys of self-discovery into the ‘idyllic’ or ‘politically fraught’ Kashmir,
whichever way they choose to see the Valley. It is also an obvious allusion
to reinventions, such as the paisley motif that is deemed innately
‘Kashmiri’, but which came into Kashmir from Britain in that name, woven
into the imitation cashmere shawls made in British factories. Paisley is,
thus, a Western, or rather British, redesign of the traditional mango, pine
cone and teardrop motifs that embellish local Kashmiri textiles, wood- and
lacquer-ware and other crafts.
Munnu’s professional journey as a cartoonist is often hazardous. He finds
himself on the brink of being incarcerated in New Delhi for being a
Kashmiri. He is also often patronized by his older professional brethren for
his grasp, or not, of Kashmir’s history. On one occasion he exclaims: ‘I
might not know where the bullet came from but I could tell her who this
bullet hit.’ Munnu’s incisive quip, to follow Ghoshal, ‘underscores the point
of view that Sajad assumes. The everyday experiences of the Kashmiris are
prioritized […] over lofty political rhetoric advanced by the various
stakeholders.’ Thereby, Munnu creates a visual history of a powerful
paradox, namely, that ‘people are capable of massacring and exoticizing the
endangered species at the same time’. It illustrates the paradox as embedded
in Kashmir’s history, which it literally footnotes through three storyboards
one after the other: of Mughal, Afghan and Sikh rule of Kashmir declaring
that ‘if there is a paradise on earth…it is here! It is here! It is here!’ while
the rulers of all slaughter herds of Hangul deer. By juxtaposing the ‘oft-
quoted couplet with the picture of the genocide, Sajad economically
captures the history of the Valley on a single page of his book’.
The visual histories of the nefarious legacies of the claims upon Kashmir
bring home the irony that militant nationalism breeds its own kind as a form
of counter-resistance. The histories also illustrate the wilfully ineffective,
internationally mediated interventions that exacerbate the extraordinary
conditions in Kashmir, and the lucrative opportunities of self-promotion and
aggrandizement they offer. Of the many glimpses of the senseless politics of
Kashmir’s custodial care, a notable example follows the case of the
Amarnath land transfer of 2008, which aroused the kani-jung or stone-
pelting war. Munnu records the aftermath as

Kashmiris with apple trucks marched to the L.O.C. [Line of Control]

to bring down the de facto border that divides the land into Pakistan-
occupied Kashmir and India-occupied Kashmir, hoping to break open
the Berlin wall that blocked the traditional routes connecting the
 valley with the rest of the world. […] However, indiscriminate
shootings, killings, curfews with shoot at sight and a media gag once
more protected the ‘integrity of the nation’.

He ruefully concludes that ‘prisons […] seem to be the only places to

make new friends and mingle with old friends and neighbours’.
Sajad has shown through his own work preceding and succeeding Munnu
how seamlessly graphic novels transform into digital artefacts. Their ability
to move into the digital realm easily has given scholars of Kashmir hope
that ‘the internal conversation amongst Kashmiris’ as well as ‘the Indian
public sphere’ would increasingly be brought into the ‘de-territorialised
technology of the web’, as Ananya Kabir explains. Yet the total lockdown
of Kashmir in August 2019 by the Indian government, following the
stripping of the autonomous status for the state of Jammu and Kashmir,
illustrates starkly the totalitarian wars of communication blockade that also
accompany advances in technologies.
Munnu concludes with the chapter called ‘Solar Powered Flashlight’ that
shines upon thugs patrolling the streets of Srinagar chasing its destitute
inhabitants. It leaves readers thinking that perhaps the dark politics of
decolonization could have possibly not illuminated the Kashmir of the
munnus of today more strongly.

AHMED, N. and S. Singh. (2007). Kashmir Pending. Phantomville.

GHOSHAL, T. (2016). ‘Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir’. South Asian Popular Culture, 14(1–2), 128–
30. DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2016.1241349.
KABIR, A.J. (2016). ‘The New Pastoralism: Environmentalism and Conflict in Contemporary
Writing from Kashmir’. In A. Tickell (Ed.), South Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary
Transformations (pp. 199–215). Palgrave Macmillan.
LEITH, S. (2020, October 17). ‘Graphic artist Art Spiegelman on Maus, politics and “drawing
badly”’. The Guardian.
RECCHIA, F. (2015, November 4). ‘Malik Sajad’s “Munnu”: A Graphic Novel from Kashmir’.
Warscapes.
SAJAD, M. (2010, February 19). Kashmir in Black and White. [Video]. www.youtube.com/watch?
v=kRkWUQsqWsY.
SAJAD, M. (2010, June 7). Hopscotch. [Video]. www.youtube.com/watch?v=So3uYFVr1yo&t=32s.
SAJAD, M. (2015). Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir. Fourth Estate, HarperCollins.
SAJAD, M. (2020, June 11). ‘We Have Been in a Lockdown for a Decade’. The New York Times.
SARKAR, S. (2018). ‘The Art of Postcolonial Resistance and Multispecies Storytelling in Malik
Sajad’s Graphic Novel Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir’. South Asian Review, 39(1–2), 104–24.
DOI: 10.1080/02759527.2018.1509537.
SINGH, A. (2017, February 20). ‘“Inside Out”: Autobiography, History and the Comic Form in
Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir’. Café Dissensus.
SPIEGELMAN, A. (2003). The Complete Maus, Vols 1 & 2. Penguin.
75
MOVEABLE CHALIT SOLAR PUMP
2019
Before its intervention, Chunni adivasi and other farmers took diesel
pump for irrigation, for which they paid Rs. 1200 per day rent, plus
Rs. 5000 for diesel charges. Now they pay Rs. 200 to irrigate 0.5 acre
and save their 8000 rupees.
A case study for Parhit Samaj Seva Sanstha

THE CHALIT SOLAR PUMP, AS THE DEVICE IS CALLED BY LOCALS, irrigates

farmlands in the villages of Kalothra, Himmatgarh and a few others close
by in Shivpuri district of Gwalior division, Madhya Pradesh. The villages
are all inhabited by Sahariya people, who are amongst the 75 listed
Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups of India. Many today live in the
districts of Gwalior–Chambal–Bundelkhand, which are described by the
non-profit organization Parhit Samaj Seva Sanstha (henceforth Parhit) as
‘one of the most backward regions in not only Madhya Pradesh, but also in
India’. Parhit has for long worked in the area among the Sahariya, and the
procurement of the pump was masterminded by the founder and director,
Raghavendra Singh, who with select members of his organization finalized
the design and got it built in 2019 in a small scrap-metal factory in Gwalior.
The design is a rustic version of 1HP DC Portable Solar Pump on a cargo
bicycle, which has been commercially produced since 2017, such as by the
Selco Foundation, for renting out to small and marginal farmers. The
designers of the Kalothra pump call theirs the moveable pump, and it
directs us to see the phenomenal Indian jugaad, or the ability of ‘common
people’ to seize adverse circumstances as opportunities for innovating with
ingenuity – and in a frugal manner – technologies of improvement.
Importantly, it exhibits the fundamental nature of all objects as harbingers
of change.
The ‘Chalit Pump’ of Sahariya in Kalothra, Shivpuri district, Madhya Pradesh. The pump had a flat
tyre on the day of the photograph, in August 2019.

The solar panels of the pump in use in the field. To the far left is Raghavendra Singh.

We may describe the device as a portable irrigation machine that

represents the technological possibilities of a village cart. It comprises a
wooden base, of locally sourced wood of the sal tree, which is fitted with
iron frames upon which are fixed solar panels. The ‘solar cart’ has four
motorcycle tyres and is of the hand-pulled variety that requires two people
to move it around. It carries a photovoltaic pump, which is taken from field
to field to be submerged in the nearest borewells and small waterbodies.
The manufacturing logic of portable solar pumps resides in the fact that a
submersible pump with a load controller above ground is easy to install and
performs best in small farms.
The Sahariya farms are very small, all under one bigha, or half an acre,
and the moveable pump has the capacity to irrigate four bighas in four
hours. During peak summer of 2019, it ran for more than ten to twelve
hours per day, irrigating around six to seven fields. Its creation was made
feasible through a small grant from a quasi-government organization, and
the designers now see the opportunity of improving the device at a nominal
cost by adding to it a solar-powered battery, for optimising the use of solar
energy. They specifically anticipate, with great expectations, the
possibilities of their solar cart moving on solar power.
The mobile or portable solar pumps, as the commercial variants are
named, represent increasing investments within India towards capacity
building programmes for solar energy. In March 2018, the Government of
India launched the Kisan Urja Suraksha Evam Utthaan Mahabhiyan
(KUSUM) with an outlay of ₹220 billion for setting up 1.75 million off-
grid solar pumps to meet the ambitious target of 100 GW solar by 2022,
which it has committed to the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change. Additionally, the growing market for solar goods, to quote
a report for standalone solar products, is approximately ‘₹1.4 trillion ($20
billion) overall consumer durables’, excluding government-driven sales.
The pump of the Sahariya follows the innovative ownership models
subscribed by the government. These capitalize upon the typically small
landholdings in the country that do not require large capacity solar pumps
for irrigation. Additionally, they recommend ‘the opportunity to share […]
a single pump by a group of farmers’.
The Sahariya farmers organize the borrowing schedule of the moveable
pump. This, however, hinges upon one condition of use imposed by Parhit,
namely, to commit to organic farming, for which the farmers are provided
on-site training. One of the long-term benefits of the pump, which became
immediately apparent after the first crop, was the possibility of creating
seed banks, due to increase in crop production, that allow farmers to source
better quality and cheaper seeds within their home terrain, and thereby
shield them from the vagaries and extortions of uncertain markets.
In highlighting the great success of the pump, Raghavendra Singh
announced that it has already brought over 67 acres of land under
cultivation, and the achievement becomes patently visible when we note a
2017 report of the philanthropic organization Arghyam which declared that

The sparse [deciduous] forests [on the lower Vindhyan hills], which
once offered some respite with their tendu leaves, gondh, mahua and
other herbs, have started to dwindle, making survival precarious for
the Sahariya. The adivasi community has depended on the forest for
its livelihood. On an average, a Sahariya household has two to five
bighas of land on which they practice slash and burn farming (locally
known as ‘sur’). […] The yields are not inspiring. Although patta (a
title deed to a property) is in the name of adivasis, land and resources
have been generously usurped by other caste groups. Even when the
land is in their possession, many pawn it to supplement their meagre
income from farm labour. Now, the water situation is pushing them to
the brink.

The solar pump at Kalothra displays the urgency of recognizing the

realities of climate change and the growing crisis of water. As we know, this
is spawning at an alarming pace, creating water-poor nations and extremely
high levels of water stress within the world. The pump provides a glimpse
of the importance of local schemes of sustainable water management which
are often marginalized next to the ambitious projects with large resources.
Besides, it reminds us that solar energy is the best solution for facilitating
water supplies in remote areas with abysmal connectivity to the electrical
grid.
 The now cultivable lands of Kalothra and nearby villages may provide a
measly livelihood to the inhabitants. But they do have the potential to stop
the distress-driven seasonal migrations of Sahariya communities. The cheap
pool of labour which adivasi migration has historically provided for India
has been studied and analysed for long. One can only hope that the
harrowing destitution and helplessness of India’s migrant labour, which was
unveiled to the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, affects the creation
of ethical labour laws, policies of minimum wage, and employment
guarantee schemes.
In symbolizing the innovative fix of doing more with less, the moveable
solar pump of Kalothra reminds us of the empathetic entrepreneurship that
permeates initiatives similar to jugaad in all societies, especially those with
poor economies. It conveys and celebrates the courage to think differently.

GARG, V. (2018, August 16). ‘India: Vast Potential in Solar-Powered Irrigation’. Report of Institute
of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IFFEA).
GARTHWAITE, J. (2019). ‘The Effects of Climate Change on Water Shortage’. Stanford Earth.
‘Murari Adivasi Becomes Self Dependent Farmer’. In Stories from the Field. Parhit Samaj Sevi
Sanstha.
‘Movable Solar Water Pump a Hope of Marginal Farmers: A Case Study’. Annual Report 2019–20.
Bharat Rural Livelihood Foundation.
PALIATH, S. (2017, September 29). ‘For the Sahariya Tribe of MP, Water Management is the
Essence of Survival’. Huffington Post.
Parhit Samaj Seva Sanstha. parhit.org.in/.
‘Peering into the Future: India and the Distributed Standalone Solar Product Market’. (2019, January
28). GOGLA.
www.gogla.org/sites/default/files/resource_docs/report_india_and_the_solar_standalone_market
_sizing_in_india_web_opt.pdf.
Portable Solar Pump. Selco Foundation. [Video] www.youtube.com/watch?v=en8KxtiXy00.
RADJOU, N., J. Prabhu, and S. Ahuja. (2012). Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible,
Generate Breakthrough Growth. Jossey-Bass.
SHAH, A. and J. Lerche. (2018). ‘Tribe, Caste and Class – New Mechanisms of Exploitation and
Oppression’. In A. Shah, J. Lerche, R. Axelby, D. Benbabaali, B. Donegan, J. Raj and V. Thakur
(Eds), Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in Twenty-first-century
India (pp. 1–31). Pluto Press.
TAYAL, M. (2019, April 11). ‘How Mobile Solar Pumping System Can Revolutionize Indian
Farming’. Saur Energy.
World Meteorological Organisation. (2020). United in Science: A multi-organization high-level
compilation of the latest climate science information.
HISTORIES WITH OBJECTS

A VOLUME SUCH AS THIS, OF HISTORIES WITH OBJECTS, CAN ONLY offer a tiny
glimpse of the vastness of the historical enquiry. Books comprising several
objects, however many, can only be inherently selective of the things they
recall and explore, and in sketching aspects of the historical enquiry of the
Indian subcontinent this book undoubtedly omits much, both regional and
chronological. Yet, the social biographies of the 75 objects, which entail
histories of their creation, circulation and consumption, guide readers to see
that a history is always in the making. It has to be, because objects of
history are reused time and time again. Therefore, the merit of such object-
focused history books lies in demonstrating the implausibility of a total
historical narrative of anything: be this a nation, household, legacy, time
period, art, aesthetics, tradition or economy.
Seeking histories through objects demands the careful study of one thing
with reference to all others that are associated with it. We see the shifting
valuation of things over time and most importantly, we begin to appreciate
the complexity of history, which beckons careful scrutiny and which belies
expectations of a straightforward historical narrative. Object histories guide
us to regard the vast arena of unknowns and the ontology of absence. And
in thinking through them we begin to understand the injunctions of astute
historians to approach aspects of the past by searching carefully for
perceptions of these in that past.
A book about a history of India must end with a recall of the eye-opening
and inspiring scholarship of B.D. Chattopadhyaya on the Concept of
Bharatavarsha (2017). Through a study of various texts from various times,
Chattopadhyaya unravelled for readers the many shifts, transformations and
developments of the concept, and illustrated the open-ended entity which
Bharatavarsha denoted until colonial administration marked a shift,
crystallizing ‘a mappable, concrete territorial identity thrown back into the
past’. He clearly demonstrated that ‘the bogey of invasions and of
foreigners as catalytic agents in effecting grave disorders in Indian society
is not in consonance with how the early Indians themselves perceived their
Bhãratavarṣa and its society’. And critiquing the obliteration of histories of
Bharatavarsha that convey the shifts in locally or regionally important
settlement zones as the colonial ‘burden that we are forced to carry’, he
pointed to the ‘irony of history that movement of diverse cultural spaces to
come together, to integrate, to function as a united entity, happens
invariably by sacrificing a multitude of such spaces’.
Chattopadhyaya highlighted a key historical fact, that ‘evidence from the
ancient texts of cultural differences, tensions, and even of conflicts was
evidence of dynamic interactions in a heterogenous society.’ He, therefore,
fervently hoped that in ‘keeping the heritage of that glorious, if contentious
heterogeneity in mind […] we do not deliberately consign that country –
our many Indias – to the black hole of robotic uniformity in the name of
integration and unity’.
We ought to nurture the hope of one of India’s finest historians by
prominently displaying the fallacy of an Indian history that homogenizes
society and unearths a forever-existing national culture. Notably, objects
present opportunities for configuring methods to do so. Their biographies,
as this book demonstrates, illuminate the contingent and elusive nature of
meaning and thus open up spaces for analysing creations of historical
realities of fixed identities.
Objects thereby allow us to see with considerable precision why we can
never unearth authenticity. They bring to our attention instead the
importance of interrogating that which is being historicized in a particular
manner at a particular time. They revel in making us ask the question why?
CHATTOPADHYAYA, Brajadulal. (2017). The Concept of Bharatavarsha and Other Essays.
Permanent Black.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

That objects demand lengthy periods of research because they take us into
all kinds of histories is possibly the most powerful object-lesson I have
learnt from writing this book. My biggest debt of gratitude is to Hachette
India, especially Thomas Abraham and Poulomi Chatterjee for waiting
patiently for years for this book to develop. My grateful thanks to Sohini
Bhattacharya for recommending my name for the project, Amish Raj
Mulmi for helming the project’s inception, Sini Nair for ensuring its smooth
running and Sonali Jindal for the final edits and for overseeing the
completion.
Bhavya Goel made heroic efforts to make the prose more reader friendly,
and I am also very grateful to her for the long hours she spent working with
me. My thanks to Shyama Warner, and to Eivind Kahrs, not among the
publication team, for their critical eye towards the final manuscript, and to
Parul Sharma and Anupama Manral for cheerfully administering the last-
minute corrections.
A book such as this would not have been possible without the generous
support of the museums and institutions whose collections make it up. I am
especially grateful to Dr Venu Vasudevan for his encouragement and
support to draw into the collections of the National Museum (New Delhi)
when he was director general, and Joyoti Roy, then head of outreach, for
administering the details. The Centre of South Asian Studies, Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology and Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern
Studies at University of Cambridge have been very generous towards the
project, and I thank Kevin Greenbank for the time and effort in helping me
select objects from the Centre’s collection and photographing them for the
publication, Jocelyne Dudding for draft designs of the book cover from the
Museum’s collection, and Miki Jacob for the unfettered access to the
Faculty’s South Asian collections. Besides, Liam Nash and Melanie
Howard (Science Museum Oxford), Jennifer Chowdhury (Alkazi Collection
of Photography), Ruta Waghmare-Baptista (Dr. Bhau Daji Lad City
Museum), Swasti Singh Ghai (National Institute of Design), Joy Wheeler
(Royal Geographical Society), G. Arunima (Kerala Council of Historical
Research), Sharmistha Chatterjee (Amity Institute of Social Sciences),
Prakash Maity (State Archaeological Museum, Kolkata), Ursula Sims-
Williams (British Library), Ajay Mahurkar (Indira Gandhi National Open
University), Sudha Sawant (Godrej Archives), Jennifer Barry (Freer
Gallery), Karen Lawson (Royal Collections), Maya MacManus (LIC logo),
and Robert Hagge (whose photograph of the Hampi Chariot has not been
used) have gone out of their way to expedite the procuring of select images.
My grateful thanks to them all.
Many scholars have been exceptionally generous with their knowledge
and time. They have provided information, read select essays and corrected
mistakes, and I record the debts I owe especially to Michael Attwood,
Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan, James Benson, Sharmi Chakraborty,
Rosemary Crill, Deepali Dewan, Rupert Gethin, Mark Elliott, Annapurna
Garimella, Aashique Iqbal, Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, K. Paddayya, Shanti
Pappu, Kapil Raj, Ayesha Sheth, Amrita Shodhan, John Smith, Susan
Stronge and Giles Tillotson.
In addition to my demands for their scholarly inputs, family and close
friends have also had to often rescue flagging morale. Their unwavering
support has been crucial for the book to become, and I am immensely
grateful to Ajay Dandekar, Suchi Guha, Anita Herle, Eivind Kahrs,
Madhuca Krishnan, Divia Patel, Jonathan Portes and Tapti Roy. The
omissions of histories, and mistakes which may have crept in, do not reflect
the academic and intellectual inputs I have received.
 It is always a pleasure to thank Romila Thapar and Simon Schaffer for
the inspiration of their scholarship. I thank them here also for their eye upon
the book in its making. Additionally, I take the opportunity to express my
gratitude to Deborah Swallow for giving me that first opportunity to work
in a museum. The stint of nine months at the V&A in 1994, which was also
my first ‘proper’ job in the UK, brought me to see the promise of
collections-based research for extending the remit of historical and
archaeological enquiries.
My deepest regret about the long gestation of this book is the loss of B.D.
Chattopadhyaya whose persistent enquiries about ‘where is the manuscript’
has often stoked the pace of writing. And in anticipating the publication I
recall my mother, who would have noted with the warmth of her smile the
eventual completion of a rather long and solitary journey.

Sudeshna Guha, 30 October 2022

IMAGE CREDITS

Adobe: 72.2
Ajay Dandekar: 29.1, 29.2
Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi: 54.1, 54.2
Archaeological Survey of India: 9.1, 10.2, 18.1, 19.1, 26.1, 27.1, 64.2
Bodleian Libraries, Oxford: 25.1
British Library, London: 33.1
British Museum, London: 41.1
Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge: 30.1, 50.1, 52.1, 61.1, 61.2, 62.1, 71.1
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai: 24.1
daCunha Communications: 70.1
DAG: 67.1
Department of Archaeology and Museums, Rajasthan: 36.2
Dr. Bhau Daji Lad City Museum, Mumbai: 65.1, 65.2
Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC: 38.1
Galav Bhushan: 68.1
Getty Images: 7.1, 13.1, 44.1, 69.1
Godrej Archives, Mumbai: 55.1, 55.2
HarperCollins: 74.1, 74.2, 74.3, 74.4
Harry Falk: 8.1, 8.2
Jhupu Adhikari: 66.1
John D. Smith: 30.2
Kerala Council for Historical Research, Thiruvananthapuram: 14.1
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge: 51.1, 56.1, 56.2, 58.1, 59.1
Museum of the History of Science, Oxford: 35.1
Mint: 72.1
National Museum, New Delhi: 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 12.1, 16.1, 17.1, 20.1, 21.1, 34.1, 39.1, 42.1, 45.1,
46.1, 48.1, 58.2, 64.1, 71.2
Navyana Publishers: 73.1, 73.2
Priya Paul Collection at Tasveer Ghar: 60.1
Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi: 17.2
Royal Collection Trust, Windsor: 43.1
Royal Geographical Society, London: 53.1
SOAS, University of London: 59.2
Shilpa Gavane: 32.1
Sreedeep Bhattacharya: 68.2
State Archaeological Museum West Bengal, Kolkata: 15.1
Sudeshna Guha: 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 3.2, 4.2, 10.1, 10.3, 11.1, 11.2, 12.2, 18.2, 18.3, 26.2, 26.3, 28.1,
28.2, 31.1, 75.1, 75.2
Sumeet Jadhav: 73.3
The Hindu: 23.1
University Library Cambridge: 22.1, 37.1, 37.2, 43.2, 49.2
Victoria and Albert Museum, London: 36.1, 40.1, 47.1, 49.1, 57.1
Wikimedia Commons: 63.1 (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International/Aryan
Gupta)
INDEX

A Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir, 211

A Visit to London, 399
Abbasid palaces, 349
Abdul-Rahim Khankhanan, 295, 316
Abu’l Fazl, 316, 334, 342, 339, 425
Abu’l Hasan, 304
Abdur Razzak, 273
Acheulean Culture, 9
Adams, George, 414
Adhikari, Jhupu, 560
Adil Shah II, 366
Adil Shahi rulers of Bijapur, 324, 354
Aditya Chola, 196
adivasi settlements, 14, 19
Advertising Sales Promotion (ASP), 560, 562, 592
Afzal Khan, 355
Agra Fort, 224, 225, 230
Agra, 296, 299
Agrawal, D.P., 52
Agrawala, V.S., 169–71, 546
Ahichchhatra, 166, 169, 170–73
Ahmad Shah, 371
Ahuja, Naman, 34, 121, 515
Ai’n-i-Akbari, 339, 424
Ajanta, 79, 140, 145, 147–52, 154, 155, 187
paintings, 148, 150
Ajitanatha, 94
Akananuru, 116
Akbar, 56, 61, 81, 159, 295–97, 305, 307, 310, 312–18, 334, 337, 339, 343, 359, 371, 425
Akbarnama, 313, 334
Akluj hero stone, 253–58
Alam Ara, 571
al-Asaad, Khaled, 181
Ala-ud-din Khilji, 229, 365
Albert Hall, 317
Alexander of Macedon, 61–63, 107, 132
Alexandria, 110
All India Handloom Board, 209
All India Radio, 564
Allahabad Pillar, 56, 58–64, 135, 233
Almagest, 378
Altamira, 19
Altekar, V.S., 137, 141, 143
Altman, Micah, 607
Alvares, Claude, 557
Amazon, 35
Ambedkar, B.R., 615, 617–23
Amir Khusrau, 365
Amir Timur, 296
Amrith, Sunil, 554
Amul advertising campaign, 592
Amul butter, 562, 590, 592–95, 597
Amul Girl, 562, 590, 592, 593, 597
Anandamath, 569
Anangabhimadeva III, 245
Anangapala, 235, 236
Anantavarman Chodaganga, 241, 245
Anchor brand, 470, 472
Ancient Iran, 291
Ancient Kalinga, 243, 247
Andal, 198
Andhare, Shridhar, 101
Angkor Wat, 180
Anglo-Afghan War, 221, 223
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, 31
Annesley, George, 412
Annihilation of Caste, 622
Another India, 498
Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe, 425
Appar, 196
Arabic inscriptions, 223
Archaeological Survey of India, 19, 26, 28, 43, 68, 83, 133, 145, 147, 154, 160, 164, 166, 225, 231,
235, 279, 474, 543, 544, 546
Archer, Mildred, 404, 415, 418
Archer, William, 499, 500
Arghyam, 638
Armstrong, Vickers, 584
Art crime, 181
trafficking of antiquities, 180
Arterburn, Yvonne, 208
Arundale, Rukmini Devi, 206
Arya Samaj, 622
Aryabhatta, 139, 171, 308
Asher, Catherine, 61, 237, 380, 388
Asher, Frederick, 73, 158, 159, 238, 381
Ashmolean Museum, 436, 439
Ashoka, 56, 59–61, 63, 77, 158, 159
Ashokan dhamma, 60
edicts, 56, 58, 59, 130
Queen’s Edict, 56, 58, 60
Schism Edict, 56, 58, 158
Ashokan pillars, 70, 160
Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita, 183, 185, 186, 188–90
Ashutosh Museum of Indian Art, 122
Ashvaghosha, 139
Atlas of the Mughal Empire, 421, 424
Augustus, 108, 109
Aurangzeb, 316, 348, 352, 355, 356, 359, 370
Austin Motor Company, 579
Avatamasaka Sutra, 161, 162
Awadh, 422, 423, 427, 434, 446–49
court, 430, 432
Axworthy, Michael, 385, 387–89
ayagapatas, 94, 96, 97, 100–02
Ayodhya, 229
Azoulay, Ariella, 462
Babur, 293, 295–301, 343, 385
Baburnama, 293, 295–301, 442
Bacon, Francis, 332
Badauni, Abd al-Qadir, 315
Bahadur Shah Zafar II, 447
Bailey, Gauvin, 339
Banabhatta, 171, 251
Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar, 524
Banerjee, Mukulika, 609, 610, 613
Banerjee, Sandeep, 463
Banerjee-Dube, Ishita, 517, 522
Barker, Alex, 180
Barker, Thomas Jones, 445
Basu, Chandreyi, 111
Bates, Crispin, 337, 447
Battle of Buxar, 420
Battle of Kohima, 500
Battle of Plassey, 389
Battle of Pollilur, 404
Bautze, Joachim, 121
Bayana hoard, 143
Bayly, C.A., 208, 430, 445, 527, 530, 533, 534
BBC, 31, 523, 581
Beach, Milo Cleveland, 147, 149
Becker, Nick, 322
Beckit, Robert, 322
Begum of Bhopal, 464
Begum Sikander Jahan, 79
Behl, Benoy, 147
Bendall, Cecil, 189
Bengal Famine, 533, 534, 555
Benthall, Edward, 525
Berger, John, 617
Bergson, Henri, 486
Bey, Elfi, 403
Bhagavad Gita, 256, 560
Bhandare, Shailendra, 98
Bharatanatyam, 206, 207
Bharatuddhar, 513, 517, 519, 569
Bhasa, 139
Bhave, Savita, 565
Bhima, 62, 63
Bhimayana, 615, 617–19, 622, 623, 625
Bhimbetka, 12, 14, 15, 17–20
Bhogle, Harsha, 597
Bhojadeva, 186
Bhopal Durbar, 464
Bhopal State, 460
Bhopal State Railway, 465, 467
Bhownaggree, Sir Mancherjee, 467
Bhugola box, 302, 304–07, 309
Bihar Museum, 66, 68, 73, 74
Bijapur Sultanate, 354
Billa Surgam Caves, 7
Binyon, Laurence, 149
Birbal, 56, 61
Birla Group, 579
Birla, G.D., 580
Birsa Munda, 508
Bisauli anthropomorph, 53
Bisht, R.S., 26
Bodhgaya, 160
Bombay Gasworks, 472
Bombay Mutual Life Assurance, 562, 563
Bombay School of Art, 152
Bose, Nandalal, 153
Bose, Subas Chandra, 531
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 150
Bourne, Samuel, 462, 463
Bouton, Charles, 550
Boxer, Charles, 327
Brahmanism, 92, 97, 99
Brahmanical dharma, 60
Brahmanical orthodoxy, 100
Brahmi, 135
inscriptions, 63
script, 59, 60, 94
Brancaccio, Pia, 149
Brereton, Joel, 490
Brett, Katherine, 395
Brihaddesi of Matanga, 363
Brihatsamhita, 139
British Army, 530, 531
British Empire, 534
British India, 522, 525, 527
British Museum, 79, 128, 132, 149, 342
British Parliament, 229
British photography of India, 463
British Royal Navy, 584
Brittlebank, Kate, 405
Bronkhorst, Johannes, 97, 100
Bronze Age, 26, 31, 42, 46, 52, 543, 545
Egypt, 38
Brown, Percy, 277, 280
Buchanan-Hamilton, Francis, 159
Buddha, 92, 100, 148, 158, 160, 161, 185, 456
Buddhacharita, 140
Buddhas at Bamiyan, 291
Buddha Shakyamuni, 77
statues, 180
Buddha’s Word, 190
Buddhism, 91, 92, 101, 132, 149, 150, 188, 189, 456, 543
Buddhist, 60, 96, 97, 99, 100
art, 75, 154, 291
cosmology, 148
literature, 156
 manuscripts, 188, 190
monasteries, 292
monastic complex, 140, 148
monks, 149
rock-cut caves, 148
Sangha, 58, 160
Tripitakas, 455
Bühler, Georg, 216
Burlington House, 190
Burma Office, 527
Burns, Cecil, 553
Burrow, Thomas, 128
Burt, Lt. T.S., 62
Burton-Page, John, 281
Burzahom, 21, 23–26
Butler, Captain John, 496
Cambodia, 180
Cambridge University Library, 189, 190
Campbell, Colin, 449
Cankam literature, 109, 110, 116
Captain Johnson, 78
Captain Newbold, 6
Carlleyle, Archibald, 19
Carruthers, William, 123
Casson, Lionel, 107, 108
caste system, 484, 486, 490, 491
Catalogue of Buddhist Sanskrit MSS in the University Library of Cambridge, 189
Central Asian Antiquities, 132
Central Museum, Lahore, 34, 545
Central Rice Research Institute, 557
Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, 529
Chadarevian, Soraya, 552
Chaghatay, 295, 300
Chakraborty, Sharmi, 120, 121
Chakravarti, N.P., 544
Chakravarti, Ranabir, 122, 123
Chakravarty, Sumita, 568
Chalcolithic, 23, 46
period, 47, 21, 17
sites, 43, 45
Deccan Chalcolithic, 17, 47, 48, 49
chalit solar pump, 634
Chalukya kings, 170
Chandra, Pramod, 72, 163
Chandragupta I, 137, 143, 171
Chandragupta II, 171, 233, 234
Chandraketugarh, 123
plaque, 118, 120–24
Chanhudaro, 48
Charaka, 139
Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 569
Chattopadhyaya, B.D., 243, 261, 642, 249
Chaudhuri, Nirad, 487
Chenchu flute, 503, 505, 506, 512
Chenchu tribe, 503, 505, 506, 508–11
Chengiz Khan, 296, 343
Chera Kings, 196
Chetti, Nalli Chinnaswami, 208
Chidambaram, 194
Childe, Vere Gorden, 23, 24
China, 25, 87, 122, 127, 128, 131, 132, 149, 203, 290, 348, 393, 394, 455, 457, 555
Chishti, Ṛta Kapur, 207
Chitralekha, Zutshi, 217
Cholas, 194, 199
bronzes, 72, 192, 198
Empire, 196
imperialism, 197
inscriptions, 203
kings, 270
period, 32
Christianity, 337
Chubb and Baron, 472
Chudda, 132
Churchill, Winston, 524
civil disobedience, 516
Cohen, Steven, 397
Cohn’s E method, 475–77
Col. Kydd, 63
Cole, Henry, 80, 81, 82
College of Fort William, 413
Colombo Plan, 556
Commonwealth, 516
Company paintings, 418, 423, 426
Congress party, 619
Congress Radio, 523
Coningham, Robin, 25, 54
Constituent Assembly Secretariat (CAS), 608
Constitutional Conduct Group, 612
Coomaraswamy, Anand, 163, 197
Cooper, Randolf, 256, 257
Copper Anthropomorph, 50, 55
Copper hoards, 52–54
Cousens, Henry, 82
Cowasjee, Rustomjee, 562
Cowell, Edward, 189
Cox, Whitney, 216
Crill, Rosemary, 393, 394, 396
Cripps Mission, 525
Critical Tiger Habitats (CTH), 507
Cunningham, Alexander, 70, 78, 79, 159, 237
Cuno, James, 55
D’Costa, Anthony, 581
da Cunha, Sylvester, 560, 562, 592, 593
Da Yuezhi, 85
Dadlani, Chanchal, 423–26
Daguerre, Louis, 550
Daimabad, 43, 45–49
Bronzes, 43, 45, 48, 49, 54
Dalai Lama, 456
Dalal, Kurush, 54
Dale, Stephen, 293, 296, 299, 301
Dalit Panther movement, 619
Dallapiccola, Anna, 363
Daly, Major H., 464, 466
Damme, Stephane Van, 123
Dance of Shiva, 192
Dancing Girl, 28, 30–36, 198
Dandekar, Ajay, 257
Dandi Salt March, 516
Daniyal, 349
Dantwala, Mohanlal, 556
Dara Shikoh, 352
Darasuram ratha vimana, 271
Das, Asok, 312, 314, 453–57
Das, Sarat Chandra, 451, 458
Davenport, Arthur, 538
Davis, Richard H., 69, 226, 227, 399, 403
Davy, Humphry, 414
Dayal, Deen, 77, 460, 464–68
Dayal, Prabhu, 516
de Perthes, Jacques, 4, 5
Deen Dayal’s photograph, 460, 462, 464, 466, 468
Deewar, 573
Dehejia, Vidya, 75, 174, 176, 178, 195, 198, 364
Delhi, 238, 239, 296, 300
 Delhi Sultanate, 234, 237, 385
Deluge, 5
Dennell, Robin, 8
Desai, Santosh, 593
Deshmukh, C.D., 564
Devanagari script, 309
Devaraya II, 273
Devi-chandra-gupta, 139
Dewan, Deepali, 464, 465, 467
Dhamek stupa, 158, 159, 164
Dhammacakkappavattana-sutta, 156
dharmachakra, 75, 161
Dharmarajika stupa, 158, 160
Dharmashastras, 140
Dhavalikar, M.K., 45, 46, 106
Dhere, R.C., 271, 273, 275
Dholavira, 41
Didarganj yakshi, 66, 68, 71–73, 85, 106, 181
Digambara Jain, 163
Digby, Simon, 305–07
Distaff, Dorothy, 398
Dodhi, 20
Dourado, Fernão Vaz, 320
Dr. Bhau Daji Lad City Museum, 550, 552
Drouais, François-Hubert, 392
Dubreuil, Gabriel Jouveau, 180
Dundas, Paul, 96, 98–102
Durand, H.M., 79
Durgarjan Singh, 236
During-Caspers, Elizabeth, 104
Dutch settlements in India, 328
Earlom, Richard, 428, 429
Early Harappan cultural phase, 21
Early Harappan jar, 23
Early Harappan sites, 23
East India Company, 6, 62, 149, 150, 160, 188, 221, 225, 244, 248, 275, 279, 289, 309, 371, 389,
394, 396, 411, 415, 420, 429, 432–34, 446
Eastern Chalukya, 196
Eastern Torana, 75, 77, 81, 83, 148
Eaton, Natasha, 478
Ebeling, Klaus, 361
Eden, Emily, 371, 372
Edmonds, Wing Commander Charles, 536
Edwards, Elizabeth, 475
Egypt, 108, 109
Election Commission of India (ECI), 608, 609, 611
Electronic Voting Machine (EVM), 605, 607–09, 611–14
Elliott, Mark, 498
Ellora, 152, 194
Erskine, William, 299
Evans, John, 4, 5
Ewen, John, 164
Executive Council of the Viceroy of India, 520
Exhibition of Indian Art, 71
Faizabad, 422, 424, 430, 447
Falconer, Hugh, 5
Falconer, John, 462
Falk, Harry, 59, 139, 138
Fall of Rangoon, 534
Falser, Michael, 82
Fanshawe, Herbert, 237
Farruk Siyar, 370
Fatehpur Sikri, 81, 316
Faxian, 131, 159
Fell, Edward, 78
Fergusson, James, 150, 224, 225, 241, 243–45, 247
Ferishta, 223
Fernandes, Eustace, 592
Fiat car, 577, 581
Finch, William, 62
First All India Conference of Depressed Classes, 620
First Five Year Plan, 554–56, 586
First World War, 451
Firuz Shah Tughluq, 56, 61
Fleet, John Faithfull, 60, 233, 234
Flood, Finbarr, 62, 64, 217, 223, 233
Foote, Robert Bruce, 1, 3, 4–7, 10
Forest Rights Act (FRA), 510
Formigatti, Camillo, 186, 188, 190
Fortuna Intaglio, 113, 115, 117
Fraser, James, 386
French Revolution, 421, 433
Frere, John, 5, 6
Führer, Alois Anton, 61
Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von, 495, 503, 505, 506, 508
Fussman, Gerald, 90
Gandhara, 543
Gandhi, M.K., 513, 516–19, 522, 568, 619–22
Ganga dynasty, 241
Ganga–Brahmaputra delta, 120
Garuda Chariot, 268, 270, 271, 273, 275, 276
Gentil Album, 418, 421–27
Gentil, Colonel Jean-Bapstiste Joseph, 420
Gericke, Wilhelm, 412
Germany, 302
Gerzeh, 335
Gethin, Rupert, 156
Ghaznavid sultanate, 217
Ghazni raid, 226
Ghazni, Afghanistan, 221
Ghosh, Amalananda, 154
Ghosh, Suchandra, 118
Ghoshal, Torsa, 630, 631
Ghurye, G.S., 491
Gill, Captain Robert, 150–53
Gitagovinda, 246
Gladwin, Francis, 425
Godrej and Boyce, 473, 474
Godrej, 470, 472
Godrej, Ardeshir, 472–74
Gol Gumbad (Bijapur), 543
Goldenbaum, Laura, 83
Goldrick, James, 586
Gole, Susan, 325–27
Goloubeff, Victor, 192
Government Museum, Madras, 8, 71, 479
Government of India, 229
Governor General Canning, 80
Governor General Lord Auckland, 371
Governor General Lord Ellenborough, 221, 223, 224, 228–30
Governor General Richard Wellesley, 402
Graeco-Buddhist art, 132
Granoff, Phyllis, 98
Great Bath, 41
Great Granary, 41
Great Indian Peninsular Railway (GIPR), 78, 462, 463
Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, 453
Greater Kashmir, 630
Greek and Roman art, 77
Green Revolution, 556, 557
Greenbank, Kevin, 534
Greenlaw, Alexander, 275, 276
Griffin, Lepel, 466
Griffiths, John, 152, 153
Guha, Ramachandra, 610
Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, 70, 153, 489
Gupta Art, 171
Gupta Brahmi script, 233
Gupta dynasty, 143
Gupta Empire, 137
Gupta gold coins, 140, 142, 143
Gupta period, 139–41, 159, 162, 166, 169, 171, 172, 234, 235
Gupta, Samarendranath, 153
Gupta, Subodh, 579
Gurukkal, Rajan, 109, 110, 116
Gwalior Fort, 293, 297
Gwalior, 293, 297–300
Haddon, Alfred Cort, 477–79
Haider Ali, 403, 404
Haldar, Asit, 153
Hamida Banu, 371, 384
Hampi, 268, 271, 273
Hamzanama, 314
Han Dynasty, 129
Haneef, Mohammed, 141
Harappa, 31, 32, 38, 41, 45, 545, 546
culture, 45, 46, 49
gallery, 35, 38
objects, 33
site, 48
unicorn, 54
Hare Krishna movement, 249
Harisena, 60
Harisena, Vakataka, 148
Harivamsha, 310, 312
Harper, Tim, 527, 530, 533, 534
Harrison, Mark, 553
Harshacharita, 251
Harshavardhana, Thaneswar, 170, 171
Harvart, Daniel, 395
Hasan Reza Khan, 432
Hastings, Warren, 429
Havelock, Henry, 449
Hearsey, John, 446
Heathorn, Stephen, 444
Heber, Reginald, 412, 413
Heitzman, James, 203
Hendley, Thomas Holbein, 312, 317, 318
Hill, Joe, 557
Hindavi, 315
Hindu Code Bill, 623
Hindu Mahasabha, 524
Hindu Patriot, 488
Hinduism, 92, 101, 226, 280, 357, 446, 621
Hindus, 96, 164
Hindustan Ambassador, 575, 577–79, 581–83
Hindustan Motors, 579, 580, 582
Hindustani music, 366
Hintze, Almut, 284
Hippalus, 108
Hipparchus, 379
Hirachand, Walchand, 580
Hiranandani, G.N., 586, 587
Hire, Phillipe de la, 308
HMS Hercules, 584
Hobart, Robert, 413
Hobson-Jobson, 243, 397
Hockings, Paul, 480
Hodgson, Brian Houghton, 188, 189
Hoffland, Barbara, 399
Hopwood, Nick, 552
Hubel, Teresa, 622
Hultzsch, Ernst, 58
Humayun, 159, 339, 380
Humboldt Forum, 83
Humphrey, Ozias, 433
Huntington, John, 160, 161
Huntington, Susan, 88, 89, 161
Hutton, C., 414
Hutton, Deborah, 464, 467, 495, 497–99
Hutton, John Henry, 493
Huvishka, 88, 90
I Too Had a Dream, 594
Ibn Battuta, 235
Ibrahim Shah, 366
India and the World: A History in Nine Stories, 33
Indian Air Force (IAF), 538–40
Indian calicoes, 392
Indian chintz, 390, 392, 393, 396–98
Indian Constitution, 609, 615, 623
Indian cotton, 392
Indian Institute of Management, 279
Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), 580
Indian Life Insurance Companies Act, 563
Indian National Army (INA), 531, 534
Indian National Congress, 516, 520, 522
Congress Working Committee, 520
Lahore session, 516
Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), 50
Indian Navy, 584, 586, 587, 588
Indian Planning Commission, 555
Indian Press Act of 1910, 516
Indian Voices of the Great War, 539
Indus antiquities, 546
Indus Civilization, 21, 23, 25, 26, 31, 32, 34, 38, 40–42, 47, 48, 107, 122, 198, 543, 545, 547–49
Indus collection of Pakistan, 36
Indus Scale, 38, 42
Indus Valley, 548
Indus, 46
INS Rajput, 587
INS Vikrant, 584, 586–89
Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), 597
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), 557
Iqbal, Aashique, 536, 539
Iran, 217, 226, 286, 290, 291, 470
Iran Shah, 292
Iraq, 23
Iron Pillar at Mehrauli, 231, 233, 234–39
Irwin, John, 395
ISKCON, 249
Islam, 226, 255, 280, 317, 337, 343, 446
Islamic Republic of Pakistan, 543
Itinerario, 320, 322, 324, 325, 327
jaali, 277, 279–82
Jacobs, Julian, 497, 498, 500
jadeite necklace of Mohenjodaro, 543, 545–49
Jadhavrao, Lukhji, 354
Jafar, Mir, 389
Jaffrey, A.W., 529
Jagannatha ratha, 241, 243, 244, 247, 248, 268
Jagannatha Samrat, 378
Jagannatha Temple, 244, 247, 249, 250
Jahangir, 56, 61, 62, 64, 300, 301, 304, 305, 316, 329, 331–35, 337, 339–44, 346, 349–51, 359, 368,
370, 371, 384
Jahangirnama, 329, 333
Jain, Kajri, 517
Jaina
boards, 438
communities, 438
Kalpasutra, 364
laity, 102
manuscripts, 306
stupa, 96
temples, 228
texts, 227
Jainism, 92, 94, 96–101
Jains, 164
Jaipur Economic and Industrial Museum, 317
Jaipur Exhibition of Industrial Art, 310
Jan Sarokar, 612
Jambavati-kalyanam, 272
Jambudvipa, 306
Jambudvipaprajnapti Sutra, 97
James I, 305
Jami Masjid at Ahmedabad, 543
Jami Masjid, 238, 234, 385
Jamison, Stephanie, 490
Jantar Mantar, 373, 375, 377, 381
Jaoul, Nicolas, 623
Japan, 149
Jasanoff, Maya, 223, 430, 431, 433
Jatashur, 484, 486–90, 492
Jayadeva, 246
Jejeebhoy, Jamshetji, 290
Jericho, 23
Jesuit missions, 339
Jesus, 343
Jinaprabhasuri, 98, 99
Jnanesvari, 256
Jnyaneshwar, 256
John, C.S., 412
Johnson-Roehr, Susan, 376–78
Jones, Christopher, 251
Jones, William, 213, 215
Jorwe culture, 47, 49
Journeys, 603
kaavad, 599, 601–03
kaavad banchana, 601, 603
Kabir, Ananya, 632
Kabra, Kamal Nayan, 563
Kafi Khan, 355
Kaikkola Senguntar, 205
Kaimal, Padma, 176, 179–81
Kalaburgi, M.M., 254
Kalam, Ghulam Rasul, 68
Kalhana, 211, 213–19
Kalibangan, 45, 48
Kalidasa, 139, 171
Kamasutra, 139, 171
Kamtekar, Indivar, 532
Kanchi Yoginis, 180, 181
Kanchipuram, 270
korvai silk, 206, 207
weavers, 201, 203, 204, 208
Kanishka, 87, 88, 90, 91
statue, 85, 88–90, 92, 98
Kapoor, Raj, 572
Karachi, 30, 545
Karaikallar Ammaiyar, 196, 199
Karanjia, B.K., 472, 473
Karnad, Raghu, 529–31
Kashmir Pending, 625
Kashmir, 211, 213, 214, 216, 218, 292
Kathasaritsagara, 316
Kathodi, 20
Kaul, Suvir, 541
Kavuri-Bauer, Santhi, 238
Kawlra, Aarti, 204, 206, 207
Kayatha, 47
Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, 23, 25, 31, 33, 38, 41
Kevalarama, 378
Khan, Syed, 153
Khare, Meera, 349, 350
Kharoshthi, 129
inscriptions, 131
script, 130
tablet, 125, 130, 133
Khati, Ganga Baksh, 317
Khosla, Ishan, 602, 603
Khotan, 129, 130
Khwaja Inayatullah, 312
Khwaja Mu’in-al Din Chishti, 343
Kim, 451
King, William, 1, 4
kingdom of Tanjore, 411, 413, 415, 417
kings of Vijayanagara, 275
Kipling, Rudyard, 451
Kisan Urja Suraksha Evam Utthaan Mahabhiyan (KUSUM), 637
Klass, Gary, 607
Klein, Ira, 552
Koch, Ebba, 342, 349–51
Koh-i-noor, 371, 372, 388
Kokana, 20
Konark, Odisha, 270
Konow, Sten, 129, 130, 162
Kosambi, D.D., 141
Kreyenbroek, Philip, 286
Krishna cult, 99
Krishna, Pandit Radha, 85
Krishnadevaraya, 272–74
Krishnan, N., 586, 587
Kujula Kadphises, 87
Kulke, Hermann, 241, 244, 246, 248
Kumaradevi, 137
Kumaragupta, 143, 171
Kurien, Verghese, 594, 595, 597
Kushan, 73, 87, 97, 130, 138
dynasty, 85, 88, 89, 92, 291
empire, 91
Lahjat-i-Sikander Shahi, 366
Lahore, 545
Laksmikamadeva, 186
Lal, Nevasi, 424
Lal, P., 71
Late Harappa, 45, 47
Lawrence, Henry, 448, 449
Lawrence, Richard George, 439
Layard, Austen Henry, 79, 291
Le Mesurier, H.P., 6
Leach, Edmund, 479
Lègret-Manochhaya, Katia, 192
Leith, Sam, 629
Lepakshi, 271
liberation of Bangladesh, 588
LIC logo, 560, 562, 565
Life Along the Silk Road, 132
Life Insurance Companies Act, 562
Life Insurance Corporation Act, 564
Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van, 320, 323–25, 327
Linschoten’s map, 322, 326, 328
lock-making, 470, 472
Lodhi sultan, 296
London International Exhibition, 81
London, 190
Lord Byron, 412
Lord Dalhousie, 407
Lord Linlithgow, 524, 525
Lorimer, Christopher, 434
Losty, Jeremiah, 341, 342
Lothal, 45
Louis XV, 393
Louis XVI, 426
Lucknow, 427, 430
Lumiere brothers, 571
Lumiere, Auguste, 571
Lumiere, Louis, 571
Lundgren, Egron, 445
Lyell, Charles, 4
Macaulay, Colman, 456
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 223, 229, 457, 458
Mackay, Ernest, 30, 33, 38, 40
Maddock, T.H., 78
Madonna portrait, 337, 339, 340, 343, 344
Madras, 8, 71
Magadha, 88
Mahabalipuram, 270
Mahabharat Shield, 317
Mahabharata, 140, 166, 168–71, 296, 310, 312–15, 318, 601
Mahajanaka Jataka, 145
Mahar Satyagraha, 620
Maharaja Ranjit Singh, 223, 371, 372
Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh, 307
Mahastupa at Sanchi, 75
Mahavira, 94, 100
Mahayaga rites, 179
Mahayana Buddhism, 185, 189
Mahipala, 197
Mahmud of Gazni, 221, 223, 224, 226, 227, 229
Maiuri, Amedeo, 104
Maisey, Frederick, 78
Majumdar, Susmita Basu, 142
Malhar Koli, 20
Malwa, 47, 88
school, 365
ware, 17
Man Mandir, 375
Man Singh Tomar, 293, 297
Manasara, 139
Manusmriti, 620
Maratha kings, 411
Maratha power, 352, 357
Marathi language, 358
Marco Polo, 131, 325
Marshall, Sir John, 28, 30, 31, 33, 83, 162, 225, 545
Martin, Behaim, 302, 433, 434
Martin, Colonel Claude, 432
Maruti 800, 581
Mason, Philip, 531
Mathura, 137
Mauryan imperial art, 70
Maus, 629
Mausoleum of Sher Shah Suri (Sasaram), 543
Maxwell, Reginald, 520, 524, 525
Mayo, Katherine, 568, 569
McCrea, Lawrence, 213, 214
Mecca, 335
Meganee, L.L., 569
Megha Raga, 361, 363
Meghaduta, 139, 316
Mehboob Khan, 566, 568, 572, 573
Mehboob Studio, 569, 572
Mehendale, Gajanan Bhaskar, 359
Mehta, Sonal, 279
Mehta, Usha, 523
Mercator, Gerardus, 305
Mesolithic, 9, 15, 19, 23
Age, 7, 16, 17, 24
Mesopotamia, 31, 107, 117
meteorite knife, 331, 333–36, 348
Mevissen, Gerd, 268, 270, 271
Miafou, 132
Michell, George, 272, 306
Middle Palaeolithic, 18
Minute on Indian Education, 223
Mirsky, Jeannette, 130, 132
Mir Jumla, 359
Mir Qasim, 420
Mirza Raja Jai Singh, 352, 358
Mirza Ulugh Beg, 368, 377
Misra, V.N., 14, 17, 18, 19
Mitchell, W.J.T., 363, 553
Mitra, Rajendralal, 246, 247
Mitter, Partha, 70, 77, 141, 171, 172, 489
Miyan Tansen, 366
Mogao Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, 132
Mohenjodaro and the Indus Civilization, 28
Mohenjodaro, 28, 30–33, 38, 40, 41, 45, 543, 545, 546, 548
scale, 41
Moin, Afzar, 293, 295, 300, 341, 343
Monserrate, Antonio, 305
Montgomerie, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas George, 453, 454
Mordaunt, Colonel John, 430–32
Mosaic Chronology, 5
Mother India, 566, 568–73
Mrichchakatika, 139
Mrs Heringham, 153
Muazzam, 359
Mudrarakshasa, 139
Mughal, 349
court, 337
dynasty, 293, 337, 343
emperors, 368, 370, 442
empire, 354, 384
India, 337
paintings, 304, 314, 339, 349, 350, 424
Muhammad Adil Shah of Bijapur, 359
Muhammad bin Tughlaq, 235, 366
Muhammad Qasim Firishta, 425
Muhammad Shah, 376, 377, 382, 385–89
Mukherjee, Rudrangshu, 446
Mukherjee, S.N., 486
Müller, Frederick Max, 438, 572
Mumbai, 550
Mumtaz Mahal, 384
Munnu, 625, 628, 629, 631–33
Munro, Hector, 403
Munshi, K.M., 140, 229
Museum für Asiatische Kunst, 83
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 493
Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, 505
Mutiny of 1857, 79, 151, 444–46, 448, 449, 522
Muziris, 115–17
Muziris Papyrus, 116
Nader Shah, 371, 382, 384–89
Naga headhunting, 496
Naga National Council, 501
Naga people, 493, 500
Naga tribes, 497, 498
Nagaland, 501
Nagari, 235
inscription, 233
Nair, Savithri Preetha, 411, 414, 416
Nala Damayanti, 316
Nalanda, 188
Nana Sahib, 444
Napolean, 407
Napoleon III, 79
Napoleonic Wars of the 1790s, 433
Nargis, 566
Narsinghgarh, 364, 365
Naryana, Badri, 619
Nastaliq script, 312
Nataraja of Tiruvalangadu, 32, 192, 194, 195, 197–99
Nataraja temple of Chidambaram, 270
Natif, Mika, 340, 341, 343
National Dairy Board, 596
National Gallery, Washington, DC, 71
National Museum of India, 26, 30, 33, 35, 38, 43, 71, 72, 130, 133, 143, 166, 168, 171, 174, 176,
181, 382, 384, 545–47
National Planning Committee Report, 580
National Portrait Gallery, 427
National Tiger Conservation Authority, 507
Natural History, 109
Nawab Asaf ud-Daula, 420, 427, 429–32, 434
Nawab of Arcot, 411
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 218, 564, 570, 578, 586
Neo-Bengal School, 153
Neolithic, 19, 23
Himalayan Neolithic, 24
Age, 7
deposits, 25
Nepal, 186, 188, 189
Neumayer, Erwin, 16
Newar Buddhism, 186
Niccolao Manucci, 352
Nielsen, Kenneth, 581
Nimrud, 79
Nissim, Doron, 563
Niya, 127–33
Nizam of Hyderabad, 505
Nizam Shahi kingdom, 354
Nizam-ul-Mulk, 382
Norman, K.R., 58–60
Nott, William, 221, 223
Nur Jahan, 384
Nuremberg, 302
Ochre Coloured Pottery (OCP), 52
Oertel, Frederich, 160
Omissi, David, 539
Omvedt, Gail, 622
Operation Flood, 596, 597
Oriental Life Insurance, 562
Orientalism, 433
Orientalist scholarship, 213
Orientalists, 131, 215, 301, 425
Origins of Chintz, 395
Ortelius, Abraham, 305
Ottomans, 389
Outram, Sir James, 449
Pabuji’s phad, 259, 261–66, 601
Padamsee, Alyque, 590, 592
Paddayya, K., 8, 9
Paes, Domingo, 274
Pakistan, 21, 34, 47, 48
Pal, Pratapaditya, 100, 101
Pala dynasty, 159
Palaeolithic Age, 1, 7, 9, 12, 17
Palaeolithic sites, 8
Pali, 189
Pallava dynasty, 195
Pallava kings, 203, 270
Pallavaram, 1, 3, 6, 8
Spear Head, 1, 3, 8–10
palm-leaf manuscripts, 187, 188
Panchatantra, 139, 316
Panchsiddhantika, 139
Pandey, Mangal, 446
Pandit, Madanna, 359
Pandit, Ranjit, 218
Pandit, Vijayalakshmi, 584
Pandyas, 196, 271
Panipat, 293, 296, 297
Parekh, Bhikhu, 610
Parhit Samaj Seva Sanstha, 634, 637
Parimoo, Ratan, 489
Parodi, Laura, 339
Parsi community, 284, 286, 289
Parthasarathi, Prasannan, 206
Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups of India, 634
Partition Council, 544, 545
Partition of 1947, 541, 548, 555
Pataliputra, 69, 74, 87, 88
Patankar, Bharat, 622
Patel, Alka, 280
Patel, Divia, 153, 569, 571, 572
Patel, Tribhuvandas, 594, 595
Patna Museum, 69, 70, 71, 73
Patuk, Framji Pestonji, 290
Pawar, Sudarshan, 575
Peacock Throne, 388
People First, 612
Pepys, Samuel, 390, 392, 477
Periplus Maris Erythraei, 109, 115, 122
Persia, 365
Persian, 56, 217, 235, 288, 295, 298, 315, 316, 384
inscription, 228
literary culture, 217
manuscripts, 314, 413
Perviz, 349
Peshwa power, 357
Peterson, Indira Viswanathan, 413
Petrie, Sir William Matthew Flinders, 40
Phalke, D.G., 571
Phillips, F.A., 465
Picart, Bernard, 426
Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient Architecture of Hindostan, 244
Pilkerton, John, 414
Pinney, Christopher, 75, 480, 515, 516, 553
Pitt Rivers Museum, 438, 440
Pliny the Elder, 109, 110, 115, 308
PNS Ghazi, 586
Polier, Antoine-Louis Henri, 432–34
Pollard, Elizabeth, 111
Pompeii yakshi, 104, 106, 111, 115
Poona Pact, 619, 621, 622
Portraits of Indian Princes, 352
Portraits of the Princes and People of India, 372
Portuguese crown, 326
Portuguese Goa, 339
Possehl, Gregory, 32
Powers, Harold, 364
practice of sati, 255, 256
Prakash, Shiva, 194, 199
Prakrit Dhammapada, 130
Prakrit, 56, 127, 130
Prasad, Rajendra, 141
Premier Automobile Limited, 580
Prestwich, John, 4, 5
Prinsep, James, 63
Prithviraj Chauhan, 236, 237
Priya, Lekshmi, 577
Prophet Khizr, 350
Prophet Muhammad, 226, 227, 335, 343, 370
Ptolemy, Claudius, 308, 378, 379
Puri, 241, 247–50
Purkayastha, Prabir, 609, 613
Queen Victoria, 79, 372, 445
Quenzer, Jörg, 183
Quintanilla, Sonia Rhie, 99, 101
Quit India Movement, 523–25, 532
Quit India Resolution, 520, 522
Quraishi, S.Y., 607, 609, 611, 612
Quran, 348, 382, 573
Qureshi, Sadiah, 405
Qutub al-Din Aibek, 234, 236
Qutub Complex (New Delhi), 543
Qutub Minar, 233, 237, 238
Qutub Shahi, 359, 360
Qutub Shahs of Golconda, 354
Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, 81, 231, 234, 237
R.K. Films, 572
Raga Megha, 364–66
Raisman, Jeremy, 525
Raj, Kapil, 453–55, 458
Raja Harishchandra, 571
Raja Tulaja, 411
Rajagopal, S., 203
Rajaraja Chola II, 270
Rajaraja I, 196
Rajarajesvara temple, 196, 270
Rajatarangini, 127, 178, 211, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 316
Rajendra I, 197
Rajshahi, 71
Ramachandran, T.N., 168
Raman Spectroscope, 16
Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 304, 305, 516, 517
Ramaswamy, Vijaya, 203, 204
Ramayana, 62, 140, 166, 170, 266, 296, 601
Ranadive, B.T., 580
Rana Sangha, 296
Rani Lakshmibai, 444
Raniwala, Prachi, 209
Rapson, Edward, 189
Rashtrakuta kings, 288
Ratapani Wildlife Sanctuary, 12
Raven, Ellen, 74
Raw, 629
Ray, Nihar Ranjan, 122
Ray, Satyajit, 266
Ray, Sugata, 317
Razmnama, 296, 297, 310, 312–18
Recchia, Francesca, 628
Red Fort, 386, 387, 388
Refugee Map, 527, 529, 533, 534, 535
Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World, 426
Renaissance Venice, 342
Representation of the People Act of 1951, 609
Republic of India, 543
Reserve Bank of India (RBI), 563
Returning Home, 603
Rey, Claudius, 390, 397
Rice, Yael, 312–14
Richards, John F., 354, 355, 360
Rig Veda, 286, 490, 518, 519
Rishabanatha, 100
Risley, Herbert, 618
River of Stories, 625
Rivers, William Halse Rivers, 477–82
Rodin, Auguste, 192, 199
Roe, Thomas, 305, 340, 370
Roman Empire, 108–10, 116, 132, 308
Roman trade, 106
Rome, 87, 109, 110
Round Table Conference in London, 620
Roxburgh, William, 414
Roy, Anamika, 178
Roy, Arundhati, 618
Roy, Tapti, 446
Roy, Tirthankar, 578, 579
Royal Academy, 71, 190, 546
Royal Air Force, 538, 539
Royal Asiatic Society, 436, 439, 440
Royal Geographical Society, 458
Royal Library, France, 421
Royal Society, 5, 150
Rudradeva, 186
Russia, 451
Sa’ida, 333, 348
Sa’adat Khan, 382
Sabnani, Nina, 601
Sadanga, 172
Safavid Empire, 344
Safavid Shahs of Persia, 349, 384
Safavid Tahmasp, 389
Saga of Security, 562, 565
Sahariya farmers, 637
Sahariya farms, 636, 638
Sahni, Daya Ram, 30, 31, 162
Sahu, Bhairabi Prasad, 246
Saini, Dharamvir, 575
Sajad, Malik, 625, 628, 629, 631, 632
Saka Era, 307
Saka–Satavahana period, 49
Salar Jung, 432
Saldanha, Arun, 323, 324–27
Samaddar, Jogendranath, 69
Sambandar, 196
Samraṭ Siddhanta, 378, 379
Samudragupta, 56, 60, 61, 135, 137, 138, 143, 144, 171, 233
gold coin, 135, 137
Sanchi, 68, 82, 83
Gate, 83
Stupa, 75, 77, 78, 148
Sangha, 158
Sangita-narayana, 365
Sangita-ratnakara of Sarangadeva, 364
Sangita-siromani, 366
Sankalia, H.D., 47, 48
Sanskrit, 56, 130, 140, 172, 185, 188, 189, 215, 227, 228, 233, 302, 413
literature, 215, 316
manuscripts, 415
Sarai Khola Jar, 21, 25, 26
Sarkar, Sir Jadunath, 357, 532
Sarnath, 156, 158, 159, 161, 162
Buddha, 156, 160, 162–64
Saurashtra Iyer community, 206
Sawai Jai Singh, 373, 376–78
Sawai Madho Singh, 310
Sayajirao Gaekwad III, 618
Schaffer, Simon, 307, 308, 375, 479
Schofield, Katherine Butler, 366
Schwartz, Freidrich, 412
Science Museum, Oxford, 309
Scroll, 511
Sculpture of India, 71, 163
Second World War, 500, 524, 534, 536, 539, 540, 584
Selco Foundation, 636
Sembiyan Mahadevi, 194
Sen, S.P., 421
Sen, Salina, 279
Sen, Sukumar, 610
Serfoji II, 409, 411–17
Sett, Maneckji, 291
Seyller, John, 314
Shah Abbas I, 370, 384
Shah Alam II, 422, 423, 432
Shah Jahan, 225, 333, 348–51, 359, 370, 371, 385–88
Shah Shuja, 421, 422, 430
Shahani, Gitanjali, 397, 398
Shahji Bhonsle, 352, 354
Shahnama, 349
Shaiva Siddhanta sect, 194
Shaivites, 205
Shakespeare, William, 412
Shamsuddin Iltutmish, 298
Shani, Ornit, 607, 608
Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 578
Shattari Sufi, 300
Sheikh, Gulammohammed, 603
Sheth, Suchitra, 281
Shiva, 557
Shiva, Vandana, 556
Shivaji and His Times, 357
Shivaji, 352, 354–60, 411
Shodhan, Amrita, 281
Sholay, 573
Shonar Kella, 266
Shroff, Behroz, 279
Shudraka, 139
Shuja ud-Daula, 420, 423, 432
Shulman, David, 215
Sidi Sayyid Mosque, 277
Siege of Lucknow, 429, 448
Sikander Lodhi, 314, 366
Silk Road, 130, 149
Simon Commission, 517
Sindh, 48
Singh, Jai, 379, 380, 381
Singh, Kavita, 80, 81, 265
Singh, Mani, 453
Singh, Mohan, 424
Singh, Nain, 453, 455, 458
Singh, Raghavendra, 634, 637
Sinha, Bappa, 609, 613
Sir J.J. School of Art, 553
Siraj ud-Daulah, 389
Sirdar, Marika, 314
Siriyavan, Anand, 615
Skandagupta, 138, 143
Smith, Edward, 63
Smith, John D., 259, 262, 264–66, 313
Smith, Lewis Ferdinand, 431
Smith, Rachel, 344
Smith, Vincent, 238
Société Asiatique, 189
Somadevasuri, 177
Somanatha, 226, 227
gate, 221, 223–25, 229, 230
temple, 223, 227–29
Somanatha: The Shrine Eternal, 229
Sontheimer, Gunther, 253, 254, 256
Sorabjee, Hormazd, 577, 578, 581
Soucek, Priscilla, 340
South Kensington Museum, 80, 81, 83
Southey, Robert, 243
Spain, 19
Spiegelman, Art, 629
Spink, Walter, 148
Spooner, David Brainerd, 68–70, 72
Sri Lanka, 187
St. James’s Chronicle or British Evening-Post, 401
Standard Herald, 577
Starza, O.M., 249
Stein, Marc Aurel, 125, 127–33, 211, 213, 214, 216, 219
Stewart, Sarah, 289
Stoker, Valerie, 274, 275
Strabo, 308
Stronge, Susan, 339, 346, 348, 404, 405
Subramanian, Laxmi, 414
Sufi communities, 439
Sujatabhadra, 186
Sultan Abdullah Qutub Shah, 359
Sultan Abul Hasan of Golconda, 359
Sultan Ali Adil Shah II, 359
Sultan Mohammad of Ghori, 159
Sultan Shams al-Din Iltutmish, 233–35, 237, 238
Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin, 217
Sun Temple at Konark, 248
Sundarar, 196
Sunderason, Sanjukta, 488, 489
Sunga Brahmi script, 18
Supreme Court of India, 609
Surkh Kotal, 90, 91, 92
Susruta, 139
Svapna-vasavadatta, 139
Swadeshi Movement, 473
Tabula Peutingeriana, 116
Tagore, Abanindranath, 489
Tagore, Dwarkanath, 562
Tagore, Gaganendranath, 484, 486–89, 491
Tagore, Rabindranath, 489
Taj Mahal, 351
Taklamakan desert, 130
Talbot, Cynthia, 61, 236–38, 388
Tallapakkam Annamacarya, 273
Tan, Bonny, 322
Tanjore Enlightenment, 414
Tantia Tope, 444
Tantric Shaivism, 176
Tarasarani, 378
Tashi Lama, 456
Tata Steel Plant, 522
Tatar Khan, 293
Tata, Nusserwanji, 290
Tate Britain, 429
Tavernier, Jean Baptiste, 305
Taxila Museum, 544
Taxila, 21, 543, 544, 547
Teltumbde, Anand, 623
Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act, 556
Tetzlaff, Stefan, 580, 581
Thackston, Wheeler, 295, 333
Thakur, Manish, 578
Thapar, Romila, 60, 139, 227, 288, 490
The Ajanta Caves: Ancient Paintings of Buddhist India, 147
The Art of India and Pakistan, 71, 33, 190, 546
The Bhilsa Topes, 79
The Body in Indian Art, 515
The Chenchus: A Jungle Folk of the Deccan, 505
The Civil Contract of Photography, 462
The Concept of Bharatavarsha, 642
The Curse of Kehama, 243
The Geologist, 1
The History of Nadir Shah, 386
The Indian Antiquary, 19
The Konyak Nagas, 495
The People of India, 463
The Raj: India and the British, 427
The Rock-cut Temples of India, 152
The Scheduled Tribes, 505
Third Anglo-Mysore War, 404
Thomas Agnew and Sons, 445
Thorat, Sukhdeo, 619
Thurston, Edgar, 479, 480
Tibet, 188, 451, 453, 456, 457, 458
Tibetan prayer wheel, 451, 453–55, 458
Tibetan rosaries, 454
Tieffenthaler, Joseph, 63
Tiger Amendment Act, 510
Timur Ruby, 368, 370–72
Timur, 343, 368, 371, 385
Timurid, 349
dynasty, 377
empire, 296
sovereignty, 343
Tinker, Hugh, 533, 534
Tipu Sultan, 399, 401–07, 426, 442
Tipu’s Tiger, 399, 401, 403, 407
Tipu’s Tigers, 404
Tirthankara, 94, 97, 99–101
Tod, James, 262
Toda anthropology, 475, 479–82
Tomar dynasty, 236, 237, 297
Topsfield, Andrew, 436, 439, 440
Torin, Benjamin, 415
trade with Rome, 122
triratna, 75
Truschke, Audrey, 315, 316
Tuluva dynasty, 272
Tutinama, 296
Twelfth Dynasty Egypt, 40, 42
ivory scale, 40
Udayagiri, 233–36
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 637
United Nations, 180
United Netherlands Chartered East India Company, 320
University of Calcutta, 122
Upper Palaeolithic period, 14, 15
Uttama Chola, 201
Uttar Pradesh, 166
Vaishnava communities, 438
Vaishnava matha, 274
Vajrayana Buddhism, 186
van Neck, Jacob, 327
Vande Mataram, 569
varaha avatara, 54
Varahmihira, 139
Varma, Ravi, 571
Vasco da Gama, 302, 322
Vataranyeshwarar temple, 195, 196
Vatsyayana, 139, 171, 172
Vedic Culture, 543
Verghese, Anila, 272, 273
Verma, Manisha, 510
Victoria and Albert Museum, 83, 152, 153
Victoria Museum, Karachi, 545
Vienna Exhibition of 1873, 7
Vijayanagara, 244, 268, 272, 273
Empire, 203, 272
kingdom, 411
kings, 274
Vikramachola, 198
Vikramaditya, 297
Vikramarjuna Vijayam, 254
Vikramashila, 188
Vimala temple, 101
Vinayaditya Satyasraya, 170
Vira Narasimha, 272
Vishnudharmottara Purana, 140, 169
Vishnusarman, 139
Visvesvaraya, Sir M., 580
Viththal Temple, 272, 273
Vogel, Jean Phillipe, 90
von Richthofen, Ferdinand, 130
Vyam, Durgabai, 615, 619
Vyam, Subhash, 615, 619
Wajid Ali Shah, 447
Wakanker, Vishnu Shridhar, 12
Walsh, E.H.C., 69
Warli, 20
Wavell, Lord Archibald, 524
Wellesley, Arthur, 402, 403, 407
Westland Aircraft Works, 538
Westland Wapiti, 536, 538, 539
wheel of Dharma, 158
Wheeler, R.E.M., 31, 33, 544
White Revolution, 482, 594, 596
White, Lynn, 455
Whitfield, Susan, 132
Widdess, Richard, 363–65
Wild Life (Protection) Act, 507
Wildlife Protection (Amendment) Act, 510
Wilhite, Harold, 581
Williams, Alan, 288
Williams, James Edwin, 150
Williams, John, 473
Willis, Michael, 234
Wima Kadhphises, 87
Wima Taktu, 87, 88
Wima’s statue, 89
Wombwell, John, 433
Woolley, Sir Leonard, 127
World Heritage Site, 19, 282
Wright, Daniel, 189
Wright, Elaine, 344
Wu-ti, 131
Xuanzang, 129, 131, 159
Yadava dynasty, 256
Yagnik, Achyut, 281
yakshi of Didarganj, 69, 70, 74
Yasastilaka, 177
Yashodharman, 171
Yasna Sadeh, 284, 286, 288, 289, 292
Yaudheyas, 88
Yogini Chakra, 178, 179
Yogini Cult and Temples, 174
Yogini Vrishanana, 174, 176, 179, 181
Young, Ruth, 25, 54
Yule, Paul, 53, 54
Yule, Sir Henry, 458
Zachariah, Benjamin, 525
Zebrowski, Mark, 306
Zend Avesta, 425
Ziz-i Muhammad Shahi, 379
Zīzi Ulugh Begī, 378
Zoffany, Johann, 427, 429, 432–34
Zoroastrianism, 284, 286–88, 290, 292
Zutshi, Chitralekha, 217
Sudeshna Guha is currently a professor in the department of History and
Archaeology at Shiv Nadar University, India. She holds a Ph.D. in
archaeology and has a long curatorial and teaching career at the University
of Cambridge. She has built upon the scholarship of visual anthropology
and ethnographies of material studies for analysing histories of archaeology
and is at present developing research on histories of museums, collections
and curatorial practices within South Asia. She has published widely, also
on histories of heritage, and is the editor and contributor of The Marshall
Albums: Photography and Archaeology (Mapin/Alkazi Collection of
Photography, 2011), and author of Artefacts of History: Archaeology,
Historiography and Indian Pasts (Sage 2015).
 A HISTORY OF INDIA THROUGH 75 OBJECTS

A HISTORY IS ALWAYS IN THE MAKING

Through a selection of things from prehistoric to modern-day India, this

book encourages the appreciation of the complexity of History. It illustrates
the logic of expecting many histories of a particular phenomenon and
conveys the merit of evaluating the historical linkages we construct.
Histories through objects, as it demonstrates, bring us to see the vast terrain
of unknowns. They present the immense value of collections and collecting
practices for nurturing historical scholarship. The histories in the book
convey the inordinate power of object worlds to analyse schemes of
classification, acts of historicizing and projects of history- and heritage-
making. In presenting the shifting valuation of things over time, they guide
readers to see that a history is always in the making.
www.hachetteindia.com