Finding the Buddha

Europeans competed hard for the fame and spoils from early digs. Pradeep Gooptu weighs a book on one such rivalry.

Archaeology and scandal are not strangers — the glamorous discipline thrives on the imagery of exciting digs and discoveries in remote areas that promise to rewrite the history books, and these finds are usually opposed tooth and nail by scholars with a stake in the status quo.

This book is one more contribution to a genre that seeks to record such controversies but, sadly, deals with an episode in which the protagonists are not the men whom we remember today as the real discoverers of sites like the birthplace of the Buddha (Kapilavastu) or the elaborate network of stupas built with the Buddha’s relics by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka.

In the late 19th century, British policy encouraged the expansion of agriculture under British or Indian princely landowners to the vast wooded areas along, and north of, the valley of the Ganga and its tributaries, right up to the Nepal Terai. The Nepalese monarchy was very unhappy and suspicious, but the Viceroy was happy with the additional revenue, as were the landowners.

Dotting this landscape were innumerable large and small mounds earlier mistaken for natural hillocks but soon discovered to be the ruins of grown-over Buddhist stupas. Enlightened landowners took up their excavation directly or with external assistance. At one such site at Piparwah, the Peppé family discovered, in 1898, a stone coffer filled with jewels, gold and relic caskets. They had been left in the stupa by the Sakyas, the Buddha’s own clan.

A few years previously the ruins of Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha, had been discovered, and a few years later the ruins of Kapilavastu, the capital of his powerful Sakya clan.

Understandably, the desire to gain fame through such discoveries attracted the big names that drop off the pages of this book: Vincent Smith, historian and ex-ICS; archaeologists Alexander Cunningham and A C L “Archie” Carlleyle; army doctors like L A Waddell; and German Indologists like Georg Bühler and Anton Führer.

The rush to excavate the Buddha’s relics pitted Waddell and Führer against each other, with the former accusing the latter of faking finds like those at Piparwah and thwarting Führer’s moves to expand his digs.

The two men, with Waddell the Briton holding the advantage, fought bitterly over where to dig and also over the veracity of Führer’s finds, even as crucial discoveries in the area were all made by a Bengali staff member, P C Mukherji.

The allegations and counterclaims of the two Europeans — who had much less to show on their books than Mukherji for example — was indeed a scandal, but of rather limited import. The rather bitter Waddell sought to frustrate Mukherji as well, but was thankfully put in his place by his superiors.

It was the Indian who had the last laugh.

So much for the facts of the case. This 292-page book narrates this tale well but with such excessive focus on the spat between the two Europeans that it is likely to prove quite useless for readers interested in the rediscovery of India’s Buddhist heritage.

The pictures and illustrations, and Allen’s background sketches make it attractive and entertaining for the lay reader, but the mildly patronising colonial tone — Mukherji is always called “Babu Mukherji”, for example — may irritate some.

Allen does not recognise the fact that the Buddha was known as an avatar of Vishnu (and his religion as that of the Chittagong Maghs and Tibetan border traders), and instead pretends that it was the British who rediscovered him in the land of his birth.

It also ignores the real scandal of this era of colonial archaeology — the behind-the-scenes politics that saw the British government gifting away the relics of the Buddha and ancient civilisations to Asian monarchies like Myanmar to procure favours for colonial trade.

It’s time we had a book on that, the real scandal of British archaeology in India.

THE BUDDHA AND DR FUHRER
An Archaeological Scandal
Editor: Charles Allen
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 304
Price: Rs 299