Takeaway Antiques
It is difficult to resist tracing a finger down her face, to touch her. This is ludicrous: after more than ten hours on the road, close to exhaustion, the body is reacting to the voluptuousness of a stone image. The mad genius who sculpted her knew a thing or two about desire.
The eyes instinctively look away, perhaps searching for something commonplace against which it can reconfirm this beauty. With me are the District Magistrate, Rajesh Bhushan and his bodyguard, Jairam Singh. We are standing three fourths of the way up against a hilltop in the Kaimur ranges. From this height everything looks toy-like, diminished. Four hundred feet below, the plains of Kaimur District are spread out like a grid map of wet green and fading gold squares, crisscrossed by dusty pathways and the occasional metalled road. Woodsmoke curls up from a lonesome hamlet in the distance. A truck slowly winds its way up the adjacent hillside, with red flags and banners of Marxist origin aflutter.
Jairam Singh adjusts the World War II Webley revolver strapped to his side. He points to the Gauri Shankar. Lots more where it came from, he says in his semi-musical Bhojpuri. Then his right arm makes a wide slashing arc from the waist; he leaves it poised in midair. This one is estimated at one crore rupees.
The piece should ideally occupy pride of place in some grand temple. Or perhaps be the locus of well-lit and geometrical spaces in some expensive art gallery, with reverential curators and well-heeled dilettantes in solemn attendance. Instead, the three feet tall, 1200 hundred year old statue lies unguarded in a little clearing on the mountainside. Next to it lies a four-foot sculpture of Ganesha. Facing the two statues is another Gauri Shankar, which does not seem to have taken kindly to the vicissitudes of time and chance.
It wouldnt be difficult for two strong men to simply walk off with the lot.
Located on a plateau on the western border of Bihar, Kaimur probably has one of the largest freewheeling art galleries in the country. Within a 40-kilometre radius around us, the landscape is strewn with the priceless remains of civilisations more than a thousand years old. It is the graveyard of some of the most powerful dynasties of ancient and medieval India among them the Cheros, the Mauryas, the Guptas and the Palas.
And were not just talking about any old architectural remnants of ancient dynasties. This is the real stuff outstanding relics of some of the finest periods in Indian art. Here are artifacts, idols and images easily worth lakhs, perhaps more. Just lying there, forgotten. With perseverance and some degree of disregard for legal niceties, it would be temptingly easy to make ones own priceless personal collection. If you are the persistent sort, you could organise your own dig. Alternatively, simply pick one up and walk off.
It has been a bone-jarring ten hours a day on the road for the past three days. Singh himself has proved to be an invaluable find. The seven years he has spent in the district have turned him into that most valuable of travel companions driver cum local guide cum amateur historian.
But the journey has been no easy haul. Singh displays the amazing ability to take his Maruti Gypsy through terrain that would make army tankers blanch. He displays a fine disregard for the lesser mortals on the road and minor issues like velocity of travel. But its all well worth it for those occasional historical asides and hair-raising stories about Naxalite activity in the district. Then there are those few random stops, in the midst of some paddy field in the middle of nowhere, when he hijacks some unsuspecting peasant and appoints him local guide for part of the expedition.
The names of the sites have begun to blur Jharpa, Karar, Kokhatgada, Sion the list seems endless. It is no longer possible to keep track of exactly what was sited where. And though the unusual has by now become the commonplace, it is difficult to keep down the excitement and sheer disbelief that marks this journey.
At some sites one does not have to dig more than a feet to strike paydirt. At others, in villages a few kilometres off the main road, the debris of a once flourishing culture pillars, idols and intricately carved statues lie strewn about casually.
Take Mer, a large village roughly 10 kilometres south-west of the block headquarters, Chainpur. It is a virtual goldmine. Pat in the centre of this village is a huge stone platform, some 30 feet square and ten feet high. A large doorway lintel, with carved male and female figures and decorated with floral motifs, lies sprawled across. An eight-handed dancing Ganesha holds pride of place.
And thats not all. Another statue of Kuber, some four feet in height and two feet in diameter lies on a backslab, the hair tied back in a knot, hands resting on the thighs. This is one piece that has not been wanting in attention. It has has been the object of several illegal takeover attempts, all of which have failed so far.
Then there is the 1300 year old Mundeswari temple, the oldest in Bihar. Located roughly 10 kilometres from the district headquarters, Bhabhua, it is one of the few remaining octagonal temples of the Nagara style of architecture. Around it, like cast-offs in a junkyard, lie the broken remains of pillars, pilasters, lintels and amalakas. A giant wheel, broken into a quarter of its original size, leans drunkenly against a pile of stone blocks. Planted into the ground in the foreground is a four-sided statue of Siva.
The terrain that surrounds this monument is proven to be potentially one of the richest possible sites if only someone organises an excavation here, rues Bhushan.
In the midst of the dense scrub and thorn vegetation below the hill lies, partly buried, a massive carving of an elephant. Only a semblance of the original sculpture remains in the eroded stone. Near it, against a peepul tree, rests an unfinished one-foot tall statue of Vishnu. One can even now discern the chisel marks on the stone.
Its antiquity has not been established correctly so far. But look at these flat bricks, says Bhushan prodding a specimen with his foot, You wont find this anywhere else. And those iron ore lumps point towards some sort of a foundry obviously this was a flourishing centre once.
The local populace believes him. Come monsoon and its time for a treasure hunt. The villagers go panning for gold at Garhvat, a site roughly three kilometres to the east of Mundeswari. Silver and gold coins are known to have been unearthed here.
Bhushan has initiated several impromptu digs over the past two years but does not have too many reasons to feel happy. Every so often there are new sitings. All he can do is mark the place. We wrote to the Archaeological Survey, he says, but they referred us to their Patna office, which has not yet bothered to turn up. They say that archaeologists die for a single Gupta pillar. There seem to be so many here. The note of disbelief and disappointment is hard to miss.
In fact the ASIs apathy may be gauged by its inability to collect even that which rightfully belongs to it. In 1968, a four-sided sculpture of Shiv, currently valued at around a crore, was stolen from the Mundeswari Temple. While it was recovered almost immediately, criminal proceedings were aborted the very next year as the people who had stolen it died. Since then it has remained at the Bhabua police station because the ASI never bothered to ask for it.
Meanwhile a large assortment of statues, pillars and idols lie in the local inspection bungalow, waiting for the completion of a museum intended to house them. The museum is being financed by the local administration, though this is not one of its routine functions.
These have been collected over many years, says Azimuddin, khansamah at the inspection bungalow. He has been given unofficial and temporary charge of all excavations. But God knows what lies waiting to be discovered out there. Its a fortune. God knows if we will manage to retrieve even a small percentage of it.