Itkhori

The Hindu priest is telling visitors that this is an ancient lingam, but clearly it is Buddhist

According to Sir Edwin Arnold, in 'The Light of Asia,' Buddha came to Itkhori before his long walk to Bodhgaya where he was enlightened, and according to local legend, it was here at Itkhori that his aunt Prajapati Gautami lost him and screamed "iti koi" (iti = here koi = lost). Hence the derivation of the name Itkhori.

During the Gupta Period a ruler built a large Buddhist temple here. Later the temple became a Hindu temple and at some point it may even have become a Jain temple. But unlike many such temples in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, which have remained as testimony to their changing religious affiliations, with a mixture of Buddhist and Hindu iconography, this temple was destroyed. Few people knew about it until sometime in the twentieth century, when farmers began to unearth stone sculptures with their ploughs and this came to the attention of Bulu Imam and his sons, who persuaded the villagers to keep the sculptures in a safe place.

Gradually over time a large quantity of stone sculptures and pieces of the architecture of the temple came to light and were stored in an old school. Eventually money was found for a makeshift 'museum' for them. The museum is kept locked but we were taken there by a caretaker who unlocked the doors, switched on the lights and ushered us in to a dusty room where Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sculptures and pieces of the old temple were stacked on top of each other in untidy rows with an occasional label in Hindi.

An application was made for Unesco status and funding was allocated, then suddenly the whole site was covered with concrete, obliterating the rest of the remnants of the ancient temple and a huge Hindu temple was built on the site. Had the site been carefully preserved it is possible that sufficient pieces of the old temple could have been unearthed to re-construct it, more or less as it originally was, as they did in Bodhgaya. But now it is too late. Sad remnants of the ancient temple still line the outer perimeters of the new temples.  And Hindu worshippers worship a Buddhist Tara statue, mistaking her for Kali, in one of the Hindu temples.

The chief Minister has announced that he will build an enormous new Buddhist temple at Itkhori, which will go some way towards recognising it as a Buddhist site, but the temple will not include any of the old stone architecture. Large colour pictures of the projected Buddhist temple are displayed high up on the walls of the 'museum' at Itkhori. The Unesco application still awaits.

There are several villages around Itkhori where Buddhist sculptures have come to light. We visited Daihar village, a village of fifty two lanes and fifty two wells. Old Buddhist, Jain and Hindu statues have been pulled out of some of the wells, the better preserved pieces taken to Ranchi, the broken pieces piled in heaps in the lanes, where the villagers revere them with marks of vermillion, wrapping the odd piece in red cloth, as a mark of respect. As I stared down into the depths of one of the wells, too deep to see the water at the bottom, I marvelled at how, hundreds of years ago, these villagers could have dug and built the walls of such deep wells.

Over the years many ruins of the Buddhist monuments and statues have come to light in different parts of the state of Jharkhand. According to T. Bloch, several Buddhist remains were found five and seven kilometres from Dalmi and Budhpur in Dhanbad district, dating to the tenth century AD, according to Beglar. In 1918 FM Holo found Buddhist sculptures at Suraj Kund village in the Hazaribagh district near some hot springs. At Belwadag village, three km east of Khunti in Ranchi, an excavation has revealed a Buddhist Vihar, constructed of bricks similar to those used to build the Buddhist stupa at Sanchi.  Buddhist statues have been discovered in places like Jonha of Ranchi district, Katunga village of Gumla district, Bhula village of Jamshedpur (East Singhbhum) and Ichagarh in Dhanbad district.

At Mangarh a brick work Buddhist Stupa, twenty feet by twenty feet has recently come to light. At Tultul, near a waterfall, Koleshwari temple is Buddhist, Jain and Hindu. Some of these statues and parts of monuments have been taken to the post-graduate department of history of Ranchi University, but they are not well cared for. In the current climate of Hindutva, little importance is given to Buddhist archeological remains in India.

The UNESCO application for recognition of Itkhori as an important Buddhist site still awaits a response. Hopefully if it is recognised, attention can be drawn to the importance of Jharkhand as a major Buddhist destination. If money is provided for excavation and a proper museum, many more Buddhist sites will probably come to light.

the World of Rock Art Exhibition

I went to see the World of Rock Art Exhibition at the Vinoba Bhave University, Hazaribagh, Jharkhand this morning. There was a disappointing lack of information regarding the photos: rock art of India on the ground floor and a whistle stop tour of world rock art upstairs. None of the rock art was dated, photos of thousands of years old paintings sandwiched between obviously much more recent art with absolutely no explanation. There was no information regarding the geographical siting of the rock art either, merely vague indications about district where they could be found. 

Almost all the photos were over-saturated, leading to garish colour distortion. Overall it was a disappointing experience, though the map of India indicating the major rock art sites, was possibly the most inspiring thing in the whole exhibition, showing rock art sites in almost every state in India. Rock art in India varies from petroglyphs in the hills of South Goa:

Petroglyph at La Zarza in South Goa (my photo)

and paintings of animals in Bimbetka and Rajastan to pictographs in the Hazaribagh region of Jharkhand:

Pictographs at Isco, Hazaribagh, Jharkhand (my photo)

The exhibition included iconic images from the caves of Central France

The exhibition was culled from a much bigger and more detailed exhibition on Rock Art organised during the International Rock Art Conference at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) New Delhi form 6 December 2012 - 25 January 2013. I wonder whether the original exhibition was more informative than this, an exhibition designed to entertain, rather than inform. 

Sunderbans

Our boat, the Mangrove Matal

We travelled to the Sundarbans with backpackers, 4 Tottie Lane, Sudder Street, Kolkata. 
Our departure was delayed by the New Zealand bloke forgetting to bring his passport, which entailed a long diversion to his hotel to collect it. As we drove through the city we passed numerous people washing clothes, dishes, themselves by the side of the road where the city taps are opened twice a day for the use of the homeless and all those who do not have running water. Men strip off down to their underpants and scrub themselves enthusiastically right beside the road, as the heavy traffic thunders by. I never did discover how the homeless women manage to wash adequately. We were driving through a part of Calcutta with tree lined streets, the trees leaning over the road to touch in the middle, creating a dappled green canopy. We entered a market, selling garish bright coloured clothes and ground to a halt amidst hordes of people, queues of buses hooting deafeningly, out of frustration, since no amount of hooting made any difference to the traffic jam. It took an hour and a half to get out of Kolkata, into a lush, green area of smelly canals, banana trees, maize, vegetables, trees, coconut palms, villages, lakes and a gigantic rubbish dump. Then we passed a series of fish farm lakes on one side and a whole area given over to brick kilns, belching out evil looking smoke on the other.

After three hours we reached our boat, the Mangrove Matal. We stopped at the first island to buy beer at the request of the New Zealand bloke, who, it seems cannot function without the stuff, but the beer shop was shut, so we continued past rows of pleasure boats anchored and waiting for tourists, but the main tourist season was over. All manner of small cargo ships ply this waterway between Kolkata and Bangladesh.

Originally all the branches of the Ganga and the Bramaputra between them emptied their sweet water into the Bay of Bengal giving rise to hundreds of mangrove islands which thrived on the sweet/salt mixture of water. The area was called by the locals Sundar, meaning beautiful and bans, meaning forest: hence Sundarbans. In the sixteenth century the British East India Company, wanting to create a trading base in this watery swamp, constructed Fort William on one of the islands, then, afraid of being attacked by the Marathis, they began building walls and dikes round the island, eventually blocking off all the outlets of the Ganga except the Hoogli, thus depriving a large part of the Sunderbans of its sweet water source. Fort William was later to become the centre of the new town called Calcutta. The tide continued to flow in and out of the area, so the environment changed to a salt water one, the trees adapted by reducing their size and the animals adapted to drinking salt water when they couldn't find any fresh water. The animals managed to survive long enough to breed but they lived, and live, short lives, eventually suffering multiple organ failure, all except the aquatic ones, such as the crocodiles, which thrived.

Churchill, who hated all Indians with a passion, drew a line through Bengal, determining where the state would be partitioned, thus separating the jute growing area from the jute processing area and so ruining the jute industry at a stroke. Churchill's line cut right through the Sundarbans, granting two thirds of the mangrove islands to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and one third, the salt water third, to India. There are 102 islands on the Indian side, some of which are inhabited, many of which, on the other hand, form an uninhabited wildlife reserve. The Bengal tiger lives in the wildlife reserve, venturing into the inhabited areas occasionally to steal the odd goat or chicken. But should the islanders venture into the uninhabited areas, which they do during the honey collecting season, they run the risk of tiger attack and indeed tigers kill about sixty men a year.

The banks of the Sunderbans, showing severe erosion

I'm sorry that the pictures of the Sundarbans are so uninspiring but our boat kept to the wider channels, well away from any potential attacking tiger, so all we could do was listen to our guide telling us the names (including Latin binomial) of the different species of mangrove, as we went past them: there are 84 different species of mangrove in the Sundarbans and none of them look like the mangroves I have seen in other parts of the world, such as Florida or Vietnam. They do not send down rooting branches but rather drop their seeds into the salty water to send up shoots and grow into fresh trees. But they send up 'breathing roots' which stick out of the mud at low tide in a multitude of different styles, some thick and fierce looking like dinosaur teeth, some thin and fine like hair, some forming stilts leaning round trees like many legged giant spiders. 

The biggest salt water crocodiles live in the Sundarbans, king of the predators, capable of catching a tiger as it swims from island to island. The crocodiles are well hidden below the turbid water and extremely fast moving. Our skipper spotted a crocodile basking on a bank and steered the boat right up close to it so everyone could take photos. There was something primeval about such a massive beast ending in such a huge scaly tail, moving its head from side to side as it surveyed the boat. Then it waddled forwards, jaws pointing towards the water, slid into the water and disappeared. 

On the first day we landed on the island with the eco village, were shown to our rooms then treated to a sumptuous lunch of fish, vegetables and rice.

Eco village

After lunch boatmen poled us in little boats into one of the narrow channels of the mangrove forest, where the trees lean in low over the water and the sun glistens on the muddy banks between the trees. Unfortunately one of the villages across the water from us was celebrating a wedding with bad Bollywood music bellowing forth from massive loud speakers, which drowned out the sound of any birds or animals we might have heard. 

But our guide had other ideas anyway, inviting everyone to step out of the boat into the mud, then started throwing mud. I stayed in the boat, as the boatman backed down the channel, away from the mud fight. This was not what I came for, to watch grown men, including a middle aged New Zealander, behaving like small children, as though they were not interested in the environment they found themselves in. I would have liked to have spent far longer quietly exploring the narrow channels of the mangroves, which were mysterious, cool and leafy.

Bauls singing and playing

In the evening we were treated to a Baul concert. The Bauls were originally Hindus who rejected the rules and strictures of their religion, forming a sect which expressed its philosophy through music. They grow their hair and beards long, sometimes coiling dreadlocks on the tops of their heads, wear necklaces (malas) of basil stem beads. Since they have renounced the world and the pursuit of money their musical instruments are simple, such as the ektara (a single stringed wooden instrument), wooden flutes and drums. They live on whatever the villagers give them, sleeping wherever they can, as they travel from village to village. The owners of the eco village host the Bauls because they love their music, providing them with transport to and from the island. 

Talking to one of the owners of the eco village about Shantiniketan, he introduced me to Souvik, a young man who lives in Shantiniketan and would be travelling there soon. We arranged to meet in two days time to travel together.

Next day we left the island at 6 am gliding through the smooth waters in the early morning mist. It was low tide as we left and the mud banks rose beside us, showing clear signs of erosion. In places the islanders have been planting mangroves in a desperate attempt to halt the erosion. Sadly the rate of erosion is increasing and in 60 years they would be gone, our guide told us, as would all the predators.

We stopped at an island with a marketplace to pick up 2 cooks and a load of food. The two cooks descended into the bowels of the boat and clattered about, shouting merrily to each other all morning. By now the sun was glittering on the water as our guide told us that the Sundarbans contain forty types of mammals, fifty six types of reptiles, including the strange monitor lizard, four types of turtles and two hundred and fifty types of fish, including sharks, sting rays, sword fish and even a unique fish that wriggles around on the mud at low tide.  

We came to an area where the mangrove palms grow, trees without trunks, giant feathery fronds sprouting straight out of the mud in dense thickets. The guide told us that the forest department had tried various ways to carry out a tiger census, such as putting radio collars on the tigers, which cease to function after a few months since the tigers swim in the salt water; placing 300 cameras around the Sunderbans, not nearly enough for such a vast area and lastly using drones.  

The two cooks produced another sumptuous meal at lunchtime, after which a general somnolence took over, many passengers on the shady side of the boat falling asleep on the narrow benches, until we turned a corner and the sunny and shady sides of the boat changed sides. 

Hazaribagh

Painted mud house in tribal village near Hazaribagh

I've just spent two intense days at Sanskriti https://buluimam.wixsite.com/sanskritimuseum 

staying with Bulu Imam and his family, visiting painted houses in tribal villages, meeting the villagers, very lovely people who welcome visitors, inviting them into their houses, proudly showing off their painted walls, inside and out. These people's carbon footprint is zero. Their villages are clean, without a scrap of rubbish. In some villages they have enough land to grow vegetables and build nice big mud houses with plenty of storage space. In some villages they have very little land and the government policy of introducing concrete houses is eroding their way of life. 

10,000 BCE cave paintings 

On the second day we visited caves covered with geometrical paintings that have been dated to 10,000 BCE. Bulu has spent days camped out in these caves, copying the paintings in pen and ink into a book which he has printed one copy of. 

He told me about a a wonderfully proud, strong, healthy nomadic community called the Birhors, who lived in houses made from leaves, who hunted, trapped and gathered. Bulu went hunting with them when he was young and recorded everything about them, the plants that they used as medicine, their hunting and trapping methods, their habits, beliefs and customs. They claim that their ancestors painted the rock art in the caves near Hazaribagh and it is indeed identical to the rock art of the oldest layers in Hazaribagh. Their art is not pretty but simple, strong and authentic, the art of one of the world's First Peoples. It is different from that of the other tribes, because it tells stories and depicts series of events related to their survival in the scrub jungle environment. Village art depicts the developed form of the abundance of nature, the 'overflowing vase' of the natural environment, a common theme in ancient Indian art.

Unfortunately the government has forced all the Birhors that they could find to abandon their nomadic way of life, building them ugly concrete houses, where we saw them sitting and lying, with lifeless eyes, utterly dejected. There may be some Birhors still hunting and gathering, wisely keeping a very low profile, who hopefully will survive, for those who have been forced to settle will not. I noticed that many of the concrete houses were deserted. Hopefully they have left them and gone back into the forest, but life will be harder and harder for them as the wild animals decrease.

Jhharkhand is a beautiful state with rolling hills covered in Sal forest which sheds its leaves in 'autumn': March April, growing fresh new leaves in May. There is a huge coal deposit in a valley in Jhharkhand, which the government is allowing various mining companies to exploit. The coal is forty metres below the surface, so the mining companies strip off all the top soil and vegetation to dig out the coal with their gigantic machinery. In the affected areas they have mined right up to the villages, leaving the villagers staring out over a cliff into a vast, dusty wasteland. I did not visit the mines. Visiting the concrete houses of the Birhors had made me sad enough and I'd seen photos of the mines. However I did see the road widening scheme that is stripping the land of its beautiful trees, all the way up to Hazaribagh, creating immense amounts of dust, that left me with a sore throat that lingered for a day or two. Again the government is destroying the environment in the name of progress, driving the highway right through the middle of the national park which is supposed to be protected. 

But there is still much of Jhharkhand that is beautiful and untouched. After visiting the caves we visited another village where the villagers spend more than half their time in the forest. The villagers welcomed Justin, one of Bulu's sons, crowding round him, asking him questions. The headman's son put his arm round Justin's shoulder affectionately and accompanied us to the caves and back to the village, chatting with Justin all the way. Many of the old women had tattoos on their arms, in the form of bracelets and necklaces round their necks. 

This old woman is magnificent, straight and upright without an ounce of fat on her, despite numerous pregnancies. These people live a hard life and yet they welcome us cheerfully, offering us everything they have. One woman insisted in filling Justin's bag with tomatoes. "I never tell them when I'm coming," he told me, "otherwise they would cook for us." Even so while we were visiting the cave they cooked rice for us, which we had to refuse because it was getting too late.