By Anirban Ganguly
Published: 15th June 2014
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Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Sok An places a garland on one of the statues during a ceremony in Phnom Penh
Cambodia rejoiced last week and welcomed back, through a national celebration, three dominant figures of Hindu itihasa—Bhima, Balarama and Duryodhana. The millennia-old statues hacked off and smuggled out to the West sometime in the 1970s were finally returned after a tedious and long-winding process, often slowed down due to walls of legalese and avarice.
Welcoming back the statues from the US, the Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister touched a deeper chord when he said, “In a long 40-year journey, surviving civil wars, looting, smuggling and travelling the world, these three statues have now regained their freedom and returned home.” The event, little noticed or discussed in India, demonstrated the national will of a smaller nation to reclaim its civilisational identity and to assert its right of being the proud inheritor and possessor of a legacy that produced a unique civilisation which was culturally, philosophically and aesthetically tied in an umbilical loop to the Hindu civilisation in India.
In a sense, this homecoming may perhaps be seen as a major step in dismantling the structures of a cultural colonialism put in place in the heydays of Western hegemonism where civilisations, which bloated materially through a parasitical process, came to eventually control and regulate the cultural and aesthetic expressions of other civilisations that were rendered weak in course of this material and cultural extraction. This reclaiming has pointers in it for us as well.
Looking at the structure and design of the statues, from a region that Ptolemy termed, “India beyond the Ganges”, and discerning their ethereal look of satisfaction, Voltaire’s famous exclamation in his Lettres sur L’origine de Sciences et sur celle des peuples de l’Asie that “everything without exception is of Indian origin” came to mind. These statues came forward, essentially, as symbols depicting the apogee of Indian civilisation which had successfully blended the material and the metaphysical.
Cambodia’s activism in reclaiming her civilisational heritage comes as reminder to us in India that much remains to be done in our context too. The magnitude of the task is gigantic in comparison to the others, especially if one were to place it against the backdrop of the historical disruptions that have wracked India over the millennia. The recent case of the Chola era statues from Tamil Nadu, traced to the National Gallery of Australia, is a case in point and demonstrates how a combined, determined and sustained effort can indeed yield results in this very challenging task. While these have been successfully traced, thousands of other civilisational artifacts in India either face threat from marauders or have already been shipped out of the country to face the brunt of the auctioneer’s hammer. The colonial mindset and a lingering sense of the “mission civilisatrice” make some over-zealous cultural groups and institutions in the West grab at these priceless treasures and making the hurdles to reclaim them near herculean. Such acquisitions are also facilitated solely because there exists in India a well-entrenched network of dealers and cultural mercenaries who perpetuate and encourage the trafficking of these tangible expressions of our civilisational identity.
-Ganguly is Director, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, New Delhi.
Source Link
Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Sok An places a garland on one of the statues during a ceremony in Phnom Penh
Cambodia rejoiced last week and welcomed back, through a national celebration, three dominant figures of Hindu itihasa—Bhima, Balarama and Duryodhana. The millennia-old statues hacked off and smuggled out to the West sometime in the 1970s were finally returned after a tedious and long-winding process, often slowed down due to walls of legalese and avarice.
Welcoming back the statues from the US, the Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister touched a deeper chord when he said, “In a long 40-year journey, surviving civil wars, looting, smuggling and travelling the world, these three statues have now regained their freedom and returned home.” The event, little noticed or discussed in India, demonstrated the national will of a smaller nation to reclaim its civilisational identity and to assert its right of being the proud inheritor and possessor of a legacy that produced a unique civilisation which was culturally, philosophically and aesthetically tied in an umbilical loop to the Hindu civilisation in India.
In a sense, this homecoming may perhaps be seen as a major step in dismantling the structures of a cultural colonialism put in place in the heydays of Western hegemonism where civilisations, which bloated materially through a parasitical process, came to eventually control and regulate the cultural and aesthetic expressions of other civilisations that were rendered weak in course of this material and cultural extraction. This reclaiming has pointers in it for us as well.
Looking at the structure and design of the statues, from a region that Ptolemy termed, “India beyond the Ganges”, and discerning their ethereal look of satisfaction, Voltaire’s famous exclamation in his Lettres sur L’origine de Sciences et sur celle des peuples de l’Asie that “everything without exception is of Indian origin” came to mind. These statues came forward, essentially, as symbols depicting the apogee of Indian civilisation which had successfully blended the material and the metaphysical.
Cambodia’s activism in reclaiming her civilisational heritage comes as reminder to us in India that much remains to be done in our context too. The magnitude of the task is gigantic in comparison to the others, especially if one were to place it against the backdrop of the historical disruptions that have wracked India over the millennia. The recent case of the Chola era statues from Tamil Nadu, traced to the National Gallery of Australia, is a case in point and demonstrates how a combined, determined and sustained effort can indeed yield results in this very challenging task. While these have been successfully traced, thousands of other civilisational artifacts in India either face threat from marauders or have already been shipped out of the country to face the brunt of the auctioneer’s hammer. The colonial mindset and a lingering sense of the “mission civilisatrice” make some over-zealous cultural groups and institutions in the West grab at these priceless treasures and making the hurdles to reclaim them near herculean. Such acquisitions are also facilitated solely because there exists in India a well-entrenched network of dealers and cultural mercenaries who perpetuate and encourage the trafficking of these tangible expressions of our civilisational identity.
-Ganguly is Director, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, New Delhi.
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