At about this time his brother, Joseph Cunningham, was appointed political agent at Bhopal in central India – the state that held Sanchi; the chance was too good to miss. In January 1851 Alexander Cunningham was back amongst the
stupas.
He was much taken by the famous gateways: their bas-reliefs ‘are more original in design and more varied in subject matter
than any other examples of eastern sculpture that I have seen’. As at Sarnath, he drove a shaft down the Great Stupa and again found no relics. But the main purpose of his visit was to explore the other two
stupas
on the Sanchi hill and the many
other stupas
and cave temples in the vicinity. In a
stupa
just a few yards to the north of the main one, Cunningham was at last rewarded. Under a vast
slab of stone five feet square his shaft found two stone boxes. Inside each box was a small steatite relic casket, covered with a thin saucer of black pottery. Inside each casket were fragments of bone and beads. But the most dramatic discovery was that the boxes were engraved. One bore the name of Sariputasa, the other, Maha-Mogalanasa. These were two of the Buddha’s foremost disciples; it was like
finding the graves of Saints Peter and Paul. At last Cunningham experienced the thrill of handling secrets undisturbed for two millennia. And, on the strength of this identification, Sanchi, which centuries before had slipped from Buddhist memory, again became a place of Buddhist pilgrimage.
Cunningham published his findings in a book,
The Bhilsa Topes,
and took the opportunity to plead, ever
so gently, the cause of Indian archaeology. The money saved by no longer financing the publication of Sanskrit works could well be spent on exploring other
stupas.
If the British public needed some convincing about the worthwhile character of India’s Buddhist legacy, why not have the two fallen gateways at Sanchi removed to England and re-erected in the British Museum, ‘where they would form the
most striking objects in the Hall of Indian Antiquities’? The weight of anti-Orientalist prejudice had fallen on Hindu literature, so Cunningham tried to make it clear that archaeology was worthy of separate consideration and that Buddhism was altogether less objectionable than Hinduism. Buddhist sculpture was never obscene and, since Buddhism was dead in India, there was no question of offering
encouragement to pagans.
But still the time was not ripe; Cunningham would have to wait another ten years. In 1856, now a Lieutenant-Colonel, he was posted to Burma to set up a public works department. While he was there British India reaped the rewards of Macaulay’s rhetoric and thirty years of insensitivity. The Mutiny, or the National Uprising, may not have changed much; if anything it hardened
attitudes. But it did show that the British must needs be a bit more conciliatory, a bit less outspoken. An interest in native culture could now be forgiven, even applauded, on the grounds of its political expediency. More obvious effects of the Mutiny were the demise of the East India Company and of the Moghul emperor. India was now the direct responsibility of the British government and Queen
Victoria was its sovereign. Under these circumstances it was reasonable to expect a more responsible attitude towards the national heritage. More often than not the government would try to dodge this responsibility, but the preservation of national monuments could no longer be totally ignored. If places like the Taj Mahal were allowed to fall into ruin, ‘the brightest jewel in the imperial crown’
would begin to look distinctly tawdry.
In 1861 Cunningham, now aged forty-seven, retired from the army with the rank of Major-General. He had never ceased to press for an archaeological appointment and now, in the evening of his career, he had at last received a favourable reaction. Officially, he outlined his scheme to Lord Canning, the first Viceroy.
During 100 years of British dominion in India, the government has done little or nothing towards the preservation of its ancient monuments which, in the almost total absence of any written history, form the only reliable source of information as to the early condition of the country. Some of these monuments have already endured for ages, and are likely to last for ages to come; but there are many others which are daily suffering from the effects of time, and which must soon disappear altogether unless preserved by the accurate drawings and faithful descriptions of the archaeologists&. In the present proposed investigation I would follow the footsteps of the Chinese pilgrim Hsuan Tsang who, in the seventh century of our era, traversed India from west to east and back again.
The Chinese pilgrims had noted Hindu temples as
well as the Buddhist sites. Cunningham proposed to do the same. But the Buddhist bias of his researches was something for which he would be much criticized. Indian studies, having started with a strong literary and Hindu bias under Jones, were now swinging too far towards Buddhism and archaeology. But given the Evangelical legacy, it is hard to see the government willingly financing a specific study
of, say, Hindu sculpture. It is to Cunningham’s credit that he managed to embrace such subjects at all. In the short list of sites to be immediately investigated, which he enclosed with his letter to Canning, was Khajuraho.
The other significant point about his recommendation was that it had little to do with archaeology as we now know it. Cunningham was not proposing to dig, not even to conserve,
but simply to survey and to draw. Lord Canning, in accepting the recommendation, expressed his anxiety over the neglect of architectural remains.
By neglect I do not mean only the omission to restore them or arrest their decay; for this would be a task which, in many cases, would require an expenditure of labour and money far greater than any government of India could reasonably bestow upon it. But & there has been neglect of a much cheaper duty, that of investigating and placing on record, for the instruction of future generations, many particulars that might still be rescued from oblivion and throw light upon the early history of England’s great dependency.
Clearly a more ambitious scheme would never have been approved. In Canning’s view the beauty of a survey was that it cost
very little, should take only a couple of years and would commit the government to nothing. Cunningham managed to make it last for a quarter of a century. He did do some conservation and exploration, and he made sure that the responsibility for serious conservation could never again be so complacently shrugged away. The criticism that he left India’s monuments in much the same state as he found
them should be directed at the government rather than at the new Archaeological Survey.
With a modest caravan Cunningham took to the field in December 1861. Bihar was his first destination. At Boddh Gaya he confirmed its Buddhist associations. It was in fact the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. He found the pillars and railings, similar to those at Sanchi, which were later re-erected at Lord
Curzon’s instigation, and after much controversy he dated the temple itself to about
AD
200. North of the Ganges he visited Hodgson’s three Ashoka pillars and beside one of them found burial mounds in which were huge lead coffers, nine feet long, containing ‘unusually long human skeletons’. Dated to about 1000
BC,
these were the oldest finds yet made on Indian soil.
The next year he worked his
way up the Ganges and Jumna to Mathura and Delhi; then the Punjab, where he discovered the ancient city of Taxila; then central India; then back to Bihar, Benares and Allahabad. And so it went on. With a short break in the late 1860s, the old General stomped back and forth across northern India for twenty-five years. There was so much to record, so many new sites; a week here, a week there, he could
never afford more. It was boomtime in the building of roads and especially railways. In the plains, rock was scarce and the contractors were grabbing every bit of stone and masonry they could lay their hands on. If Cunningham could never concentrate his energies on a major dig nor undertake any sustained conservation work, he could at least try to block the contractors. Every site recorded might
be a site saved. He was too late at Sultanganj, where the ruins ‘furnished brick ballast for many miles of the line’; the only good to come of the depredations was the discovery of a famous bronze Buddha. Too late at Rajaona, Masar and Tiwar. Too late, too, at Tigowa where at least thirty-six temples ‘had been utterly destroyed by a railway contractor using 200 carts; his name, which is still
well remembered, was Walker’. But Cunningham was amazingly thorough and the wealth of archaeological remains that survive is largely due to him.
In the process he came to know northern India better perhaps than any contemporary. A little crusty as he approached his seventies, very possessive about his own discoveries and jealous of his unquestioned pre-eminence, Cunningham and his Archaeological
Survey became an institution. One can imagine the little caravan descending on some forgotten group of temples. The tents are up as the old General emerges, stooping, from a sculpture-encrusted
mandapam.
His tweeds reek with the sickly smell of bat dung; but a quick ‘tub’ and he is back to work, recording the day’s discoveries on a shaky camp table. As the sun dips behind the trees and the parakeets
go screeching home to roost, the lamp is lit, and the General, issuing instructions for an early start in the morning, retires to bed with a dog-eared copy of Hsuan Tsang.
For a man whose career seems to have revolved around the great Buddhist shrines of Sarnath in 1835, Sanchi in 1851, Boddh Gaya in 1862, it was wholly appropriate that his last major discovery should be another
stupa.
Marching
cross-country for Nagpur on a November’s day in 1873, he paused to investigate a rumoured site at the remote village of Bharhut. The site proved to be a flat-topped mound of rubble, but sticking up out of it was a section of collapsed railing almost identical to the mortice and tenon colonnade of Sanchi. Beside it stood a column which Cunningham immediately recognized as the upright of a gateway.
Three months later he was back at Bharhut and spent ten days, a long time for the restless Archaeological Survey, digging into the mound and unearthing the heavily sculpted stones.
The curious sculptures were a source of much wonder to the people who visited the place by hundreds every day. But the inscriptions excited even greater curiosity when it was known that I was able to read them. At every fresh discovery I was importuned to say what was the subject of the writing, and great was the disappointment when I made known the simple words of gifts to the stupa or of the names of the guardian
yakshas, devatas
and
nagas.
Few natives of India have any belief in disinterested excavations for the discovery of ancient buildings&. Their only idea of such excavations is that they are really intended as a search for hidden treasure, and from the incredulous look of many of the people, I have no doubt that I was regarded as an arch-deceiver who was studiously concealing the revelations made by the inscriptions as to the position of the buried treasures.
Th
e stupa
itself had gone, removed brick by brick to furnish building materials; the village of Bharhut boasted 200 houses, every
one of them built out of purloined bricks. Many of the railing’s pillars had also been dispersed: they made excellent roof beams and lintels. A cross piece of one of the gateways was found embedded in the wall of a local stronghold; another was in use seven miles away as the stone on which the washermen beat their laundry. On his third visit in 1875, Cunningham rounded up these pieces, offering
compensation where necessary. He had been known to purchase a field of standing corn if he thought there was was something worth excavating in it; the niceties of rural etiquette were now second nature to him. But he also realized that as soon as the Archaeological Survey turned its back the raiding would begin again.
With this in mind, he recommended that the gateway and the section of railing
that he had laboriously pieced together, should be speedily removed to a museum. Judging by the inscriptions, which were in an early form of Ashoka Brahmi, and by the more archaic carving, Bharhut was earlier than the Sanchi gateways (Cunningham thought 250–200
BC
though nowadays 150–100
BC
is thought more likely). In view of this great antiquity the government agreed, though not without protests
from some quarters; ‘The scheme carries with it a certain aroma of vandalism’, wrote one of Cunningham’s correspondents; ‘fancy carting away Stonehenge’. But in the event the old General was proved right. When he returned to Bharhut in 1876 after the main items had been removed to the Indian Museum in Calcutta, he found that ‘every stone that was removable has since been carted away by the people
as building material’.
Indian sculpture is poorly served by artificial light and the museum setting. The carving needs the sharp contrast between light and shade afforded by the Indian sun to bring it to life; the architecture needs the vastness of its rural surroundings, and the wide blue sky to establish its credentials. The beauty of the Sanchi gateways lies in their intricate silhouette and
in the way the light glances through their massive superstructures. As sun and shade play upon the voluptuous curves of the famous
yakshi
(nymph and tree spirit) on the east gate she seems to lean still further out into space while the gentle elephants behind her sway ever so gently. But the Bharhut sculptures have no such life. Cunningham had rescued them from oblivion; but he cannot have been
entirely happy about consigning them to a museum.
Bharhut’s railing and gateway were particularly vulnerable because, by the time Cunningham discovered them, the vast stones had already been broken into portable pieces. Fortunately this was not true of the two collapsed gateways at Sanchi. Cunningham had proposed that they too be transported to a museum, the British Museum in this case. This was rejected on the
grounds that the transport of such enormous chunks of stone would be a costly operation (even for the government), and one fraught with danger to the sculptures. They therefore remained on site. But fifteen years later the Begum of Bhopal, to whom the site nominally belonged, was approached by the French government: how would she feel about one of the fallen gateways being removed to adorn the boulevards
of Paris? The Begum’s reaction is not recorded, but that of the government of India was prompt enough: nothing was better calculated to dispel official indifference than the appearance of a foreign bidder. Sanchi was declared inviolate and a Major Henry Hardy Cole was sent to scotch any further such bids by procuring plaster casts of one of the gateways. This in itself proved a major operation.
With three sappers specially trained in the latest method of ‘making elastic moulds with gelatine’, twenty-eight tons of materials, and sixty bullock carts, Cole set about the 700 square feet of carving. The final 112 separate castings were duly erected in museums in London, Edinburgh, Dublin and Paris.