03-19-2006, 02:40 AM
Discussing Chandraketugarh with Prof. Joachim K. Bautze
(from site mentioned in the original post of this thread)
Prof. Joachim Karl Bautze is the Chief of the Art History Section at the South Asia Institute of the Heidelberg Univeristy. He is a Professor of Indian Art History. From October 2002 he will become a professor at the Wako University, Tsurukawa, Japan. Dr. Bautze is the author of the book Early Indian Terracottas (E.J.Brill, 1995) which, with the help of 48 plates, describes northern Indian terracottas from 2nd Century BC to 1st Century AD. Many of the terracottas discussed in this book are from Chandraketugarh.
I met him during his recent visit to the USA and over a long lunch discussed several aspects of Chandraketugarh and its terracottas. Below, I present a transcript of this discussion, in a Q & A form.
AG: How did you get interested in Chandraketugarh terracottas?
JKB: There are two main reasons behind this. First, my Ph.D. advisor Prof.Dr. Herbert Härtel, former Director of the Museum of Indian Art, Berlin, considered the terracotta as major objects of archaeological interest. Terracotta often pre-dates stone sculptures, and are not necessarily influenced by the so called imperial art (e.g. Maurya, Shunga, Kshatrapa). Besides the Mauryan Ashokan capitals, pillars and rock edicts, what else do we have in stones in India? Terracottas are clues to zeitgeist, they have an immediate result, since it is easy to create them. Stone or bronze sculptures involve complex processes to create. Lower Bengal contains mainly alluvial soil and no major mountains and quarries which can be the source of stone. Thus, terracotta was the only medium until the Gupta period, and in South Asia nobody else mastered it to a better degree of quality than the Bengalees. Chandraketugarh terracottas are some of the most outstanding.
Second, I lived in the lower Bengal (Dankuni, Hooghly) for quite some time and was naturally interested in Chandraketugarh. I personally saw the uses of unbaked terracottas during different festivals and rituals.
AG: Please describe the ancient geography of Chandraketugarh and its association, if any, with the ancient port of Gange (Ptolemy).
JKB: What we know is that Chandraketugarh had international relationship and commerce. To the best of my knowledge, foreign (Roman, and other Mediterranean) coins were found near this site (similar to those found in other coastal port-cities of India such as Chennai).
Geography was much different in the days of Chandraketugarh. What is now 100km inside Bengal was coastal at that time. Alluvial soil pushed the coast southwards.
The wealth of terracotta found at Chandraketugarh attests to a very major production center. You do not find so much terracotta in a region unless people are actually buying or using them. Chandraketugarh was almost a dumping ground of terracotta. Many of the earlier terracotta pieces you find in Mahasthanagarh, now in Bangladesh, and other parts of Bengal are stylistically heavily indebted to Chandraketugarh if not actually produced there. However, those pieces are of inferior aesthetic quality. Chandraketugarh was a center and landmark in those days.
AG: What is known about the religious beliefs of the inhabitants of Chandraketugarh?
JKB: During the last centuries BC and first centuries AD, the entire South Asia used to be a melting pot, with so many things in common between various population centers. Very few iconographies we can clearly distinguish. We have Surya, the sun god and something like proto-Lakshmi.
AG: Ganesha? What about the elephant-headed images from Chandraketugarh?
JKB: We are talking about Mauryan and post-Mmauryan period and Ganesha hasn't appeared yet. We have something like Kubera, then the most important God. No Buddhism yet, positively not until 2nd-3rd century in Bengal. We have endless depictions of one deity of a goddess throwing coins from her right hand to people below busy collecting them. This is the Varada-Lakshmi, proto-Lakshmi. Her gesture is seen in the Lakshmi deity still worshipped in Bengal on the day of Lakshmi-Puja which precedes Kali Puja. Hinduism or Brahmanism developped as a response to Buddhism. There were the Ashokan pillars but they were not strictly "Buddhist". We also had the Naga cultures. Vasudeva (who later on becomes Krishna) and Balarama were worshipped. Vishnu as we know him today wasn't worshipped before the late Kushan or early Gupta period. It's different from the later deities. We didn't obtain inscriptions to decidedly validate these things...
AG:... there are some inscriptions...
JKB: There are even some Kharoshthi inscriptions, which is surprising, because one generally comes across Kharoshthi in the North-West of the subcontinent. Prof. B. N. Mukherjee has read them. We have small amount of other inscriptions such as the Tamralipti copperplate inscription of Govinda Pala, but that is from a much later period (8th century). There is nothing like long Ashokan edicts. So we don't know anything about the chieftains or monarchs of the Chandraketugarh region.
AG: How does Chandraketugarh rank in the quality and quantity of its terracotta in India? How does it compare with Tamluk, Kaushambi and Mathura?
JKB: Chandraketugarh terracottas provide the largest variety of topics. There are also a large number of very high quality pieces such as the one at the Metropolitan Museum (NY) or some shown at the exhibition at the State Archaeological Museum, Behala, Kolkata (Feb, 2001). We also find many carved pieces of bone/ivory (incidentally, these inspired many fakers to execute tortoise-shell carvings -- the shells are often 2000 years old but the carvings are done recently). We have very high quality terracotta from the same period from Bulandi-bagh near Patna, but their number is not very high. Chandraketugarh is almost unsurpassed in the quantity of terracottas. I have seen literally boxes and boxes of terracotta from Chandraketugarh.
Asutosh Musem (Calcutta University, in Kolkata, India) has several thousand pieces of Chandraketugarh terracotta. You can see some of them but can't take any photos, which is a pity. Incidentally, they were the first (and the only, except a small digging in 1998) official excavators of that site. Interestingly, I know a number of students who studied there but even they are not allowed to see the material.
Rating the terracotta in terms of their quality is more difficult because "quality" can be very subjective. Due to my personal links I am biased towards Bengal terracottas. There are also wonderful terracotta pieces from Mathura and Kaushambi, but fewer.
AG: What are the particular characteristics of Chandraketugarh terracottas -- technical, artistic, or material-wise? If you see a piece of terracotta how would you determine if it's from Chandraketugarh?
JKB: It's not so easy to answer this in such a short span. What separates Chandraketugarh terracottas is not some rendering styles, such as the eye having double outline, or nose is done in a particular way. In fact, I cannot easily describe to you these characteristics. But if you work for a period of times with these terracotta objects, you simply "know" where a given object comes from, without rationally knowing why. Because the production is so rich -- there are plaques - hand modeled, half hand-modeled, matrix modeled, mixed processed, softer burns, burned with less Oxygen etc., -- . It's difficult to make a general statement. Also no art offers more exceptions than Indian Art.
If you consider a narrow category such as the hollow terracotta pieces (also called rattles, tricycles and toy carts), I can easily tell the difference if you give me two pieces. But to describe it theoretically is different.
AG: So there aren't any describable difference in terracotta from these centers?
JKB: There is a clear stylistic difference. But first, you need to compare something to some other thing. You have to start your comparison from a fixed point, and if you don't establish this point you can't do any comparison. For terracottas it is not clear what should be this standard fixed point.
AG: How about differences based on the depicted contents?
JKB: Not much, since the content is all Indian. For example consider the story of the Jataka about a monkey crossing the river on the back of a crocodile. Depictions of this story have appeared in several Chandraketugarh and other terracottas in India. But the story is well-known all over India, and from this point, the terracottas can be from any part of India. Some plaques are difficult to determine geographically. But show me two terracotta pieces, and I'll tell you why one is from one place and the other is from a different place.
No general statement is possible to make, because the examples are different. So I will be cautious to say something like "Chandraketugarh terracotta are easily recognizable due to these features...".
AG: In your book you say "A useful frame for a more precise dating is provided by the excavation report on Sonkh near Mathura. The majority of the terracottas reproduced here (by here Bautze means the BOOK) , however, stems from the areas around Kaushambi and Chandraketugarh " - please explain.
JKB: The publisher didn't want to reproduce fragments but complete terracotta. There are reliable stratographical excavation reports e.g., in Sonkh (by my Ph.D. advisor) -- so the periods are datable. Not much was done in Kaushambi and Mathura which are reliable -- I wish there will be more. Nothing much is available. Complete pieces come from private collections, so unauthorized, clandestine and unofficial sources.
Prof. B. N. Mukherjee published a photo in one of his recent Bengali booklets not knowing that the photo was originally published in my book.
AG: Is it possible for an experienced researcher to do a synthetic work on the history, economy, society and culture of Chandraketugarh from the available art materials, inscriptions and the geographical data? I am thinking of a description of the people - their day to day lifestyles, beliefs, food habits etc.
JKB: In absence of more historical material it's hard... what is lacking in any period of Indian art is a newspaper or journalistic reporting such as the inauguration of a king or the visit of a dignitary, and information of this type. All we have are the art objects and a few inscriptions, other than the Stupas and Toranas. Books on social life have been written on some historical sites (such as Sanchi) but these are all based on conjectures, and therefore are not very scientific.
Indians were never great historians. What we know about the Buddhist and the early Buddhist periods are practically exclusively from Chinese descriptions. They supplied all the information. The importance of Nalanda and Bodhgaya are testified through Chinese or Burmese sources and not through genuine Indian sources. So the topic you suggest will be interesting but it will lead to nothing that will convince me.
Why don't we take the art objects as they are? Why do we always try to... it's like you find the skeleton of a dinosaur and trying to reconstruct how it looked like, what it ate, how it mated, how many eggs it hatched etc. It's not the job of an art historian to do that. It is somebody else's job. But that somebody else first needs to undergo training in art history in order to distinguish between all the deities and gods etc. and then...
During excavations we have found glass beads necklaces... gold jewelry, granulated gold -- they tell us that people had very good taste but not much about their social status. The pieces put them in the map of world art. Why do we need to do more? Everybody should be happy with that.
After having lived in the rural lower Bengal villages without the amenities, I would say that life probably didn't differ that much in those rural areas 2000 years ago.
AG:...Is this opinion confirmed by what you notice on the terracottas?
JKB: No, it's more wishful thinking.
AG: For example, women these days are not seen wearing the gigantic headdresses with 10 hairpins routinely seen depicted in Chandraketugarh.
JKB: Japaneese women used to do it until recently. Until the Sunga or Kushana period both men and women used to have huge headgears to maintain a huge quantity of hair. But that doesn't allow us to draw any conclusion.
AG:... Are the plaques then depictions of totally fictional people or the realistic depictions of a certain class of people?
JKB: Can't tell. Look at the prodigious amount of granulated gold in the Tamralipta plaque in Oxford, -- she wasn't the wife of a poor peasant with 1 sq. m of paddy field, but the idealized depiction of a wealthy person. Excavation has brought up many similar objects, but whether they were actually used by the majority or the minority of people, you just can't tell.
For example, if you go by the Ajanta paintings, you would think that dark complexion was the ideal of beauty. Today it is the other way around and people want to have fair complexion rather than dark complexion.
AG: What are the European museums where one can find Chandraketugarh terracottas on display?
JKB:
Musee Guimet, Paris, France
Linden Museum, Stuttgart, Germany
Museum of Indian Art, Berlin, Germany
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK
probably also the Victoria and Albert and the British Museum, London
I know collections even in Japan. Not in museums yet.
Chandraketugarh terracottas were not available 50 or 100 years ago. Even 15 years or so ago, the dealers used to freely give a few terracotta pieces accompanying a stone statue to the purchasing museums. This is how several of the museums obtained those pieces.
AG: I wanted to put pictures of Chandraketugarh teracottas from private collections on this website. I was told by researchers and museums that the private collectors wouldn't want that and they don't want their names to be known because of legal issues.
JKB: Not true. The private collectors would love their collection to be known. Scholars don't want to give access to their "stock" of collectors to other scholars. Perhaps this is a form of professional greed.
AG: You say in your book, "three plaques originate from different moulds which, however, are based on the same upper die" -- how does a upper die differ from a mould?
JKB: The first creation is a real clay figure perhaps sun-dried (they are normally not preserved). This is called the "paternal piece". The paternal piece is covered with a lump of clay to produce what is called the upper die. The upper die isn't ready for production yet and it's not sufficiently detailed. For further ornamenting it and bringing it to a production quality mould, an upper die (there can be several upper dies from the same original clay figure) is chiseled in or incised with a needle or a star-shaped piece of wood. Thus a mould is formed. I have seen several moulds, which can be traced back to the same paternal piece.
AG: What were the Chandraketugarh terracottas used for? Due to the presence of a hole at the top of many of the plaques, people think that they were hung on the wall.
JKB: You can't hang them on the wall because the terracottas are heavy and big, and there isn't enough material between the hole and the boundary to hold the weight of the clay.
There are some description of quotidien uses of certain Mauryan terracotta pieces. I have also observed a few rituals in lower bengal. For example, to build a new house, a "puja" is performed before the building actually starts -- they worship the soil, earth, because they are going to hurt it with the spade. The worshipping involves mud bricks on a row with a purna kalasha (the "vase of plenty", holy pitcher), and a quadrangle, and arati, ... before digging starts. It happens out in the open field and not for the existing house. This indicates a cult closer to the earth.
From excavation in Begram (ancient Kapishi) in Afghanistan -- ivory boxes were found and we have a fairly good idea how certain objects were used in the daily life. Terracotta objects were never hung on the wall. If they were ever hung on the neck, the pieces were very small.
Some fragments (of large terracottas) I have seen - the holes are so near the top that it would have been impossible to hang them.
For Mathura terracotta figurines, the lower part of the backs of the plaques are plain, so the pieces weren't supposed to be completely seen from behind.
This is one of the most fascinating questions -- what did they do with the toy carts?
Even now in houses in Bengal there are small temples with niches, where small images are placed. Perhaps 2000 years ago, some such practice was prevalent.
AG: What were the use of the large number of erotic plaques found from Chandraketugarh?
JKB: Another fascinating question! I couldn't include all the erotic plaques I wanted in my book, because I had to be cautious.
Taking the Chandraketugarh plaques aside, where else in India do you have erotic art? Other than the Chandella dynasty (Khajuraho) and Konarak and related sites which are all some 1000 years after Chandraketugarh -- you have practically no hard-core erotic art. These are unique, because if you didn't have them we would think that the patrons and the builders of Khajuraho and Konarak (9th-12th century) were the inventors of erotic art in India. I don't recall comparable erotic terracotta plaques from Mathura and Kaushambi.
There's one terracotta where one man enjoys sexual intercourse with five women at a time -- it is a very Indian theme -- because we have it 2000 years later in Indian painting e.g. in Kotah. Dr. Devangana Desai in her book on erotic art proposes a number of texts, but the general observer or an artist or a craftsman -- did he care for all the exotic texts -- a craftsman is craftsman and an artist is an artist and he cares but little for texts and prescriptions. When it comes to details...
If you go to a museum in Italy and Greek, you see these ancient vases with erotic depictions. It's not uncommon that the inhabitants of Chandraketugarh used to possess these terracottas. There's a certain typology of intercourse depicted here...and it's certainly very healthy.
Perhaps people were buying these erotic plaques because it was fun. The society was very different those days and we need to consider that as well. But the quantity of terracotta with this theme is prodigious and it wasn't a fluke.
AG: How did the Chinese traveller miss Chandraketugarh but were fully aware of Tamluk?
JKB: There were places the Chinese travellers should have seen but they didn't. For example, they didn't leave any description off the cave paintings of Ajanta, but they visited the nearby Ellora caves. There are also places they described which haven't been identified with certainty.
AG: What about the so-called Chandraketugarh Fakes?
JKB: I will tell you a story -- its about the plate#48 of my book. The photo was sent to me by a museum in Oxford (UK) asking my opinion. The plaque is about a lady ...(see the photo) -- it looked absolutely OK. So I reported that in my opinion it looked right. Then it was tested (thermo-luminescence) and was found that the clay was fired only 20 years ago. I was flabbergasted -- thought it was amazing that they were able to build such fine pieces in modern times. This meant that we could trust items only from old collections -- from 20-30 years ago -- when there wasn't any demand for Chandraketugarh pieces. I titled this piece in the book as a "master fake".
Subsequently a dealer called me from London and said that the piece wasn't fake and that his tests showed that it was found to be original. The investigation revealed that two fragments from two different pieces -- one new and one old -- were confounded in the laboratory.
We have to consider the following scenario: suppose that a bronze piece can be sold for $100K. How much does it cost to convince a person ("expert") in a laboratory that the piece is old? Suppose that the piece costs $5K, you add another $10K to get a seal of approval. The stakes are so high that this will be perfectly all right. I must say that the skills of modern Indian craftsmen are remarkable in making fakes.
I have seen actual fakes on display in museums, although I don't want to mention names. But then again, these are perhaps mixtures of genuine and authentic stuff. If the craftsmen are caught they should not be sent to jail but they should be rewarded, because the pieces are so good (joking).
I think most of the fakes are produced for the American market. They also know the market well. Therefore they avoid the hard-core erotic pieces. Not only Chandraketugarh terracottas are faked but also Kushana sculptures.
AG: In the Asad-Uj-Jaman collection, I have seen some wood-carvings from Chandraketugarh. They are dark black. How did wood survive the 2000 year-long subterranean life?
JKB: They are black because the wood has to be burned to have all the Oxygen out, because Oxygen causes the decay. These pieces are never very large.
With some prominent dealers I have seen some carved wood pieces with brown outlines and with no traces of charcoal. Apparently they went through treatment, but no pre-treatment photos are available -- I don't think they are old.
(from site mentioned in the original post of this thread)
Prof. Joachim Karl Bautze is the Chief of the Art History Section at the South Asia Institute of the Heidelberg Univeristy. He is a Professor of Indian Art History. From October 2002 he will become a professor at the Wako University, Tsurukawa, Japan. Dr. Bautze is the author of the book Early Indian Terracottas (E.J.Brill, 1995) which, with the help of 48 plates, describes northern Indian terracottas from 2nd Century BC to 1st Century AD. Many of the terracottas discussed in this book are from Chandraketugarh.
I met him during his recent visit to the USA and over a long lunch discussed several aspects of Chandraketugarh and its terracottas. Below, I present a transcript of this discussion, in a Q & A form.
AG: How did you get interested in Chandraketugarh terracottas?
JKB: There are two main reasons behind this. First, my Ph.D. advisor Prof.Dr. Herbert Härtel, former Director of the Museum of Indian Art, Berlin, considered the terracotta as major objects of archaeological interest. Terracotta often pre-dates stone sculptures, and are not necessarily influenced by the so called imperial art (e.g. Maurya, Shunga, Kshatrapa). Besides the Mauryan Ashokan capitals, pillars and rock edicts, what else do we have in stones in India? Terracottas are clues to zeitgeist, they have an immediate result, since it is easy to create them. Stone or bronze sculptures involve complex processes to create. Lower Bengal contains mainly alluvial soil and no major mountains and quarries which can be the source of stone. Thus, terracotta was the only medium until the Gupta period, and in South Asia nobody else mastered it to a better degree of quality than the Bengalees. Chandraketugarh terracottas are some of the most outstanding.
Second, I lived in the lower Bengal (Dankuni, Hooghly) for quite some time and was naturally interested in Chandraketugarh. I personally saw the uses of unbaked terracottas during different festivals and rituals.
AG: Please describe the ancient geography of Chandraketugarh and its association, if any, with the ancient port of Gange (Ptolemy).
JKB: What we know is that Chandraketugarh had international relationship and commerce. To the best of my knowledge, foreign (Roman, and other Mediterranean) coins were found near this site (similar to those found in other coastal port-cities of India such as Chennai).
Geography was much different in the days of Chandraketugarh. What is now 100km inside Bengal was coastal at that time. Alluvial soil pushed the coast southwards.
The wealth of terracotta found at Chandraketugarh attests to a very major production center. You do not find so much terracotta in a region unless people are actually buying or using them. Chandraketugarh was almost a dumping ground of terracotta. Many of the earlier terracotta pieces you find in Mahasthanagarh, now in Bangladesh, and other parts of Bengal are stylistically heavily indebted to Chandraketugarh if not actually produced there. However, those pieces are of inferior aesthetic quality. Chandraketugarh was a center and landmark in those days.
AG: What is known about the religious beliefs of the inhabitants of Chandraketugarh?
JKB: During the last centuries BC and first centuries AD, the entire South Asia used to be a melting pot, with so many things in common between various population centers. Very few iconographies we can clearly distinguish. We have Surya, the sun god and something like proto-Lakshmi.
AG: Ganesha? What about the elephant-headed images from Chandraketugarh?
JKB: We are talking about Mauryan and post-Mmauryan period and Ganesha hasn't appeared yet. We have something like Kubera, then the most important God. No Buddhism yet, positively not until 2nd-3rd century in Bengal. We have endless depictions of one deity of a goddess throwing coins from her right hand to people below busy collecting them. This is the Varada-Lakshmi, proto-Lakshmi. Her gesture is seen in the Lakshmi deity still worshipped in Bengal on the day of Lakshmi-Puja which precedes Kali Puja. Hinduism or Brahmanism developped as a response to Buddhism. There were the Ashokan pillars but they were not strictly "Buddhist". We also had the Naga cultures. Vasudeva (who later on becomes Krishna) and Balarama were worshipped. Vishnu as we know him today wasn't worshipped before the late Kushan or early Gupta period. It's different from the later deities. We didn't obtain inscriptions to decidedly validate these things...
AG:... there are some inscriptions...
JKB: There are even some Kharoshthi inscriptions, which is surprising, because one generally comes across Kharoshthi in the North-West of the subcontinent. Prof. B. N. Mukherjee has read them. We have small amount of other inscriptions such as the Tamralipti copperplate inscription of Govinda Pala, but that is from a much later period (8th century). There is nothing like long Ashokan edicts. So we don't know anything about the chieftains or monarchs of the Chandraketugarh region.
AG: How does Chandraketugarh rank in the quality and quantity of its terracotta in India? How does it compare with Tamluk, Kaushambi and Mathura?
JKB: Chandraketugarh terracottas provide the largest variety of topics. There are also a large number of very high quality pieces such as the one at the Metropolitan Museum (NY) or some shown at the exhibition at the State Archaeological Museum, Behala, Kolkata (Feb, 2001). We also find many carved pieces of bone/ivory (incidentally, these inspired many fakers to execute tortoise-shell carvings -- the shells are often 2000 years old but the carvings are done recently). We have very high quality terracotta from the same period from Bulandi-bagh near Patna, but their number is not very high. Chandraketugarh is almost unsurpassed in the quantity of terracottas. I have seen literally boxes and boxes of terracotta from Chandraketugarh.
Asutosh Musem (Calcutta University, in Kolkata, India) has several thousand pieces of Chandraketugarh terracotta. You can see some of them but can't take any photos, which is a pity. Incidentally, they were the first (and the only, except a small digging in 1998) official excavators of that site. Interestingly, I know a number of students who studied there but even they are not allowed to see the material.
Rating the terracotta in terms of their quality is more difficult because "quality" can be very subjective. Due to my personal links I am biased towards Bengal terracottas. There are also wonderful terracotta pieces from Mathura and Kaushambi, but fewer.
AG: What are the particular characteristics of Chandraketugarh terracottas -- technical, artistic, or material-wise? If you see a piece of terracotta how would you determine if it's from Chandraketugarh?
JKB: It's not so easy to answer this in such a short span. What separates Chandraketugarh terracottas is not some rendering styles, such as the eye having double outline, or nose is done in a particular way. In fact, I cannot easily describe to you these characteristics. But if you work for a period of times with these terracotta objects, you simply "know" where a given object comes from, without rationally knowing why. Because the production is so rich -- there are plaques - hand modeled, half hand-modeled, matrix modeled, mixed processed, softer burns, burned with less Oxygen etc., -- . It's difficult to make a general statement. Also no art offers more exceptions than Indian Art.
If you consider a narrow category such as the hollow terracotta pieces (also called rattles, tricycles and toy carts), I can easily tell the difference if you give me two pieces. But to describe it theoretically is different.
AG: So there aren't any describable difference in terracotta from these centers?
JKB: There is a clear stylistic difference. But first, you need to compare something to some other thing. You have to start your comparison from a fixed point, and if you don't establish this point you can't do any comparison. For terracottas it is not clear what should be this standard fixed point.
AG: How about differences based on the depicted contents?
JKB: Not much, since the content is all Indian. For example consider the story of the Jataka about a monkey crossing the river on the back of a crocodile. Depictions of this story have appeared in several Chandraketugarh and other terracottas in India. But the story is well-known all over India, and from this point, the terracottas can be from any part of India. Some plaques are difficult to determine geographically. But show me two terracotta pieces, and I'll tell you why one is from one place and the other is from a different place.
No general statement is possible to make, because the examples are different. So I will be cautious to say something like "Chandraketugarh terracotta are easily recognizable due to these features...".
AG: In your book you say "A useful frame for a more precise dating is provided by the excavation report on Sonkh near Mathura. The majority of the terracottas reproduced here (by here Bautze means the BOOK) , however, stems from the areas around Kaushambi and Chandraketugarh " - please explain.
JKB: The publisher didn't want to reproduce fragments but complete terracotta. There are reliable stratographical excavation reports e.g., in Sonkh (by my Ph.D. advisor) -- so the periods are datable. Not much was done in Kaushambi and Mathura which are reliable -- I wish there will be more. Nothing much is available. Complete pieces come from private collections, so unauthorized, clandestine and unofficial sources.
Prof. B. N. Mukherjee published a photo in one of his recent Bengali booklets not knowing that the photo was originally published in my book.
AG: Is it possible for an experienced researcher to do a synthetic work on the history, economy, society and culture of Chandraketugarh from the available art materials, inscriptions and the geographical data? I am thinking of a description of the people - their day to day lifestyles, beliefs, food habits etc.
JKB: In absence of more historical material it's hard... what is lacking in any period of Indian art is a newspaper or journalistic reporting such as the inauguration of a king or the visit of a dignitary, and information of this type. All we have are the art objects and a few inscriptions, other than the Stupas and Toranas. Books on social life have been written on some historical sites (such as Sanchi) but these are all based on conjectures, and therefore are not very scientific.
Indians were never great historians. What we know about the Buddhist and the early Buddhist periods are practically exclusively from Chinese descriptions. They supplied all the information. The importance of Nalanda and Bodhgaya are testified through Chinese or Burmese sources and not through genuine Indian sources. So the topic you suggest will be interesting but it will lead to nothing that will convince me.
Why don't we take the art objects as they are? Why do we always try to... it's like you find the skeleton of a dinosaur and trying to reconstruct how it looked like, what it ate, how it mated, how many eggs it hatched etc. It's not the job of an art historian to do that. It is somebody else's job. But that somebody else first needs to undergo training in art history in order to distinguish between all the deities and gods etc. and then...
During excavations we have found glass beads necklaces... gold jewelry, granulated gold -- they tell us that people had very good taste but not much about their social status. The pieces put them in the map of world art. Why do we need to do more? Everybody should be happy with that.
After having lived in the rural lower Bengal villages without the amenities, I would say that life probably didn't differ that much in those rural areas 2000 years ago.
AG:...Is this opinion confirmed by what you notice on the terracottas?
JKB: No, it's more wishful thinking.
AG: For example, women these days are not seen wearing the gigantic headdresses with 10 hairpins routinely seen depicted in Chandraketugarh.
JKB: Japaneese women used to do it until recently. Until the Sunga or Kushana period both men and women used to have huge headgears to maintain a huge quantity of hair. But that doesn't allow us to draw any conclusion.
AG:... Are the plaques then depictions of totally fictional people or the realistic depictions of a certain class of people?
JKB: Can't tell. Look at the prodigious amount of granulated gold in the Tamralipta plaque in Oxford, -- she wasn't the wife of a poor peasant with 1 sq. m of paddy field, but the idealized depiction of a wealthy person. Excavation has brought up many similar objects, but whether they were actually used by the majority or the minority of people, you just can't tell.
For example, if you go by the Ajanta paintings, you would think that dark complexion was the ideal of beauty. Today it is the other way around and people want to have fair complexion rather than dark complexion.
AG: What are the European museums where one can find Chandraketugarh terracottas on display?
JKB:
Musee Guimet, Paris, France
Linden Museum, Stuttgart, Germany
Museum of Indian Art, Berlin, Germany
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK
probably also the Victoria and Albert and the British Museum, London
I know collections even in Japan. Not in museums yet.
Chandraketugarh terracottas were not available 50 or 100 years ago. Even 15 years or so ago, the dealers used to freely give a few terracotta pieces accompanying a stone statue to the purchasing museums. This is how several of the museums obtained those pieces.
AG: I wanted to put pictures of Chandraketugarh teracottas from private collections on this website. I was told by researchers and museums that the private collectors wouldn't want that and they don't want their names to be known because of legal issues.
JKB: Not true. The private collectors would love their collection to be known. Scholars don't want to give access to their "stock" of collectors to other scholars. Perhaps this is a form of professional greed.
AG: You say in your book, "three plaques originate from different moulds which, however, are based on the same upper die" -- how does a upper die differ from a mould?
JKB: The first creation is a real clay figure perhaps sun-dried (they are normally not preserved). This is called the "paternal piece". The paternal piece is covered with a lump of clay to produce what is called the upper die. The upper die isn't ready for production yet and it's not sufficiently detailed. For further ornamenting it and bringing it to a production quality mould, an upper die (there can be several upper dies from the same original clay figure) is chiseled in or incised with a needle or a star-shaped piece of wood. Thus a mould is formed. I have seen several moulds, which can be traced back to the same paternal piece.
AG: What were the Chandraketugarh terracottas used for? Due to the presence of a hole at the top of many of the plaques, people think that they were hung on the wall.
JKB: You can't hang them on the wall because the terracottas are heavy and big, and there isn't enough material between the hole and the boundary to hold the weight of the clay.
There are some description of quotidien uses of certain Mauryan terracotta pieces. I have also observed a few rituals in lower bengal. For example, to build a new house, a "puja" is performed before the building actually starts -- they worship the soil, earth, because they are going to hurt it with the spade. The worshipping involves mud bricks on a row with a purna kalasha (the "vase of plenty", holy pitcher), and a quadrangle, and arati, ... before digging starts. It happens out in the open field and not for the existing house. This indicates a cult closer to the earth.
From excavation in Begram (ancient Kapishi) in Afghanistan -- ivory boxes were found and we have a fairly good idea how certain objects were used in the daily life. Terracotta objects were never hung on the wall. If they were ever hung on the neck, the pieces were very small.
Some fragments (of large terracottas) I have seen - the holes are so near the top that it would have been impossible to hang them.
For Mathura terracotta figurines, the lower part of the backs of the plaques are plain, so the pieces weren't supposed to be completely seen from behind.
This is one of the most fascinating questions -- what did they do with the toy carts?
Even now in houses in Bengal there are small temples with niches, where small images are placed. Perhaps 2000 years ago, some such practice was prevalent.
AG: What were the use of the large number of erotic plaques found from Chandraketugarh?
JKB: Another fascinating question! I couldn't include all the erotic plaques I wanted in my book, because I had to be cautious.
Taking the Chandraketugarh plaques aside, where else in India do you have erotic art? Other than the Chandella dynasty (Khajuraho) and Konarak and related sites which are all some 1000 years after Chandraketugarh -- you have practically no hard-core erotic art. These are unique, because if you didn't have them we would think that the patrons and the builders of Khajuraho and Konarak (9th-12th century) were the inventors of erotic art in India. I don't recall comparable erotic terracotta plaques from Mathura and Kaushambi.
There's one terracotta where one man enjoys sexual intercourse with five women at a time -- it is a very Indian theme -- because we have it 2000 years later in Indian painting e.g. in Kotah. Dr. Devangana Desai in her book on erotic art proposes a number of texts, but the general observer or an artist or a craftsman -- did he care for all the exotic texts -- a craftsman is craftsman and an artist is an artist and he cares but little for texts and prescriptions. When it comes to details...
If you go to a museum in Italy and Greek, you see these ancient vases with erotic depictions. It's not uncommon that the inhabitants of Chandraketugarh used to possess these terracottas. There's a certain typology of intercourse depicted here...and it's certainly very healthy.
Perhaps people were buying these erotic plaques because it was fun. The society was very different those days and we need to consider that as well. But the quantity of terracotta with this theme is prodigious and it wasn't a fluke.
AG: How did the Chinese traveller miss Chandraketugarh but were fully aware of Tamluk?
JKB: There were places the Chinese travellers should have seen but they didn't. For example, they didn't leave any description off the cave paintings of Ajanta, but they visited the nearby Ellora caves. There are also places they described which haven't been identified with certainty.
AG: What about the so-called Chandraketugarh Fakes?
JKB: I will tell you a story -- its about the plate#48 of my book. The photo was sent to me by a museum in Oxford (UK) asking my opinion. The plaque is about a lady ...(see the photo) -- it looked absolutely OK. So I reported that in my opinion it looked right. Then it was tested (thermo-luminescence) and was found that the clay was fired only 20 years ago. I was flabbergasted -- thought it was amazing that they were able to build such fine pieces in modern times. This meant that we could trust items only from old collections -- from 20-30 years ago -- when there wasn't any demand for Chandraketugarh pieces. I titled this piece in the book as a "master fake".
Subsequently a dealer called me from London and said that the piece wasn't fake and that his tests showed that it was found to be original. The investigation revealed that two fragments from two different pieces -- one new and one old -- were confounded in the laboratory.
We have to consider the following scenario: suppose that a bronze piece can be sold for $100K. How much does it cost to convince a person ("expert") in a laboratory that the piece is old? Suppose that the piece costs $5K, you add another $10K to get a seal of approval. The stakes are so high that this will be perfectly all right. I must say that the skills of modern Indian craftsmen are remarkable in making fakes.
I have seen actual fakes on display in museums, although I don't want to mention names. But then again, these are perhaps mixtures of genuine and authentic stuff. If the craftsmen are caught they should not be sent to jail but they should be rewarded, because the pieces are so good (joking).
I think most of the fakes are produced for the American market. They also know the market well. Therefore they avoid the hard-core erotic pieces. Not only Chandraketugarh terracottas are faked but also Kushana sculptures.
AG: In the Asad-Uj-Jaman collection, I have seen some wood-carvings from Chandraketugarh. They are dark black. How did wood survive the 2000 year-long subterranean life?
JKB: They are black because the wood has to be burned to have all the Oxygen out, because Oxygen causes the decay. These pieces are never very large.
With some prominent dealers I have seen some carved wood pieces with brown outlines and with no traces of charcoal. Apparently they went through treatment, but no pre-treatment photos are available -- I don't think they are old.