If you don't protect what you love, someone else will destroy it.
Let such approach this consecrated Land,
And pass in peace along the magic waste;
But spare its relics let no busy hand
Deface the scenes, already how defaced !
Not for such purpose were these altars placed ;
llevore the remnants Nations once revered :
So may our Country's name be undisgraced,
So may'st thou prosper where thy youth was reared,
By every honest joy of Love and Life endeared:
SIR, we rise to move that this Bill, this very unwelcome Bill be circulated for eliciting public opinion thereon.
It was with feelings of deep sorrow and pain that I
read some of the provisions of this Bill, and it is with
an oppressed heart and a feeling of helplessness that one rise to move this motion. The matter of the Bill is not only of the greatest, but is of vital importance to those who have the pride of their country in them, or who have even the slightest idea of their duty to the dead and to the living in this country. The Bill is so cleverly, so skilfully, so unfairly drafted as to conceal its real, sinister object behind a number of superfluities and details, behind a hypocritical show of solicitude for the
preservation of the ancient monuments of India. The
Bill is styled, The Ancient Monuments Preservation
(Amendment) Bill. Verily, its object is nothing more
and nothing less than to amend, to alter, to modify, in
Speech delivered on the Ancient Monuments Preservation (Amendment) Bill in the Legislative Assembly, Simla, on 29 September 1931 A.D.
fact, partly to do away with the provisions lor Preserving things, that exist in the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904. The shade of Lord Curzon must be watching with sadness and sorrow the blasting of some of his dearest hopes, the destruction of the work, of which he was justly proud, and with the distinction of the initiation of which, his memory will in this country be associated for all time to come.
Sir, the object of this measure is, to put it plainly, to
legalise the removal from India of some of its most
cherished possessions, its most sacred objects, some of the remains of its ancient greatness, its choicest treasures which nothing in the world can buy, which no price can secure. And the beauty of it all is that this is sought to be accomplished in the name of preservation of India's sacred trust, in the name of scientific research, in the name of helping civilization. Sir, what great wrong has been done to any country, to any people but the perpetrators of it started to do it after trumpeting forth their earnest desire to help their victims or to advance the cause of civilization and culture. Well has an American poet, Bertrand Shadwell, said :
If you dare commit, a wrong
On the weak, because you're strong,
You may do it if you do it for his good;
You may rob him, if you do it for his good ;
You may kill him, if you do it for his good ;
And, Sir, would you regard it as a piece of good,
fair work to attempt to rush this Bill through,
towards the fag end of a short session without
consulting public opinion, and without letting those,
whom it deeply touches, have a chance of saying what they think of this sinister measure, and when half the elected Members of the House have gone home, and the minds of those who still remain in the House are occupied by urgent matters of grave financial and economic importance to the country ?
Sir, the ancient monuments of India and the anti- quities that lie buried underground in his country are, so far. as antiquarian matters are concerned, the only things left in the country of which Indians feel proud, and which they are anxious to preserve against the inroads of the outsiders. Most of the rare and priceless antiquities, invaluable works of art, sculptures, paintings, manuscripts, precious stones that could be removed have already been taken away to England and other countries of Europe and America. Nearly all that could be removed has been removed out of India and there is little doubt that if it had been possible for European science and engineering skill to remove the Ajanta and the Ellora caves, the Taj, the Qutab Minar and the Adhai din ka Jhonpra, the Sanchi Stupas and such other things, they should by this time have been found adorning London and other cities in Europe.
Not satisfied with robbing India of all products
of genius and works of art found on the surface,
it is now sought to remove out of this country
what lies buried underground. Are the Government of India, willing to stand by and see the country denuded of all those rare things that human genius could devise, invent or produce in this country, and are they willing to allow all and sundry of the exploiters of Europe and America to excavate and take away its heirlooms and the remains of its ancient greatness treasures which are either the products of the highest efforts of human genius or are, which is a matter of the gravest consequence, the remains of our great ancestors who have, and will continue to, shed lustre on the name of our sacred Motherland as long as history endures, and whose memory we revere, and whose lives are a perennial source of inspiration to us in our lives.
Sir, to have allowed our antiquities to be taken out of the country is the greatest injury that the Goverment of India have done to India. Sir, the things that,have been and are sought to be taken out of India roughly fall into four classes:-
(1) Sacred objects, such as the remains of founders of great religions, or other great men, whom large classes of people worship or hold in religious reverence and respect.
(2) Works of art such as sculptures, antiquities, paintings, frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, bequeathing to posterity results of centuries of work and labour, of thought the achievements, intellectual and spiritual, of the pioneers of civilization, in science, literature, philosophy and art, that illumine the pages of history and constitute a most brilliant chapter in the annals of mankind.
(3) Records of facts and events necessary and essential to a proper understanding and elucidation, not only of the history of India, political, social, religious and economic, but of the evolution of art itself in its multifarious branches, and the reconstruction of that history by proper research and piecing together the results of such research in the various branches of human effort, for instance, coins, stone and copper-plate inscriptions, sculptures, arch-stones to show that true arches were known in ancient India ; historic manuscripts found buried in mounds ; and, fourthly, rare products of nature such as the wonderful Kohinur, the Pitt, the Regent, the first two being the greatest and the most glorious diamonds of the world, associated with the history of India in its various stages and the glorious deeds of the great men it has produced.
Sir, We at present concerned only with objects
which may come to light on excavations under a
licence and are liable to be removed out of the country. These objects all fall under the four classes enumerated above. In the first class are sacred objects, and We will give here two instances where the feelings of the people of this country have been outraged.
A few years ago a stupa at Shahji ki Dheri,
near Peshawar, built by Emperor Kanishka in the second century, was excavated and the remains
deposited there with the greatest reverence and
religious veneration by leading Indians of that time, of one who is worshipped and venerated by more than a third of the human race at the present time, one who has shed ever-lasting lustre on this great and ancient land, one who has ennobled the lives and has been the solace of millions of human beings in the last twenty-four centuries ; one of the noblest of men, the Great Sakyamuni of Kapilavastu, the Buddha, were removed from its sacred place of rest and sent out of India to Burma which is on the eve of becoming a foreign country to us. In 1916, some of the relics, remains of Buddha or other religious and holy men of India, found in stupas at the Dharmrajika Stupa at Tak- shashila, modern Taxila, were given away to Buddhists of Ceylon, a foreign country, and removed out of India. Sending them to Burma or Ceylon, where Buddhism prevails is no palliation of the wrong done to India. Sir, these sacred remains are the property, not of the Government of India for the time being, not even the exclusive property of the present people of India, but also of the generations of Indians yet to come.
Sir, Buddha occupies a permanent and a high
place in Hinduism. He is held to be the tenth
Avatar or Incarnation of the Deity, just like Sri Ham or Sri Krishna. What country in the world except India has the right to keep in its sacred and reverential possession, the remains of the Enlightened, the Great Buddha, who was born in India, who lived all his life in India, and who died in India, and whose parents and ancestors all lived and died in India? Buddha was a product of India, son of Mother India in body and soul, the pride of India, and the crown of its glory. The glory of having given birth to Buddha and the privilege and honour of returning his mortal remains to Mother Earth belong to India ; and it is the pride and privilege, the honour and the duty of the sons and the daughters of India to guard those remains for all time to come.
To exhume his remains from their sacred resting
place and send them out of India is, I say in extreme humiliation and sorrow, a great outrage against our feelings of religious reverence and veneration. We apologise for using strong language, but the occasion demands it, and we have felt this act as strongly as our weak, humiliated nature is capable of feeling.
And we say, Sir, that we would look with horror upon any attempt to exhume the remains of any Muslim saint in India. All Indians, whatever their faith and religion, whatever their culture, must and do look upon the remains of Muslim saints and Muslim great men that lie buried under mounds and ruins as sacred objects to be guarded and kept undisturbed by exploiters. I would condemn and resist all attempts to remove out of India to any country those sacred remains. It is the duty of all Indians to hold them as a sacred trust, and we regard it our duty to prevent their removal from India.
Sir, has any country, we ask, but Arabia the right
to keep the sacred remains of the last of the Prophets?
Has any country but England the right to keep the remains of the greatest of Englishmen, who though not held in sacerdotal or religious reverence, yet is the glory of England the divine poet, Shakespeare?
Would England or any other power dare think of
removing the sacred Christian remains from Jerusalem because Jerusalem is now a non-Christian country to Europe which is peopled by Christians? It has been said that Government have dared to remove the sacred remains of Buddha from India and to deprive the country of its most cherished possession held sacred by its teeming millions, because Government can treat with indifference the weakness and the helplessness of a disorganised, disunited and a degenerate race. Sir, 1 do not hold this view, My belief is that Government when they removed those sacred remains, were ignorant of the feelings and sentiments of the people of India, and did not view the matter in the light in which they should have viewed it. We hope the Government will take a correct view of the matter after the present discussion. As regards Indian antiquities and works of art, Europe is full of them. All provinces of India have been ransacked, every nook and corner of it has been searched and antiquities and works of art that were buried in various parts of the country or lay on its surface, metalware, sculptures, stone and copper plates, paintings, old jewellery and old pottery prehistoric or post-historic, have been taken away; and the museums of England, France, Germany, Denmark, Holland, Austria and America, full of them, stand mocking at our helplessness and powerlessness to protect our cherished possessions. Byron's lament about Greece is equally true of India.
Cold is the heart, fair Greece ! that looks on Thee,
Nor feels as Lovers o'er the dust they loved ;
Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
By British hands, which it had best behoved
To guard those relics De'er to be restored :
Curst be the hour when from their Isle they roved
And once again thy hapless bosom gored,
And snatched thy shreaking gods to Northern climes
abhorred ! l
The country has been denuded of its old manu-
scripts, invaluable for writing a proper history of India, and tracing the evolution of its social polity or its economic annals. We will give two instances to illustrate the loss suffered by India in this direction. Kautilya's Artha Shastra, the standard work on Government and Economics in Sanskrit, unique of its kind, dealing with complicated problems of overseas and inland trade, international law and finance, was till recently a mere name. Several manuscripts of it were taken away to Europe but none was published. By a mere accident, a copy of it fell into the hands of Pandit Shyama Sastri of Mysore and he published it. It then became known that there were several copies of the book in Europe.
Sir, when we was writing a history of Ajmer, my
native city, in 1911 A.I)., We could not obtain in India any book containing an account of Sher Shah's capture of Ajmer, the only book which contains such an account, Tarikhi Daudi, was not to be found anywhere. We went to Calcutta and searched the Imperial Library, and the Library of the Asiatic Society of Bengal ; we went to the famous Khuda Bux Library of Bankipur ; we examined the Library of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and I wrote to Lucknow and Hyderabad, but all to no purpose. After a deal of enquiry, we learnt that only one copy of the Tarikhi Daudi was known to exist, and that was in the British Museum in London. Through the kind offices of Dr. Codrington, Mr. Edwards of the British Museum kindly had two pages of the work describing Sher Shah's visit to Ajmer photographed and sent to me and I was then able to complete the account we wished to give.
Then again Sir, when we wrote our monograph on Maharana Kumbha, one of the greatest of the
Maharanas of Chitor, we could find no old portrait or painting of him. Eventually we were able to trace an old portrait of him to the India Office Library in London, and we obtained a photographic copy of it.
Sir, this shows to what difficulties and troubles
students of history, literature and art in India are put by the removal o antiquities and manuscripts from this country. This exportation of priceless treasures and heirlooms, which neither love nor money can produce or get, has been going on for a century and a half, and this Bill is going to help it further. Lord Byron thus condemns the taking away of antiquities from Greece:
What ! shall it e'er be said by British tongue,
Albion was happy in Athena's tears ?
Though in thy name the slaves her bosom wrung,
Tell not the deed to blushing Europe's ears ;
The Ocean Queen, the Free Britannia, bears
The last poor plunder from a bleeding land :
Yes, she, whose generous aid her name endears.
Tore down those remnants with a Harpy's hand,
Which envious Eld forbore, and tyrants left to stand.
Childe Harold.
Colonel Tod, the great historian of Rajputana, is
stated to have taken away eight hundred boxes full of antiquities, sculptures, coins, manuscripts, inscriptions, some of which have not yet been wholly deciphered and identified. Twenty thousand Sanskrit manuscripts were sent away from Nepal to Oxford only a decade ago, and who knows what invaluable and now unobtain- able works have thus gone out of the country ? Students of archaeology know that Sir W. Jones, Colonel Mackenzie, Taylor, Fleet, Balkntyne and others took away large collections of Sanskrit manuscripts and antiquities which are kept in the India Office Library, London. The Bodleian Library of Oxford, the Indian Institute of Oxford, the Trinity College Library of Cambridge, the Edinburgh University Library possess large collections of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian manuscripts taken away from India. The library of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland contains thousands of such manuscripts and antiquities.
Professor Biihler's large collection of Sanskrit manuscripts has found its way toVienna and Hermann Jacobi's to Berlin. Germany is full of ancient Indian manuscripts and antiquities and works of art. The libraries of Berlin, Tubingen, Stuttgart, Bonn, Strasburgh, Gottingen, Wurzburgh and Leipzic are full of them.
Sir, rather than allow any antiquities and finds to be taken out of India, the problem before India is how to get back all those antiquites, sculptures, manuscripts and works of art which have been taken away from India. Sir, when the final settlement is made between England and India, we do hope and trust that India would insist on England returning all these treasures which are now kept in its various museums and libraries and which are the great heirlooms of the people of India.
It has been said that in Palestine and Egypt, licences for exploration and excavations have been given to foreigners and that in the interests of research, the same may be allowed in India. Bat even in Egypt the licence to make excavations at Luxor in favour of Mr. Howard Carter was cancelled in twenty-four hours when it was suspected that Egyptian antiquities were being removed from Egypt. Is the Government of India at present in the hands of Indians to enable them to take the same action should an eventuality of a like character arise here ?
We would further say that we should like to see
foreigners secure such licences in England, France, Germany or America. Where a country is under foreign rule and has no controlling voice in its administration, this exploitation has been permitted or tolerated,
His mind as barren and his heart as hard,
Is he whose head conceived, whose hand prepared, Aught to displace Athenae's poor remains :
Her sons too weak the sacred shrine to guard. l
But, Sir, we have enough sense of shame left in us to refuse to consent, and become parties, to this robbery being legalized. I am told that exploiters from America are anxious to obtain licences to rob India other treasures ; that certain high officers and others are anxious that licences should be given to foreigners, who have the support of foreign financiers and who wish to undertake this exploitation and carry away from our country our antiquities and sacred objects, which no nation with any self-respect or sense of honour, or a sense of duty to the country and to its future generations would allow or tolerate.
It has been suggested that these finds would be
better looked after in Europe and America and made good use of there. Sir, I would undertake to look after the valuable possessions of some of the protagonists of this doctrine. Would they give them to me ?
Why cannot the foreigners, if they are only honest and genuine students of Archaeology and are inspired only with a genuine love of research, excavate the mounds, but let the relics of India's glorious past, remain in India, in her museums and libraries ? Indians are more deeply and directly interested in them than any foreigners, however well intentioned.
Sir, if some of this material remains even unutilised for the present, let it remain so. We will make use of it in good time, but let us not be deprived of its possession. It has also been argued that if there are duplicates of a thing, if there are two images of a deity or two coins, why should one of them be not allowed to be taken away ? This argument is the argument of a robber against his victim, of the strong against the weak, and reminds us of the fable of the wolf and the lamb which we have all read in our childhood. Will England or America listen to an argument like this, and on the strength of it part with its priceless treasures. Is there not enough room in the far-flung provinces of this vast country for duplicates or triplicates to be kept ? And then, are there real exact duplicates of any antiquity, except coins?
Sir, as the matter of this measure is by no means a matter of urgency, as no question of law and order and peace of the country is involved j as this is not a question of administrative stability, no harm will come to the matter if the Bill is taken up in January after circulation to the country. The rainy season has gone and no existing excavations will be affected and those-not yet excavated will in no way be affected. I therefore request Government to allow this Bill to be circulated for eliciting public opinion, and not rush it through. Government will be in a better position to judge of the consequences of the measure when they are in possession of the considered views of those whom it affects so deeply.
I wish to make it clear that I am in no way against any excavation made in a proper and scientific manner. 1 will allow, even welcome, foreigners imbued with a desire to know things to come and help us in research work and make full use, as freely as we ourselves can do, of all finds. But I oppose, with all the strength there is in me, the removal out of India of any of the finds whatsoever. My only object in making this motion is to enable public opinion to express itself on the question of giving licences to foreigners and the terms on which such licences may be given. Absolutely nothing is lost by giving the public an opportunity to express its view, and taking the Bill into consideration after three or four months instead of at once. I would therefore earnestly appeal to the Honourable Member in charge of the Bill to give the public in India a fair opportunity to consider the provisions and the implications of this measure.
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