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Towards a Fuller History
One day early in May they dug out from a freshly opened up archaeological site in Kotbari. Comilla quite a ponderous work of art - undamaged. A picture of it was published the next week in a national daily. One casual glance at the thing even by a non expert was enough to convince that this was something very extraordinary. The experience came very close to that of the first modern observer in the Altamira caves of 40,000 year-old early Cromagnon paintings — a girl ch”d — crying The Bull, the Bull'. Or Major Alexander, stalking a tiger in the jungle fastnesses of central India, finding himself in an unending gallery of frescoes the like of which has not been found so far anywhere else in the world. Yes, it was Ajanta.
This Kotbari find is an image of the seated Buddha, in solid bronze, 1.4 metres high and weighing 1600 kilograms. These physical parameters are important in that they place the fresh image among the best archaeological and artistic finds of the world — which is an event of great pride for us, — for decidedly those that fashioned this metallurgical wonder were our forbears. The press reports said the face value of the metal ■alone would at the; present market rate be 10 million Taka. What lay people would fail ev-en to guess is the engineering problems in for-ging such a big metal thing — probably seamless. This is surely indicative of a very highpoint in Be-ngali people's achievements in metal chemistry and engineering giving a headstart to this nation in metallurgy and placing it among the best in the world until even the eighteenth century.
Of course, the artistic merit of the find far outweighs its technological achievement. Bengalees had as a people an artistic turn of mind otherwise the eminent sculptural school of 'Bengal statuary' wouldn't be tnere. And to excel in this medium, stone had to be carried all the way from Rajmahal to places in rural Dhaka demonstrating a rare urge for art and the high value put on art by society. Thanks to scholars' like Bhattashali and Akhshay Moitra, the National Museum in Dhaka and the Barendra Museum in Rajshahi are so full of the sculptures of the Bengal school. The Kotbari Buddha found in the vicinity of the Shalban Vihara and Kotila Mura sites of Mainamati would find an honourable place even among that crowded assemblage of high art.
The site yielding the miracle find, now being called the Bhoi Raja Vihara, was opened only on March 31. Hardly two weeks passed and up came the Buddha with attending hordes of art objects. We are literally sitting on a civilisation of past times — only grander and more advanced than the one we now have — and this applies especially, it seems, to Comilla where every earthy protuberation in the Lalmai valley is sure to hide fantastic depositories of cultural wealth.
Archaeology is the least cared for discipline in Bangladesh. A strong social streak of anti-history bigotry has created a situation in which one could easily banish this subject from here. Fieldworks in Mahasthan or Mainamati have been resulting in gigantic steps towards the discovery of ourselves — so important for our existence into the future. Sadly enough whatever have been thrown up by the very negligible volume of archaeological work have not been appropriately followed up by scholars integrating them into a fuller history of our people. I^t us by all means give much more money to archaeological digging and put our mind to delving deep into our past to present our people with a historico-cultural bearing.