Kolkata, Feb 16
West Bengal will lose a
"vital" part of its heritage unless the Archaeological Survey of India
(ASI) deals with the menace of smuggling, says acclaimed British author
and historian Charles Allen, who is busy exploring the Dravidian element
in Indian culture for his next book.
He pointed out that
Chandraketugarh, 35 km from Kolkata, has traces of a wonderful fertility
cult which people don't know about and yet the most wonderful
terracotta that is being found is "unfortunately being smuggled out of
the country and sold in big auction houses".
"It's rather sad
because you can see Bengal's culture is being slowly smuggled out of the
country and unless that is tackled by the ASI people, Bengal is going
to lose a very vital part of its culture," Allen, an authority on
British India and South Asia with more than 23 books and several
documentaries to his credit, told IANS in an interview.
Some of
his notable recent works include the biography of English author Rudyard
Kipling, "Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling"
(2007). Allen's great-grandfather employed the 16-year-old Kipling to
work on his newspaper, the "Civil and Military Gazette", an association
that provided fodder for the biography.
"The book I am writing
now is about Coromandel - South India. I know so little about South
India. I want to explore the Dravidian element in Indian culture and
it's not just religion because there is a pre-religion element. You
might call it the Adivasi element. There are still many layers of this
Indian element that I don't know about," the 75-year-old author said.
Allen
is trying to dig out beliefs pertaining to the Mother Goddess that
according to him is an "ancient" element in Dravidian culture (pre-Aryan
culture).
"I am also including Bengal in that incidentally,
because we do not associate Bengal with Dravidian India but there are
pockets of language here which are still Dravidian - spoken in the
countryside - and underlining Bengali is that early culture, for
example, the devotion to the Mother Goddess. That is still huge in
Bengal," he elaborated.
A self-confessed "child of Raj", the
prolific writer was born in Cawnpore (now Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh) in 1940
in the last years of the British rule in India, where several
generations of his family served since the 1790s.
A recipient of
'Sir Percy Sykes Gold Medal' of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs for
his contribution to Asian studies, Allen, based in Somerset in southwest
England, is in India to tour Kerala for his book, which goes by the
working title of "Coromandel".
An active Fellow of the Royal
Geographical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society, a Council Member of
the Kipling Society and a Member of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs,
Allen has travelled extensively across India, the Himalayas and remote
corners of far-western Tibet in the last four decades.
But his
proclivity for writing on subjects associated with the British rule in
India or his interest in historical figures of Indian history never
waned, so much so that he has been "drawn" to India 40-50 times since
leaving the country in 1947 to be schooled in England.
"India is
like an onion. You peel layers and new layers come up. It is very
fascinating and has kept me going. It is a complex society," said Allen
whose last book, "Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor" (2011) is
an Orientalist biography of the legendary Indian ruler.
The
author of "The Buddha and the Sahibs: the Men who Discovered India's
Lost Religion" and "The Search for Shangri-La: A Journey into Tibetan
History" however refrained from commenting on modern India.
"I
don't want to sentimentalise India or be critical about it. I don't want
to do either. I am what I am. I am a child of the Raj but also I am a
child of India. I am always being torn into two different directions.
"Modern
India is so complex and changing so fast it is very hard to sit back
and draw any conclusions, so I am much more happy talking about the
past," Allen said.
(Sahana Ghosh can be contacted at [email protected] )
