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YOU ARE HERE:>>Collectors' Resources>>Essentials>>Researching your pieces page 6
Prof. Joachim Karl Bautze was the Chief of the Art History Section at the South Asia Institute of the Heidelberg Univeristy and a Professor of Indian Art History. Since 2002 he has been 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.
Early Indian Terracottas (Iconography of Religions, Section XIII: Indian Religions) by Joachim K. Bautze.
Some excerpts.
Ambarish Soswami met Prof. Joachim Karl Bautze during his recent visit to the USA and over a long lunch discussed several aspects of Chandraketugarh and its terracottas.
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AG: How did you get interested in Chandraketugarh terracottas?
JKBAG: 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)
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With thanks to the Metropolitan Museum |
or some shown at the exhibition at the State Archaeological Museum, Behala, Kolkata (Feb, 2001).
http://www.historyofbengal.com/behala_museum.html
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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.
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