Inside the Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy Museum in Hyderabad is a hallway where visitors are asked to remove their footwear. School children run inside with shoes when they are called back and they look guiltily at the no-footwear sign. Occasionally, flower petals and vermilion can be spotted near the doorway. A few steps away, inside a glass casing, are a few earthen vessels and an oddly shaped stone vessel with a cap.
“These are the relics of Gautama Buddha. If this collection goes, the gem of this museum goes. People from across the world come to pay homage to the relics of the Buddha. People from Nepal have chanting sessions, offer flowers and light up joss sticks when they come here,” says an official of the museum.
Relics of the Buddha
Within the four earthen vessels, arranged according to the way they were discovered in Bavikonda, about 16 kilometres from Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, are gold objects and precious beads. The gold objects have not lost the shine. Relics of the Buddha include a small golden container that shimmers nearly 2,000 years after it was created by a goldsmith somewhere in Andhra Pradesh. These were discovered during the excavation in 1993 near Bavikonda by the Andhra Pradesh Department of Archaeology and Museums (DAM).
The relics of Buddha, discovered in Bavikonda near Visakhapatnam, are currently housed in the Hyderabad museum. | Photo Credit: .Serish Nanisetti
Now, these objects and relics will return to Andhra Pradesh, according to the plan of bifurcation drawn up by the Antiquities Committees of the two States. Just the list of brass objects runs into 269 pages, while the list of arms and weapons to be transferred runs into eight pages. One of the objects is a cannon brought from the Yakutpura Police Station in Hyderabad that will go to Kurnool Site Museum.
The key for division is the provenance and time of the acquisition of the object. All pre-1956 objects remain with Telangana. The objects, manuscripts, paintings, and artefacts acquired between 1956 and 2014 have been divided between the two states in ratio of the population with 52% going to AP and 48% in Telangana.
A.P. loses Hyderabad
Hyderabad is no longer the capital of Andhra Pradesh. But, within the 430-year-old city is a treasure that belongs to the State, which is yet to have a capital. Among them are the Buddha’s relics, jade objects, brass statuettes, and manuscripts that are now housed in the State Museum, Telangana State Archives, Oriental Manuscripts Library and other lesser-known museums in Telangana. The antiquities are now at the centre of a shadow match that is being played out beyond the limelight.
“Further, an earthen urn or receptacle i.e. Samudgaka, large in size was found below the stone receptacle, which contains ashy deposit, burnt charcoal and corporeal remains of the Master, along with silver and gold caskets and a number of precious beads,” wrote N.R.V. Prasad, who led the excavation at Bavikonda in 1994 that transformed the understanding about the spread of Hinayana Buddhism in the post-Ashoka period along the Krishna River basin.
The jade dagger with Sarkar-e-Asafia written on it is set to be transferred to A.P. as it was acquired in 2006. | Photo Credit: .Serish Nanisetti
The shadow conflict goes to the heart of the layers of history that go into the creation of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Inside the room, where the relics of the Buddha are housed, is a map of spread of Buddhism in Andhra Pradesh. It lists 16 sites. None of them are from Telangana.
Buddhavanam
Post division of the two States, Phanigiri, Kotilingala, Nelakondapalli, Kondapur, Dhulikatta and other sites have been brought to light and showcased. Telangana State has transformed Nandikonda, a village in Nalgonda district, into a heritage precinct called Buddhavanam and built a theme park.
At the same time, two statues of Buddha from Phanigiri have been taken to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its exhibition of ‘Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE’. Currently, the artefacts are in South Korea for the exhibition in National Museum which ended in April. Another brass idol that has made the journey to New York and Seoul is the Avalokteswara dating from 4-5 century AD unearthed in Nelakondapalli in Khammam district.
“We are developing the museums and they will have a new look with better showcasing of objects. We have a rich repository of objects. Most of the antiquities that are identified with Telangana will remain in the State. We will ensure that,” says Bharathi Hollikeri, director of DAM.
“Distribution of assets and sending them back to the places where they were created is a good development. We had a very important excavation in Yeleswaram in the 1950s. The excavated statues are now scattered all over the place. One is in the State Museum, another in Birla Museum, one is in Karimnagar Museum and another in Visakhapatnam Museum. When these artefacts are distributed, the importance of the site declines. The best policy is to develop in situ museums,” says scholar and archaeologist M.A. Srinivasan.
If at one end of the spectrum are the historic-spiritual objects, then at the other end are the objects from modern or contemporary era. Among the items that are to go to Andhra Pradesh is a beautiful jade dagger acquired in 2006. The ‘nastaliq’ (a writing style of Persio-Arabic script) inscription in gold lettering on the handle of the dagger reads as Sarkar-e-Hyderabad. The jade handle is a chiselled horse creating a perfect grip for the user. “How does this object fit in with the other objects in Andhra Pradesh. It will be out of context,” says a museum curator, raising a valid concern about the nature of distribution of the objects.
A total of 15,500 books remain in Telangana State Museum Library while 7,696 books, bought after 1956, have been shifted to Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh. Telangana got more books as it already had 5,496 books at the time of creation of united Andhra Pradesh. While the initial plan was to digitise all the books and leave the digitised versions with the State that is losing the books, this has not been followed through. “The books were not digitised and were shipped in 2019,” informs a museum staffer.
“The Antiquities Committees have met three times till now. The objects have been classified according to the place they are located now. The first set of objects are in the warehouse, the second set are museum pieces on display, and the third are acquired by gift or donation or purchase. Those acquired before 1956 stay here. The ones after 1956 will be divided,” says Nagaraju of the Department of Archaeology and Museums, Telangana.
“How can they bifurcate culture and history? It is not a property. It cannot be divided. Nannayya Bharatam belongs to all. How can we say the manuscript belongs to one State?” asks archivist and museologist Jayadheer Tirumala Rao, who has one of the biggest collections of tribal music objects.
“We find a number of Telugu manuscripts in the border region of Maharashtra. Do they belong to Maharashtra? Writers’ native region is an odd concept in the modern world where boundaries are changing; Khammam and Nalgonda have expanded and contracted. The manuscripts should stay at one place. If they divide, let all the Telugu documents go to one State and Sanskrit to another State. That way, scholars and researchers would find it easy,” he says about the collection at the Oriental Manuscripts Library (OML).
If the OML collection includes a treatise on sex written during the rule of Mohammed Quli Qutb Shah, the Telangana State Archives manuscripts written in gold on blue paper during the rule of the Qutb Shahis, letters written by Mahatma Gandhi, one of the first books in Urdu created during the time of Sufi saint Gesudaraz of Gulbarga. “We are parting with only documents and books that came here after May 1957 from Kurnool during the state reorganisation. The Mughal documents, the Asaf Jahi era firmans and notices are with us. They have not been touched. No one else has the expertise to even read those documents and manuscripts,” says the Director Zareena Parveen with a laugh about the repository under her care.
“What we need to do is build site museums that will help people understand the importance of the objects and heritage. Important site museums are the way to go like the one set up in Phanigiri. They give an important context to the visitors of the site and also creates a sense of pride and ownership in the community,” says art historian and curator Naman Ahuja.
Prized assets
It is not just the division of assets that will affect the assets of Telangana. Some of the prized assets have disappeared over the years. Among them is a painting of Akbar Shah, son of Sufi saint Shah Raju Qattal, reclining which used to be with the Andhra Pradesh repository and is now found in the San Diego Museum of Art.
“See the frayed edge on the right of the painting that we can see online. It matches with the image in Nizam Archaeology Department of Heritage that has the photograph of the painting by Rahim Khan,” informs an art historian.
At a time when repatriation of cultural objects is gathering pace across the world with stolen or pillaged objects being returned to the places of their origin, the Telangana-Andhra Pradesh experiment of exchanging artefacts, books and manuscripts, according to provenance and time of acquisition, poses an interesting counterpoint. How this exchange helps in understanding of the history of the two Telugu States remains a key question.
