India can re-build Bamiyan Buddhas -- ASI

India can re-build Bamiyan Buddhas -- ASI
KOTA NEELIMA

NEW DELHI, MARCH 3: Union Minister for Tourism and Culture Ananth Kumar has said that India is ``capable'' of putting back the rubble of the demolished statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan in Afghanistan. He was commenting on the proposal by the Archaeological Survey of India for rebuilding the Buddhas from the rubble left over after the Taliban was done with them.

``We have been instrumental in conserving the heritage of countries from all across the world. We are capable of putting back the rubble of the Buddhas of Bamiyan if it is given to us,'' he said.

Talking of the Indian experience with great heritage monuments that have dilapidated over a period of time, he said: ``We usually get the monuments and artefacts in a very damaged state from excavations. But we have been taking care of these important symbols of history for a long time. We can extend our expertise to preserving the monuments of Afghanistan also.''

The ASI submitted the proposal to the Department of Culture, suggesting various ways of reconstructing the world's tallest Buddhas. Experts, however, say the main problem would be to find a rock face as vertical as the one in which the statues have been carved out in Afghanistan.

There are roughly two parts of the structure of the two Bamiyan Buddhas. One is the exterior which is made of local earth, lime and hemp available in Bamiyan itself. The second is the steep mountain-face from which the interior of the statues were carved out. The only rock face which is vertical enough to accommodate a 53-metre-tall statue is in Maharashtra.

The proposal, which was drafted by a team of senior archaeologists and officials of the ASI, says that one of the solutions is to reassemble the rubble if it can be preserved and brought to India.

There is a precedent in the region when the temple of Ramses was re-built from the site of the Aswan Dam in Egypt by scratching away small bits of the structure and putting them back together at a different location away from the dam.

The second suggestion from the ASI has been to build new structures with exactly the same material as was used in Bamiyan for a ``symbolic'' historical presence. It has been also suggested that the material for the statues can be procured from Ladakh which is very identical to the region where the statues were built.

Supporting the concept of recreating the Buddhas, former director-general of the ASI who was in office when the conservation of the Bamiyan Buddhas was being done in 1969, Dr M.N. Deshpande says: ``The ASI has complete documentation of the Buddhas based on our study of the monuments for nine years. We have all the information on the dimensions of statues, the material with which they were constructed and also the other vital statistics went into making the Buddhas.''