INTRODUCTION

Since its inscription into the UNESCO's list of world heritage sites in July 2016 the ruins of Nālandā will certainly attract more attention through the Indian and global public than hitherto. The most recent or forthcoming publications on Nālandā by Frederick Asher and Mary Stewart critically assess the archaeological and art-historical evidence, and for this purpose they constantly refer to textual sources. These references are made on the basis of the old nineteenh century translations of the most extensive texts on Nālandā, the Chinese records, and of the Middle-Indic (Pāli, Prākṛt) and Tibetan sources. It seems therefore appropriate that a volume on Nālandā also contains a contribution from the textual-philological point of view, not only, as the title implies, to set the records straight, but also to give contextually informed translations and discussions of the relevant textual sources. I do not claim at all that these are the final words on all the issues addressed here, but would rather like to open a critical discourse on and about some of these sources.

The textual sources referring to Nālandā are threefold: inscriptions, Buddhist and Jain “canonical” texts in Indic languages, and passages in and from the travelogues of Chinese visitors or residents of the monastery and relatively late Tibetan historiographical writings. Among these sources the ones deemed to be most informative and reliable are the Chinese records of Xuanzang (600/602–664), of his biographer(s), and of Yijing (635–713), because both monks resided and studied in Nālandā for several years. Information extracted from these sources, digested mostly from the nineteenth century translations by Beal and others, feed rather uncritically into the major historical narrative of the monastery, pushing its existence even back to the time of the Buddha. The article has a focus on the Chinese texts and their translations and the Pāli and Jain sources while neglecting other sources like inscriptions. As a natural consequence of this, I will not discuss the paraṃparā of kings given by Xuanzang, since relation cannot be done without the evidence from royal inscriptions and other historical sources, as important as this is for the reconstruction of the history of the monastery. Due to restriction of space such an analysis has to be given at another occasion.

Blackburn Lane. It's a sleepy, time-forgotten alley in Kolkata's Tiretta Bazaar. Ennui hangs heavy, like Elliot's yellow fog, curling into every sleepy crevice. Suddenly, a thundering roll of drumbeats shatters the timeless languor — a gaggle of boys and girls in costume spill out of a weather-worn brick house in a raucous dragon dance. The street erupts into joyous celebration, the greys eclipsed by a riot of red. It is Chinese New Year in Kolkata's Chinatown.

Not many people are even aware of a Chinatown in Kolkata, much less that it is one of the oldest and the only surviving one of its kind in South Asia. The Chinese began settling in Calcutta (now Kolkata) over two and a half centuries ago, and for as long as the elders in the community can remember, Chinese New Year has always been heralded by dancing dragons in Blackburn Lane. The procession then winds its way to the newer Chinatown, the once swampy badlands of Tangra, now a warren of bumpy roads dotted with outdated Chinese restaurants and questionable tanneries. It finally ends up in Achipur in the city's suburbs where the community pays homage to the graves of ancestors in the place where the Chinese first settled. Where celebrations go, this is a pretty modest revelry, but it signifies something much deeper. A celebration of diasporic survival. Of continuity. Of a city's unique multi-ethnic heritage.

Today it's hard to tell that Tiretta Bazaar was once a bustling, vibrant market in a once grand, cosmopolitan city that was the “jewel in the crown” of the British Raj. Here you could buy the world: from crystal chandeliers to marble statues, from hookahs to cigars; it was where the Portuguese picked up the choicest fruits and the Armenians shopped for exotic birds; where the Baghdadi Jews selected Italian tiles for their mansions and where the Dutch bought shoes and the Greeks their olives. The large, colonnaded, cacophonous market was built by the flamboyant Venetian architect Edward Tiretta — friend of the infamous Casanova no less — who became Superintendent of Streets and Bazaars in Calcutta. The Calcutta Gazette of 1788, described Tiretta Bazaar as occupying “nine bighas and eight cottahs of land, formed in two squares, with convenient shops, surrounded with a colonnade veranda, and the whole area of the square divided into commodious streets with pucka stalls”.

The archaeological site of Nalanda has been inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List of 2016. One of the key requirements put forth by the World Heritage Convention (WHC) for such recognition is to geospatially identify core and buffer zones of the inscribed property. This essay analyses these inscribed zones in the spatial context of records and maps of archaeological remains at Nalanda created by Francis Buchanan- Hamilton, Alexander Cunningham and Alexander M. Broadley in the nineteenth century. Using recent satellite imagery and associated geospatial techniques together with ground observations, this essay firstly, identifies the geographical location of all features mapped and recorded by the three British explorers in and around Nalanda, secondly presents a visual comparison of the property inscribed as a World Heritage site and the expanse of archaeological features noticed in nineteenth century (some of which still exist, yet lie outside the core and buffer zones), and finally records the present land-use along those features (via visual interpretation of the latest satellite imagery and field visit) in order to identify locations where there is high potential for heritage conservation.

INTRODUCTION

Nalanda was a Buddhist monastery of considerable repute which attracted scholars from great distances. Accounts of visitors from China (dating from the seventh century AD) suggest that Nalanda was a large, thriving establishment whose physical dimensions were immense. This institution seems to have remained in existence from the fourth/fifth century to at least until the end of the twelfth century. It is unknown exactly when this centre came into existence, and we do not have a continuous record for its activities. It must have gained a reputation for importance by the seventh century AD, attracting scholarly monks such as Xuanzang and Yijing from China. Tibetan monk Dharmasvamin records some lingering activity in the monastery with a handful of monks during his visit in 1234–36 AD. There is sparse historical documentation about Nalanda in the subsequent centuries, and the very existence of this mega monastery was forgotten in that region.

The site was visited by Francis Buchanan in 1812, a Scottish physician, who surveyed the region that would later be known as Nalanda as part of a survey of the territories forming the Presidency of Fort William.

The story of the Buddha's enlightenment is one of complete transformation, of the world shaking, and of universal paradigms being broken. It was, in all senses of the word, cataclysmic. The story goes that after practising asceticism for many years, the Buddha ate some rice and milk before discerning a new path to liberation. Looking for a place to realize his new vision, the Buddha set his eyes on a small spot of ground below a pipal tree. He prepared his seat by laying a woven mat of grass and vowed never to rise before achieving total enlightenment. The climax of the dawn of enlightenment is when Mara, the God of Illusion, appears before Siddhartha demanding that he support his claim to defeat all delusion. In response, Siddhartha reaches his right hand down, touching the earth as witness to the magnitude of the merit of his acts up to that moment. The earth trembled and Siddhartha became a Buddha, realizing the truth of liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth.

There is something about the composition of ground, tree, and figure that creates a poignant scene for the great conflict of the Buddha's liberation. In many representations, the Buddha is shown serenely seated under a tree as demons attack, beautiful ladies tempt, and Mara provokes. In some depictions, the arching bows of the tree begin to trace a circle around the Buddha, defining an entire microcosm — a vision of reality or an ecosystem — that frames the moment of liberation. Like the transformation of the Sakya Prince into the Lord Buddha, the ground the Buddha sat upon and the tree he sat beneath were remade. The spot became the bodhimanda, or seat of enlightenment, and the tree the Buddha sat beneath became the bodhi tree, or tree of enlightenment. While both demand further consideration, this paper will focus on the bodhi tree as a liminal object between the figure of the Buddha and the ground of his enlightenment. It is, in fact, the tree's liminality that has made it an important living symbol of Buddhism. While iconographically rich with a history that extends from early depictions in the third century to countless iterations around the world, bodhi trees also occupy a central place in ritual engagements with Buddhism, especially around the making of sacred space and a modern history of Buddhism in India.

“TURK, TELI, TAR, WEH TINO HAIN BIHAR”

Writing in 1870s Alexander Meyrick Broadley, an official of the colonial bureaucracy and an avid antiquarian, thus rounded up his account of exploits in Bihar — “Turks (Muhammadans), Telis (oil pressers), and Tar (Tar-palms), these three make up Bihar.” This configuration of Bihar, as Broadley persuasively argued, was a common parlance of the late nineteenth century. The choice of this particular phrase as the concluding sentence of his long essay on ancient Buddhist remains of the region, however, served a more crucial function than adding a bit of local colour to a standard nineteenth century regional history. It sought to bring out the labours of a colonial administrator and antiquarian in reclaiming the glorious pasts of a land now lost to vagaries of time, and to the all too familiar colonial charges against “uninformed native vandalism”, and “misappropriation”.

Framing nineteenth century Bihar as a land of wilderness, a region wrecked by lawlessness, and inhabited by natives with a disregard for their own past, enabled the colonial narratives of discovery of Bihar's ancient history. It is against these narratives of loss that colonial officials, archaeologists, and antiquarians like Broadley would stage their labours of recovering ancient pasts. In his capacity as the Assistant Magistrate of Bihar, Broadley conducted surveys, excavations, and built up a substantial antiquarian collection which found their way into the Bihar Museum established in the town of Bihar Sharif. As the earliest museum collection of nineteenth century colonial Bihar, the Broadley Collection emerged during 1870s and 1880s as the site of rediscovered ancient Buddhist Bihar protected from the ravages of “nature” and “natives”. However, this museum had a short life, spanning only some two decades.

In 1890s the Government of Bengal disbanded the Bihar Sharif Museum and transferred the antiquities to Calcutta to add to the imperial collection in the Indian Museum. In 1917, five years after the creation of the new province of Bihar and Orissa, a provincial museum was established in Patna, the new provincial capital. Citing instances of earlier carting away of antiquities outside the territorial limits of province, in which the disbanding of the Bihar Museum featured as a major grudge, the Patna Museum projected itself as the sole rightful repository of Bihar's antiquarian heritage. The institution emerged as a potent ground for the fashioning of a new provincial identity predicated on the reclamation of the province's history and antiquities.

In the multi-volume work The Heritage of Sufism covering an entire millennium of Persianate Sufism, Leonard Lewisohn recognizes the difficulty of undertaking a “comprehensive coverage of all the mystical contexts” that characterize Sufi heritage within the span of a single study. Covering the expansive idea of a “spiritual and cultural renaissance” in Persian society between 1200 and 1500 the work identifies Sufism as a major catalyst for these developments. The religious climate of Persia in the aforementioned period was intensely influenced by Sufi traditions led by masters like Jalaluddin Rumi (d. 1273), Nimatullah Wali (d. 1431), Hafez Shirazi (d. 1389), Saadi (d. 1292), and Saiyid Ali Hamadani (d. 1384) among many others. Their works and activities shaped pre-Safavid Persia in a manner which scholars have characterized as a “renaissance” — in literature, arts, Islamic sciences, philosophy, music and mystical scholarship. One can grasp Lewisohn's emphasis on the impossibility of covering comprehensively all dimensions of this Sufi tradition between the covers of a single volume. Certain important aspects remain unexplored, even though they are critical towards understanding the heritage of Persian Sufism.

In an interesting parallel, South Asia presents before us similar difficulties of undertaking a comprehensive study of a Sufi heritage in this region. Within the same time frame, before the rise of the Mughal Empire — the South Asian equivalent of the mighty Safavids — Sufi activities spread across north India, and also the South, particularly the Deccan region. This paper will look into certain aspects connected to the rise of Sufi networks in the Deccan in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at a time when Deccan's Sanskritized cultural world experienced the coming of a north Indian Persian tradition. In spite of some obvious similarities with the Iranian situation, the focus will be less on such sweeping categories as “renaissance”. Rather the article will seek to engage with a different set of questions more relevant to the idea of a Sufi heritage.

What roles did Sufi saints and, later, their shrines play in creating a heritage? Was this idea sustained only through tangible traces of their shrines? Or can it be located in the intangible idea of mystical rituals and practices, like sama? How did the chain of spiritual succession ensure the continuity of this heritage?

So why begin an introduction on the contours, memories and cascading narratives of an inter Asian cultural history and heritage making with the sonorous words of the quintessential British Romantic poet, Percy Shelley, writing of a lost and unknown king, one who is possibly an Egyptian tyrant in an ancient time? A poem which takes at its point of entry the view of “a traveller from an antique land”, one, it is clear, who has no direct links with this land but is encountering an unknown, unreadable culture and is seeking to decipher and decode the lost civilizational history from a Eurocentric, colonially shaped imaginary.

So is it a sense of historical myopia and twisted irony, to choose as an epigraph this iconic poem, one that is symbolic in literary history of the opaqueness of cultural encounters? More so given that many essays within the pages of this volume directly disagree and debate on how history is manifested, absorbed and then concretized into a narrative that feeds a culture's — any culture's — sense of hegemony: accounts that have the common seam of being dialogic and interrogative, and, fundamentally, anti-colonial.

However, the views that emerged in the works of a Shelley, or others I will cite/site later on in this introduction, sit well with the arc of the narrative that many of the cultural theorists, Sinologists, historians, art historians, interlocutors of heritage and culture, its practitioners, religious study experts and social anthropologist engage with in this collection. At the heart of these contestations lie the vexed questions of cultural heritage, its complex and multivalent legacies, its deep fissures, its ruptures indicative of ideological schismatics and political shifts, its historical reconfigurations and altered meanings and symbolic “value” across time. In fact, as we read through this collection, we find that the drum beat of a lost time echoes in different ideational registers till today.

Does place matter? Does it matter in all instances? When locating new institutions does place matter beyond conventional issues of logistics, or will institutions achieve the same outcome irrespective of locale? These are some of the questions that emerged when two places with seemingly long histories and identities seemed to come together in the (re)creation of a new Nalanda university for the twenty-first century. These two places were of course the original Nalanda university or Mahavihara, the archaeological remains of which still exist as testimony to the greatness of what it symbolized, and the settlement of Rajgir, inhabited since prehistory, where the new international Nalanda university was to be located.

The identification with and choice of Nalanda was of course deliberate: Old Nalanda was the inspiration for the establishment of the new university. Old Nalanda, as we well know was one of the flourishing citadels of intellectual pursuit in the world way before organized transmission of knowledge became codified in formal university structures, and it symbolized academic rigour of the highest distinction. Added to this was the evocative symbolism of an interconnected Asia and the journey to Nalanda undertaken by Asian scholars seeking knowledge and learning they could carry back to their regions. It was this voyage that inspired George Yeo, the then Foreign Minister of Singapore, to forward the Nalanda proposal to the Government of India sometime in early 2006. He envisaged a new Nalanda university could once again be

Later that year, in March 2006, while visiting Bihar, the then President of India, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam said how impressed he was to learn during a state visit of Singapore's commitment to the project. And it was only because it involved re-establishing a Nalanda for our times, that Amartya Sen agreed to chair the Mentor Group that would guide the project. Enthused by the idea, the State Government of Bihar, decided proactively to explore the setting up of a new Nalanda university.

I come into the discussion on the intersection of history, culture and heritage and its ecological and environmental connections from a position that may seem to be a non-specialist one: I am not an art historian, nor an archaeologist, nor a specialist of environmental or social studies. However, what I most certainly am is someone who has been working for some forty years now in the field of Chinese intellectual history (this is the title of my Chair at Collège de France in Paris), and who has been since long developing a growing interest in intercultural studies, more specifically between India and China. I therefore feel tremendously privileged to have been given the opportunity to come to Nâlandâ as a pilgrim, right in the heart of a land which has witnessed not only crosscultural exchanges between India and China but also a space that is redolent with the memory of the historic endeavour of members of the Chinese elites to leave behind their heritage in their quest for something other than what had so far constituted the civilizational centrality and self-proclaimed superiority.

This historic movement outwards is even more critical to recall in the present day: a time when China's official discourse is entirely geared towards the Chinese rise to power and recovery of its imperial centrality in the East Asian region. To my mind, more than ever, it is timely and salutary to remind ourselves of the periods in the past when the Chinese themselves did not necessarily perceive themselves as the centre of the world (the “Middle Kingdom”, zhongguo), or even more simply as the world (“all under Heaven”, tianxia).

My starting point will be a sentence which sounds rather intriguing to me, as it has done so far for a good number of scholars, from Faxian 's Foguo ji (Notes on the Country of the Buddha), which was first translated about two centuries ago into a European language, namely French, by Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832). This self-taught Sinologist was elected to the very first Chair dedicated to Chinese Studies ever created in Europe in 1814 at the Collège de France (then called the Collège Royal) in Paris.

Being the home of two prominent UNESCO World Heritage sites of Bodhgaya and Nalanda, South Bihar region has a rich historical past. The region also witnessed the emergence of important urban and political centres of Rajgir and Pataliputra in ancient India. In early medieval India, the region was known as the centre of Buddhism because of the prominent Buddhist monasteries and their religious and political influence over the region. In this period, there also emerged a distinct tradition of stone and metal sculptural production, enriching the material assemblage of the region. The expansive material assemblage of this period can be encountered in almost every district of the South Bihar region including the Gaya district. Though the historical and religious prominence of this district is evident at the sites of Bodhgaya and Gaya, the district also has several smaller sites and villages with impressive material remains that have been documented in the last two hundred years and will be examined in this chapter.

Because of the historical and sacred importance of Gaya and Bodhgaya, the district began to attract scholarly attention from the nineteenth century onwards. This is illustrated by the surveys of numerous colonial surveyors and archaeologists. Colonial surveys began with Francis Buchanan- Hamilton, who surveyed this district in 1811–12. Along with the sites of Bodhgaya and Gaya, he also surveyed several villages that contained historical remains or older temples and shrines. Following on from this initial foray, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Alexander Cunningham, the first director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI, hereafter), and J.D. Beglar also explored the district and documented several villages of historic importance and their significant remains. In the last ten years, new surveys have been conducted, which resulted in the documentation of more than 350 sites with historical remains including mounds, sculptures, inscriptions, architectural elements, and shrines/temples from the ancient and early medieval periods. All of these documentations have revealed resituated contexts of several early medieval images and temples, which indicate a complex and disparate history of the district.

Colonial surveys, conducted in the second half of the nineteenth century, led to the movement of objects, images, and architectural materials into newly built colonial museums.

INTRODUCTION

Disparate areas of Nusantara experienced a religious and socio-political “paradigm shift” during the period of AD 1400–1600, which here I call “early modern” for the sake of convenience. The Indic-influenced polities of Java and Sumatra, where Hinduism and Buddhism had been prevalent for nearly a thousand years, began to succumb to the advance of Islam and the Islamicate social paradigm. Yet, in spite of — or perhaps thanks to — political instabilities, the disruption (or reconfiguration) of patterns of international trade and diplomacy, and the emergence of new literary genres, religio-ritual paradigms, and social orders, those regions appear to have maintained a vigorous activity of preservation, transformation, and circulation of knowledge based on Indic paradigms.

Victor Lieberman (2009, p. 10) describes a process of cultural integration in Southeast Asia from the fifteenth century onwards, an example of which is what he calls the “demoticisation” of “textually based Indic religions [that] once had been the more or less exclusive preserve of capital-based elites”. (Lieberman here refers to western and central mainland Southeast Asia, and does not look further into the insular region.) Following this lead, in this paper I explore the “parallelisms” that seem to have existed across the mosaic of literary and manuscript cultures of Western Nusantara — i.e., Sumatra, Java, and Bali — in the early modern period. Those locales witnessed the flourishing of vernacular text-manuscript cultures that shared religious ideas, literary conventions, and text-building practices stemming from the heyday of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis and the ensuing Vernacular Millennium (Pollock 1996, 2006). Rather than being separate and delinked peripheries, I suggest that these locales partook, through religious and cultural networks, of a translocal textual tradition of ultimately Indic origin. Although their textual documents were produced in different local contexts characterized by different histories of reception, socio-cultural specificities, and religious contingencies, they appear to have developed in parallel, as it were, from what must once have been a shared Sanskritic tradition.

Here I will approach the literary cultures of early modern Malay and Javano-Balinese spheres by focusing on what Pollock (2007, p. 83) calls the “materiality of manuscript culture”, and elaborate on historical evidence that linked their social and religious contexts. I will first describe the networks of manuscripts and literati in the Javano-Balinese sphere from the late fourteenth to the sixteenth century.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY