The Bihar and Orissa Research Society (BORS)

Addressing the inaugural meeting, held in January 1915, of what became the BORS, Edward Gait—the first president of the Society and future lieutenant-governor of the province—remarked that, ‘in spite of its antiquity the Province boasts of few regular historical records, and our knowledge of the past has to be laboriously pieced together from various sources of information, such as references in religious books, inscriptions on rocks, stones and coins, and the excavation of ancient site’.Footnote ²¹ Gait's earlier career was in Assam, where he rose through the colonial bureaucracy to become the director of ethnography and census commissioner. By the time Gait came to Bihar, he had demonstrated his interest in history, with his History of Assam (1906) serving as a testament to it.Footnote ²² The task of putting together the history of the newly created province was monumental and beyond the scope of any individual's effort. Recognizing this need, it was necessary that the work to be undertaken was organized ‘under the auspices of a Society’ which could ensure steady and sustained effort on the part of individuals. The proposition did not remain a mere aspiration; rather the inaugural meeting witnessed the establishment of the BORS and subsequently the publication of two issues of its journal, The Journal of Bihar and Orissa Research Society, during the year.

Since Bihar and Orissa emerged out of the erstwhile province of Bengal it is likely that initiatives to establish a research society and museum in the new province drew comparisons with similar undertakings in Bengal which (apart from the much older Asiatic Society of Bengal) saw the establishment of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad in Calcutta in 1894 and the Varendra Research Society in Rajshahi in 1910.Footnote ²³ With regard to the research societies of Bengal, which were against the 1905 division, any understanding and inquiry into their mode of operation and agenda for research should be considered in light of the rise of the nationalist sentiment that translated into the Swadeshi movement. It is precisely in this context that Bengal saw an upsurge of nationalist sentiment that manifested itself most strongly through an outpouring of regional sentiments expressed through a love for Bengali language, Bengal's history, and its regional landscape.Footnote ²⁴ In this context, Bengali became the preferred language for the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad as it began to engage itself in the writing of Bengal's history and the preservation of its archaeological heritage in its Museum. Moreover, along with the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, the Varendra Research Society and its Museum as well as the Dacca Museum brought together a ‘new community of Bengali scholars [and] wealthy patrons’ who began to view themselves as having the monopoly over their region's past.Footnote ²⁵ In order to keep it free from any colonial influence, these societies restricted their membership to Bengalis; this particular manifestation of nationalism in a Bengali guise was made more exclusive through the choice of Bengali rather than English as the preferred language for its publications.

The Bihari literati were certainly not oblivious to these efforts and yet, at a time when Bengal witnessed expressions of extreme nationalist sentiment, they chose to model their research society after the quintessential ‘Oriental’ institute—the Asiatic Society of Bengal, established in 1794 under the guidance of the pioneering Orientalist, William Jones. Moreover, the establishment of the BORS was largely facilitated through the efforts and patronage of the colonial state, with the lieutenant-governor of the province, Charles Bayley, as its patron, and Edward Gait, the future lieutenant-governor, as its president. In fact, the BORS brought together most of the highly placed colonial officials, Indian literati, and scholars who were not directly affiliated with the region. It was a forum that was not overtly nationalistic, and neither were its research agendas determined exclusively by colonial officials.

This is certainly a striking contrast to the exclusivity of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad. Mired in the Swadeshi movement, the activities of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad or the Varendra Research Society ‘did occasionally assume a provincial and chauvinistic colour’ which may have resonated among the literati in Maharashtra, Punjab, or even the south. To the Bengalis there was no apparent contradiction between their deep regional patriotism and their continued identification with India—this was largely possible during the Swadeshi period because Bengalis continued to remain ‘serenely confident of the leading position of [their] community in the cultural and political life of the subcontinent’.Footnote ²⁶ As a result, even when Bengalis chose to venture into their past through a recourse to Bengal (as the region) and Bengali (as the language), for those involved, there was no apparent contradiction or challenge to a nationalist imagination of India.

In Bihar, however, the case was different. For a province that was long overshadowed by Bengal, the separation in 1912 provided the regional literati with an opportunity to carve out a space where Bihar could emerge as part of the nationalist imagination, one where an ancient past centred on Bihar came to serve as the most important aspect. Since the Mauryan and Gupta empires were centred in Bihar, making it integral to any historical narrative of ancient India, the work carried out by the BORS and the material published in its Journal had to reach the widest audience possible. This article argues that the Society's project therefore was not so much about consolidating a regional identity through exclusive recourse to the region's ancient past, as in the case of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad or the Varendra Research Society. Rather what Bihar sought was recognition of its status as a region that served as the core constitutive element of ancient India. This also explains why English was the language chosen for the Journal's publications.

For Biharis the establishment of the BORS signalled the ‘intellectual awakening’ of the province.Footnote ²⁷ Commenting on the people involved in the Society and its journal, the Behar Herald acknowledged the cosmopolitan nature of this provincial institution, which very clearly demonstrated that at ‘the highest realms of thought there is no provincial isolation, no parochial barrier’.Footnote ²⁸ To the local literati, the Society and its Journal worked to ‘raise the intellectual level of its capital to something approaching that of Calcutta or Bombay’ therefore remaking Patna ‘not merely [as] a political capital but also a Mecca to higher students of archaeology, numismatics and history’.Footnote ²⁹ The efforts of the Society and its Journal, together with the establishment of the Patna Museum, pointed towards a public engagement with the past. While the Museum served as a repository of the ancient past, the Journal provided a scholarly platform for inquiring into the regional past. During the early days of its establishment, there was a constant appeal for local participation, one that became a mantra that the Society's president repeated during its annual meeting. Informing this appeal was a recognition that local participation could broaden the subscription base of the Journal, giving the infant Society some financial buoyancy.

In order to secure assurances of annual subscriptions and to provide the Journal with a sound footing, especially during its early days, Jadunath Sarkar, one of the foremost historians of the period and a professor at the Patna College, appealed for government patronage. The provincial government obliged with assurances of a regular subscription of 100 copies of the Journal.Footnote ³⁰ Sarkar's appeal to the provincial government and his enthusiasm and support for the Society and the Journal are indicative of the emergence of a new class of historians, who were beginning to seek permanent institutional support for their research endeavours. The fact that Sarkar was a Bengali did not dampen his enthusiasm nor did it minimize his engagement with the workings of the Society—indicating that both the Society and the Journal were not caught up in the more provincial enquiries into the past, unlike the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad or the Varendra Research Society.

By setting the agendas for antiquarian research, the Society became the primary institution of historical scholarship in the province. The debates with which the Society engaged, demonstrate how an emerging and increasingly influential narrative of an ancient Indian national past shaped the region's historical outlook, one that emphasized the ancient past of this region as the fount of Indian civilization. Not only did this succeed in establishing Bihar as the bedrock of ancient India, but it also points to how a region's historical understanding was framed by the dominant and increasingly appealing national historical narrative.

Narratives and counter-narratives: contested claims over the national past

D. B Spooner authored the first essay of the inaugural volume of the Society's Journal, discussing the discovery of a terracotta plaque depicting the Bodh Gaya Temple which was considered to be the oldest available illustration of the temple. Acknowledging its significance, ‘The Bodh Gaya Plaque’ was used as the cover illustration. For our purposes, the essay's importance lies in a rather oblique reference Spooner made when describing the site where the plaque was discovered; he referred to it as a mound ‘which corresponds in so many details with the palace of Darius at Persepolis’.Footnote ³¹ Spooner had also made more pointed references to ancient Persia in two essays on ‘The Zoroastrian Period of Indian History’ published in 1915.Footnote ³² In his engagement with the excavation of Pataliputra and its Mauryan past, the parallels and links that Spooner sought to establish between the Mauryan and the Zoroastrian period point to one of the early controversies in which the Society would become embroiled. The controversy brought to the fore strong nationalist and regionalist sentiments as the regional literati rushed to counter Spooner's comparison and defend the indigeneity of the Indian past. Challenging the indigeneity of ancient India and its defence required a fine balancing act, particularly given the glorious invocation of this period by Indian nationalists but also because of the prevalent urge among nationalist historians to paint an (albeit anachronistic) picture of a Hindu golden age.Footnote ³³ Colonial characterizations of ancient India, like those of Vincent Smith's, which reflected a ‘Western’ bias (in that they suggested that the ‘finer qualities’ of Indian civilization were derived from ‘outside’ India), further complicated the debate.Footnote ³⁴

Spooner's comparison between Pataliputra excavations and Persepolis, and similarly his description of the column excavated at Bulandibagh in 1915 as a ‘Persepolitan-like-capital’, found its way into the pages of the Journal. But it was in a different forum altogether that Spooner came out with his most elaborate exposition regarding the parallels between Mauryan India and Zoroastrian Persia.Footnote ³⁵ Spooner chose the Royal Asiatic Society in London as the venue for his lecture, and its journal to publish his theory: he was perhaps seeking a sympathetic audience before which to expound his theory on the ‘foreign’ origins of what was considered to be the first Indian empire. Claims that ancient Indian civilization had borrowed substantially from the West, most prominently with regard to art, were already matters of intensely heated debates among Indologists. For instance, in his essay ‘The Origin of the Buddha Image’, Ananda Coomaraswamy argued against a view that it was ‘the creative genius of Greece’ that influenced the first images of the Buddha. Hellenistic influences on early Indian art meant that not much of Indian art was, in fact, Indian, but rather it originated from the birthplace of Western civilization.Footnote ³⁶ Possibly, in a similar vein, Spooner proposed his theory of a ‘Zoroastrian period of Indian history’ and hoped that a forum in London—far removed from the excavation pits in Patna—would be more open to his challenging of the indigeneity of the Indian past or, at the very least, provide him with a sympathetic hearing.

Soon after Spooner's views were published, Gait appealed for caution and a measured reaction. In an address to the Society, he recounted the ‘remarkable conclusions’ Spooner drew from his discoveries at Kumrahar. According to Spooner, not only were Persians the architects of the buildings at Kumrahar, but also ‘Chandra Gupta himself, and even Buddha, belonged to the same race’. Gait was possibly among the more supportive scholar-administrators of the twentieth century who encouraged equal, if not greater, local participation in framing the history of Bihar. Nevertheless, when Indians reacted to Spooner's ‘far-reaching conclusions’, Gait characterized them as ‘patriotic Indians’ who found the results ‘unpalatable’;Footnote ³⁷ here he betrayed both his European bias and his doubts about Indian literati's ability to write their histories objectively. Spooner recognized that the link upon which his conclusion rested was tenuous, as ‘tangible evidences’ for his deductions were ‘very few’.Footnote ³⁸ As a result, many of his conclusions regarding the Persepolitan-looking palace complex at Pataliputra, and the Zoroastrian links to the ancient Indian past, were based on philological evidence. Hence Sanskritists and Epigraphists, both European as well as Indian, were most critical of his use of literary sources. In fact, one of the earliest criticisms came from A. Berriedale Keith, the distinguished professor of Sanskrit, who, after examining the literary sources Spooner had used, stated in no uncertain terms that the theory had ‘no foundation’.Footnote ³⁹

Even though Spooner's marshalling of literary sources was within the accepted protocols of historical research, the problem was the manner in which he used literary evidence to propound his theory. For instance, to Spooner, references in the Mahabharata to ‘Asura Maya leapt into instant meaning as an echo of Ahura Mazda’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Such comparisons did not rest well with most scholars. Keith, for instance, argued that the actual similarity between the descriptions of the palace as given by Asura Maya in the Mahabharata and the one provided by Megasthenes of Chandragupta's palaces was of ‘the utmost vagueness’. Instead, Keith went on to establish the indigeneity of Asura Maya. ‘The real parallel,’ Keith suggested, ‘with the deeds of the Asura is Pataliputra wrought by magic in the Kathasaritsagara, but this is purely Indian, for the wiles or magic (maya) of the Asura are notorious throughout Indian literature from the Rgveda on.’Footnote ⁴¹ While Spooner thought ascriptions to the Mahabharata would provide for a contemporary account of Pataliputra, Keith countered that the passages could not be dated precisely and doubted if any of them were older than several centuries CE. As a final blow, Keith very unequivocally stated that ‘A Zoroastrian period of Indian history never existed, nor indeed was any such existence to be expected.’Footnote ⁴²

The regional literati did not wait long to formulate their opinion in the matter; more importantly, the counter-arguments that appeared in the Journal could not be brushed aside as the mere sentiments of patriotic Indians under the guise of history. So when K. P. Jayaswal came to the defence of the indigeneity of the Mauryan past, his arguments were moderated through a methodical marshalling of opposing evidence while taking care not to betray any obvious patriotic sentiment that might mitigate the quality of his scholarship. Jayaswal's arguments were also part of a larger nationalist historical outlook beginning to coalesce during early twentieth century. This was a time when historians all across the country were beginning to formulate a challenge to colonial interpretations of an Indian past through a more academic form of historical argument.Footnote ⁴³ The Journal provided Jayaswal with the perfect platform, while also illustrating the influence of nationalistic concerns in moulding Bihar's understanding of its ancient past.

For Jayaswal, involvement in the debate was also critical because Spooner had thanked him for his help in formulating his theory. While acknowledging Jayaswal, Spooner wrote,

Finding himself squarely associated with the theory, Jayaswal's immediately distanced himself from Spooner's assertions. While acknowledging that he had discussed ‘the question of Chandragupta's nationality’ he maintained that he had also cautioned Spooner by pointing out that the ‘whole of historical evidence seemed to be against’ such a Persian theory.Footnote ⁴⁵

Jayaswal accused Spooner of mixing the accounts of Herodotus with those of Strabo, which resulted in creating a history that was not ‘faithful to fact’ since Herodotus's account related to Persia while Strabo's pertained to India.Footnote ⁴⁶ To Jayaswal, the way Spooner used Megasthenes’ account to claim that the ‘Indian court [of Chandragupta] was almost wholly Persian’ was ‘reckless’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Finally, Jayaswal found ‘serious chronological objection’ to Spooner's claim that Persian Mourva became Maurya in the Indian context since Mourva ‘had gone out of use long before the time of Chandragupta’.Footnote ⁴⁸ For Jayaswal, Spooner's assigning of Persian roots to India's ancient past appeared to be merely a ‘castle-in-the-air’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nevertheless, Jayaswal claimed that he had an open mind and was willing to accept a conversion of ‘Chandragupta's nationality’ if convincing proof was forthcoming. In cultivating the image of an objective scholar and a rational historian, Jayaswal presented himself as being above the fray of nationalist biases.

Spooner may have been emboldened by persistent claims that the roots of Indian civilization lay in the West.Footnote ⁵⁰ But by the late 1910s a growing number of Indian historians began refuting claims that located the sources of Indian past in ‘foreign’ places. For these historians the ancient Indian past could no longer be made to fit the narrative discourse of European historians who saw in it traces of a Western past. For the colonized literati, history enabled them to disassociate their humiliating colonized present from an ancient glorious past. Claiming a clear ownership over the historical narrative of ancient India was one way of bridging the dichotomy between the two.Footnote ⁵¹ In this context, the Mauryan empire in the third century BCE began to symbolize the expression of an all-India consciousness that could serve as a source of pride and strengthen the principles of nationhood.Footnote ⁵² Clearly, much more than Spooner's methodology was at stake in the controversy.

Questions regarding the roots of ancient Indian civilization did not die down with the dismal end of Spooner's theory. Rather the pages of the Journal would once again emerge as the locus of another such contention. This time two local artefacts—statues of two Saisunaka emperorsFootnote ⁵³—discovered in Bihar but housed in the Indian Museum in Calcutta were to serve as the kernel for contention.

Housed to inspire: the beginnings of the Patna Museum and provincial claims to an ancient past

The effort to establish a provincial museum in Bihar was neither a unique nor an unparalleled venture. While proposals to establish a museum in Patna were being discussed, provincial and local museums had sprouted up all over India, ranging from Madras (1851) to Srinagar (1886) as well as Nagpur, Lucknow, Mathura, and Raipur in the intervening years. The celebration of Queen Victoria's silver jubilee in 1887 added further momentum to the ‘museum movement’, with the establishment of museums in Jaipur, Udaipur, Rajkot, and Vijayawada. But it was during the early twentieth century and under John Marshall's director generalship of the Archaeological Survey that the ‘museum movement’ was at its most intense.Footnote ⁵⁴ The archaeological wealth being uncovered in Bihar was the primary reason for the establishment of a provincial museum, for without it local archaeological artefacts would be claimed by the Indian Museum in Calcutta. Bihar's artefacts were not only symbolic of India's rich artistic and cultural heritage, but for the provincial literati they were also integral to making the case for the indispensability of the province's past. This led to the establishment of the Patna Museum.

Sachchidananda Sinha recognized the significance of a provincial museum and put forward the proposal for a museum in Patna during the same meeting in January 1915 that had established the BORS.Footnote ⁵⁵ It may seem surprising that despite local interest in establishing a museum, particularly for a province that yielded a wealth of artefacts, the progress towards this goal was slow and staggered: it was only in 1929 that the province had a fully functioning museum building. The delay was always attributed to a tight budget.Footnote ⁵⁶ In 1916, the early collection of exhibits for the museum was first housed at the Commissioner's Bungalow. After Edward Gait formally established the Patna Museum in April 1917, the exhibits were moved to the North Wing of the Patna High Court.Footnote ⁵⁷ Although a temporary arrangement, this invigorated the search for articles of interest. During this time the Museum itself remained a storehouse of artefacts until it was finally opened to the public in June 1921 when it instantly began attracting visitors, averaging about 40 a day.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Patna Museum remained attached to the Patna High Court until 1929 when the Museum building was finally inaugurated.

Speaking at the inaugural ceremony, P. C. Manuk, president of the managing committee of the Museum, pointedly remarked that a museum was necessary in order for the province to retain fragments of its past as they were discovered, rather than them being carted away to the Indian Museum. He reminded his audience that, ‘Prior to the separation of Bihar and Orissa from Bengal in 1912, every object of archaeological interest found within the geographical limits of this province was exiled to the Indian Museum at Calcutta.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Established in 1814 to ‘showcase of the splendour of the British Indian empire’,Footnote ⁶⁰ the Indian Museum became the repository for artefacts discovered in Bihar while also serving as a ‘mother-institution that would hold a representative Indian collection’.Footnote ⁶¹ As early as 1820, artefacts like the Yaksha statues discussed below were carted away to Calcutta and presented to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which until 1878 also housed the Indian Museum.Footnote ⁶² The process was not limited to randomly discovered artefacts. Rather, the primacy of the Indian Museum was clearly evident when an archaeological museum at Bihar Sharif, housing the collections of A. M. Broadley,Footnote ⁶³ was removed to the Indian Museum in 1891. A belief that the interests of scholars and students would best be served if the sculptures were housed there motivated the shift of these artefacts.Footnote ⁶⁴

Broadley was hopeful that owing to his efforts, his random collection of sculptures would become the basis for a ‘permanent local museum’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The artefacts and sculptures in the collection were extensive and chiefly representative of medieval Buddhist sculptures, some of which, according to Alexander Cunningham, were ‘very fine specimens of Indian sculpture’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The collection, ‘housed in a handsome serai built by the zemindars of Behar’,Footnote ⁶⁷ did attract considerable attention and became ‘a sort of place of pilgrimage for the country round’.Footnote ⁶⁸ At least locally, people were drawn to the collection not because they viewed the sculptures as ancient cultural artefacts and admired their aesthetic qualities, but rather because the objects were regarded as idols worthy of worship. Commenting on the misappropriation of what was supposed to be a secular space, Broadley wrote, ‘the descendants of Acoka's Brahmans at Rajagriha are beginning to look on it as a serious opposition, and to tremble lest it should cause a diminution in their income’.Footnote ⁶⁹ For the locals of this rural area, it was not yet the glorious ancient past that was worthy of worship. Rather, here the line between the museum as a ‘wonder house’ and a site of knowledge production was blurred.Footnote ⁷⁰ In this instance, the notion of a museum was displaced by a sacred world view that marked it as a site where all the sacred deities had converged.

Public interest in a provincial museum was high and questions regarding its nature and purpose were debated in the provincial papers. In one such instance, Sarat Chandra Mitra, a pleader in the district judge's court in Chapra, argued against limiting the museum to becoming simply a repository for archaeological and ethnographic artefacts as some had suggested.Footnote ⁷¹ In his view Indian visitors generally took ‘great interest in stuffed specimens of mammals and birds’, which he had witnessed during his visits to the Indian Museum. Perhaps, as Gyan Prakash suggests, scientific knowledge displayed in the museums ‘face[d] the eyes of the curious, not those of the superstitious’ which was reflected the curiosity of the visitors Mitra encountered.Footnote ⁷² Modelled after the Indian Museum, Mitra argued for a Natural History section in the proposed museum, and he was certainly not alone in suggesting the Indian Museum as a model for the proposed provincial museum. His views were endorsed by the Behar Herald and were also favoured by Sachchidananda Sinha in whose Allahabad-based journal, Hindustan Review, Mitra first made the argument.

Taking its cue from the Indian Museum, the proposed museum in Patna sought to become a microcosm of the province it represented. As a result, it had sections dedicated to geology, art and industry, photographs and drawings, ethnology, and numismatics.Footnote ⁷³ Yet, given the extensive collection, archaeological artefacts commanded pride of place in the Museum. Thus the exhumed fragmentary relics of a past were now to perform a dual function which were partially embodied in their particularity as historic relics but were also ‘accorded a representative function’ which serialized them as part of a narrative that linked the present to the past.Footnote ⁷⁴

Following the formal establishment of the Patna Museum, a concerted effort to collect artefacts began. In 1916, during the foundational stages of the Museum, the more interesting of the early exhibits that found its way there was the ‘Persepolitan-like capital’ found at Bulandibagh, Patna, in course of D. B. Spooner's explorations.Footnote ⁷⁵ At the same time, Spooner also provided the Museum with a collection of seals from the Gupta period, and some terracotta figurines. But it was not until 1917 that the Museum acquired what has been labelled as it ‘chiefest treasure’—a life-size sculpture of a lady Chauri bearer of the Mauryan period found at Didarganj (Patna) on the banks of the Ganges.Footnote ⁷⁶ This Yakshi statue, also known as the Didarganj Yakshi, would eventually come to be seen as an iconic representation of Indian art.Footnote ⁷⁷ Alongside efforts to ascribe an iconic status to the statue, replicas and picture postcards of the statue began to serve as mementos of the provincial museum.Footnote ⁷⁸ This image, resurrected first from oblivion and then from the locals who had set it up for ritual worship, was to adorn the walls and mantelpieces of middle-class Indians, not as a ritual object but as a representation of a glorified artistic past.

Unlike the Yakshi image, the transfer of another set of antiquities from Spooner's Pataliputra excavations was less straightforward and was perhaps the Museum's first real battle to lay claim to be the rightful repository for provincial antiquities. In 1920 the Museum acquired what, until then, were probably its largest and most important objects: the Pataliputra antiquities, which had been excavated by Spooner and lavishly funded by Ratan Tata. The rightful claimants of these antiquities were subject to much controversy, with the Patna Museum, the Archaeology Department, and the trust of the deceased patron of the Pataliputra excavations, Ratan Tata, all laying equal claim to them.Footnote ⁷⁹ Among the antiquities are pieces of a royal umbrella in mirror-like polished stone, a gold flower with tendrils, glass seals inscribed in Brahmi characters of the third and fourth century BCE, articles made of iron, and terracotta figures including the laughing girl and grinning boy—all of which were displayed in the Pataliputra room especially set up for the purpose.Footnote ⁸⁰ Given the level of controversy, when the antiquities finally made it to the galleries of the Patna Museum, they must have truly appeared as a ‘windfall’ gain to the Museum authorities.Footnote ⁸¹ Yet, more importantly, this episode added further legitimacy to the province's claim to all future antiquities found within its boundaries.

As the quantity of exhibits increased and the need for expansion became ever more pressing, the makeshift arrangement in the North Wing of the Patna High Court was more and more inadequate. The initiative to set up a new museum building was taken up in 1925 and Bishun Swarup, the chief engineer of the Public Works Department, along with Sohan Lal and Brij Narayan were assigned the task of designing an appropriate building.Footnote ⁸² With final plans approved in December 1926, construction began soon after and culminated in an Indo-Saracenic or Mogul-Rajput-style building.Footnote ⁸³ Finally, in 1929 the Museum's time in the Patna High Court ended, almost 15 years since its inception.

The Patna Museum became a popular attraction, drawing close to 60,000 visitors between November 1929 and March 1930, and the full count of visitors the following year was almost double that number.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Museum certainly served as a necessary educational institution indispensable ‘in all modern civilized communities’. But with an average of about 300 visitors daily it is clear that the institution had a more popular appeal that transcended educational or research interests. It was expected that within the ‘well-lit and restful galleries’, students and scholars would find enough materials that were either informative or worth investigating. The Museum's galleries were also arranged to provide a panoramic view of the region's past. Beginning with the pre-historic fossil tree of the Vaisali Republic, the gallery guided the visitor ‘on to the Mauryan period when Hindustan was virtually ruled from Pataliputra, the site of modern Patna, by Chandragupta and the great Asoka, 300 years before Christ’. From there the visitor would continue on to ‘the Sunga period, to the Kushans of the Christian Era, and to the medieval period’. However, most visitors shared little of the enthusiasm expressed by scholars and students of history: to them the Museum was ‘a source of happy diversion from the daily round’.Footnote ⁸⁵ More importantly, unlike museums in Europe, where knowledge was arranged and presented to the viewer as the story of the progress of mankind, the colonial museum became a repository of former greatness and thus a source of solace to the provincial literati. Although their modes of inquiry and their historical frameworks were anchored to the province of Bihar, their narratives generally braided a national past as well pointing towards the impossibility of an exclusive regional history that could account for a Bihari people. Therefore neither the Museum nor the Research Society could remain exclusively provincial in its focus. This becomes highly evident as artefacts found within the province began to serve as markers of particular epochs of the Indian past.

Presenting the past: ancient sculptures and modern histories

The promise of monumental finds inspired much of the Pataliputra explorations but what the excavations yielded were small terracotta figurines and fragments of antiquities. Even before stock was taken, there were some locals who were sceptical of the whole enterprise, particularly in the wake of Spooner's fanciful theory. If resources were spent only to unearth ‘Persepolis at Patna’, were these the archaeological relics that were to inspire and fire up the historical imagination?Footnote ⁸⁶ Such doubts were laid to rest in 1917, through the accidental finding of the Didarganj Yakshi.Footnote ⁸⁷ Additionally, its discovery also instigated a controversy regarding the status of what Jayaswal referred to as ‘statues of two Saisunaka emperors’, who heralded them as evidence of ancient India's home-grown knowledge of sculpting in-the-round. Each of these sculptures was not the outcome of painstaking archaeological findings; instead they were all accidental discoveries.

Spooner has provided a detailed account of the Didarganj Yakshi's journey from the banks of the Ganges to the Patna Museum. A square block of stone, partially exposed owing to the erosion of the riverbank, caught the attention of Maulavi Qazi Saiyid Muhammad Azimul on 18 October 1917. Expecting to find a stone useful for domestic purposes, Azimul scraped away earth from the projecting stone only to discover ‘a complete and fairly large-sized statue’. This was subsequently moved a few hundred yards up the Ganges by, in Spooner's words, ‘unauthorized persons’, was set up under a canopy, and ‘speedily invested with the character of an incipient shrine’ where it was worshipped ‘under the mistaken notion that the figure was a Hindu deity’. It was only due to the timely intervention of J. N. Samaddar, a member of the Society and professor at Patna College, that the statue was removed from the sanctified domain of religion to that of history and archaeology. Samaddar brought the discovery of the statue to the attention of E. H. C. Walsh, vice-president of the BORS and president of the Patna Museum Committee. Upon inspecting the statue ‘the importance of the treasure was at once disclosed’ to Walsh who, along with Spooner, was able to convince the worshippers that ‘the figure was merely an attendant, bearing a chowry, and thus clearly no member of the Hindu pantheon, nor entitled to worship of any kind by any community’. Walsh then proceeded to take energetic steps ‘towards the recovery or rescue of the image’ which finally brought it ‘in safety and triumph within the walls of the Patna Museum before the close of the year’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The authority exerted by the colonial state is inescapable here as it allowed for the ‘statue to be quickly salvaged from its “unauthorized” worshippers for the “authorized” claims of history and archaeology’.Footnote ⁸⁹ By the time of its removal to the Museum, the object had been through several incarnations but was ultimately set up not as an object of worship, but as an iconic representation of ancient Indian art.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Yakshi was sent abroad in 1947 for an ‘Exhibition of Art from the Dominions of India and Pakistan’ held in London, and again in 1980 when it travelled to France and the USA as part of the ‘Festival of India’ exhibitions, further highlighting its status as an Indian icon.Footnote ⁹¹

Once the Didarganj Yakshi was brought within the purview of the provincial museum, scholars debated its iconography and contested its chronological placement. It was the labelling of this statue as a ‘Yakshini’ that attracted the notice of Jayaswal. In order to curb his dissatisfaction with this nomenclature he focused his attention on two other life-size male statues housed in the Indian Museum, Calcutta. These were described by Alexander Cunningham as ‘Yakshas’ and had been labelled as such based on the identification of a similar statue found at Parkham (Mathura).Footnote ⁹² While the true identification of these statues remains unresolved,Footnote ⁹³ as the debate unfolded it brought to the fore questions regarding the indigeneity of free-standing stone sculptures in India. Additionally, during this entire debate, although the Yakshi and the Yakshas were found in the vicinity of Patna, little attempt was made by Jayaswal or others to construct a narrative of the existence of a highly developed knowledge of art in ancient Bihar, instead they emphasized Indian art.

The two Yaksha statues stirred up a storm of controversy among antiquarians, thanks to Jayaswal labelling them as the images of two Saisunaka emperors dating back to 483–409 BCE. These dates are quite crucial as they pointed to a home-grown knowledge of stone sculpting in ancient India and served to counter the Persian and Hellenistic ties that had always been ascribed to such sculptures by European scholars. Hence when Coomaraswamy argued for the Indian origins of the Buddha image, he pointed to the Yaksha statues to claim that ‘Craftsmen capable of producing the Parkham and Patna images and the reliefs at Bharhut and Sanci would have had no difficulty in representing Gautama in human form had they been required to do so.’Footnote ⁹⁴ It was the inveterate traveller and surveyor, Francis Buchanan, who discovered one of the Yaksha statues on the banks of the Ganges in 1812. On noticing Buchanan's interest in the statue, the locals referred him to the field where they had found the image and set it up for worship. But a great fire during the occasion caused them to throw the statue into the Ganges. Upon visiting the site Buchanan discovered a similar statue and was also informed of a third statue that had been carted away by a Mr Hawkins several years before. Buchanan described the statues as being ‘nearly of a natural size, and very clumsy’. He added that they differed from the Hindu images for they were ‘not carved in relief with its hinder parts adhering to the rock’, but were ‘completely formed’.Footnote ⁹⁵ These two figures came into the possession of a Dr Tytler, whose brother presented them to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1820. The statues lay there ‘neglected for forty years hidden amongst the foliage’ until J. D. M. Beglar brought them to the attention of Cunningham. Later in 1879 the statues were removed to the Indian Museum where they were installed on raised pedestals in the Bharhut gallery. Aside from the one removed by Hawkins, Cunningham found another statue belonging to the same group near Agam Kuan, located to the south of Patna City, where ‘mounted with a new head it was being worshipped in his day as Mata-Mai by the villagers’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Unlike the quick appropriation of the Didarganj statue into the service of history and archaeology, Cunningham was most likely unable to divest the image of Mata-Mai of its divinity in order to take possession of it, for even in 1919, Jayaswal continued to believe that the statue was still somewhere in the vicinity of Agam Kuan.

When the statues were brought to Cunningham's attention he remarked that ‘the easy attitude and the calm and dignified repose of the figures are still conspicuous, and claim for them a high place amongst the best specimens of early Indian art’.Footnote ⁹⁷ In 1919, Jayaswal once again drew attention to the statues and went on to proclaim that, ‘As historic monuments they are not only the most important remains in India but have to be classed amongst the important pieces of the world.’ He went on to add that those who executed such masterpieces were artists who ‘have succeeded on the whole in producing the effect of majesty with masterly chisel’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Proclaiming the ingenuity of the sculptors, Jayaswal claimed that the knowledge of sculpting and the polish both ‘pointed to an Indian origin’. Finally, he asserted that the two statues carried the art of sculpting ‘two centuries back from the date alleged for its import from Persia’Footnote ⁹⁹ and that the two statues in the Indian Museum ‘represent two emperors of the Saisunaka dynasty’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Jayaswal's theory stirred up quite a controversy, with one set of scholars claiming them to be the statues of kings, while another declared them to be mere icons, most likely Yakshas, a label first placed on the statues by Cunningham.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Central to the controversy was the very indigeneity of the knowledge of free-standing human sculpting, and this is exactly what Haraprasad Shastri sought to establish in support of Jayaswal's theory. He pointed out that, ‘The present idea is that India owes much of her civilization to Persia. The Asoka sculptures are said to have received their finish and technique from Persian artists. There is a prima facie ground for suggesting this view as the Maurya Empire came into existence after the fall of the Persian Empire.’Footnote ¹⁰² But even when evidence to the contrary was available, many scholars refused to accept it. For instance, as Shastri pointed out, ‘The discovery of the Piprahwa vase with an inscription in a script similar to that of Asoka and with a polish superior to that on the sculptures of Asoka threw doubts on the Persian theory. But the adherents of that theory tried to explain away a single instance like that as an anomaly.’Footnote ¹⁰³ In this case Shastri saw no legitimate grounds for scholars to continue to deny the indigeneity of this particular art form. In the course of this debate, the theme of indigeneity became the core issue, particularly since it invoked a theme of ‘Indianness’, and both the ‘primitive’ and the more ‘refined’ form of sculpting became crucial metaphors to point to an ancient home-grown history of Indian sculpture—one that was devoid of any Persian or Hellenic influences.