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FOR INDIANS: - Alexander pursued and provided the concept to the colonial masters about the significance of the ‘Archaeological Survey’ for a country and it was conceived in a small scale in 1860s. In 1871, the Survey was revived as a separate department and Alexander Cunningham was appointed as its first Director-General. To this day, Alexander Cunningham is revered as the "Father of Indian Archaeology".
FOR THE PEOPLE OF BIHAR: - Apart from exploring Bodh Gaya and Rajgir, Cunningham had crisscrossed the whole terrain of Bihar to explore the archaeological sites which included Patna, Kurkihar, Parvati, Aphsar,Shahpur,Sheikhpura, Rajjana, Munger, Bhimbandh, Singi-Rikhi, Jahngira, Bhagalpur, Kahalgaon, Patharghatta, Kankjol, Tirhut, Hajipur, Vaishali, Bakhra, Kesariya, Sagar-dih, Sita Kund,Deokalli, Sitamarhi, Kako, Dharawat, Kauwa-dol, Pret-sila, Konch, Deo-Markendeya, Deo-Barunark, Sugauli, Lauriya Nandangarh, Rampurva, Padaraona, Gaya, Bodh Gaya and many more.......
Today, Mahabodhi Temple site is the UNESCO's ‘WORLD HERITAGE SITE’, whose one of the pioneer was Alexandar Cunningham.
BRIEF LIFE SKETCH OF ALEXANDER CUNNIGHAM – THE ‘FATHER OF INDIAN ARCHAEOLOGY’
Sir Alexander Cunningham KCIE CSI (23 January 1814 – 28 November 1893) was a British army engineer with the Bengal Engineer Group who later took an interest in the history and archaeology of India which led to his appointment in 1861 to the newly created position of archaeological surveyor to the government of India. In 1871, the Survey was revived as a separate department and Cunningham was appointed as its first Director-General. To this day, Alexander Cunningham is revered as the "Father of Indian Archaeology". He wrote numerous books and monographs and made massive collections of artefacts. Some of his collections were lost but most of the gold and silver coins and a fine group of Buddhist sculptures and jewellery were bought by the British Museum in 1894.
EARLY LIFE
1. He was born in London to the Scottish poet Allan Cunningham (1784–1842) and his wife Jean née Walker (1791–1864).
2. Along with his older brother Joseph Cunningham, he received his early education at Christ's Hospital, London.
3. Allan and Alexander obtained cadetships through the influence of Sir Walter Scott and went to study at the East India Company's Addiscombe Seminary (1829–31), and at the Royal Engineers Estate at Chatham.
4. He joined the Bengal Engineers at the age of 19 in 1833; as a Second Lieutenant and spent the next 28 years in the service of British Government of India.
5. He was ADC to Lord Auckland, the Governor-General of India from 1836 to 1840.
6. During this period he visited Kashmir, which was then not well explored. He finds mention by initials in Up the Country by Emily Eden.
7. On 30 March 1840, he married Alicia Maria Whish, daughter of Martin Whish B.C.S.
8. He was appointed Colonel of the Royal Engineers in 1860. Cunningham retired on 30th June, 1861, having attained the rank of Major General.
LIFE OF AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXPLORER
1. Soon after arriving in India on 9 June 1833, Cunningham met James Prinsep. He was in daily communication with Prinsep during 1837 and 1838 and became his intimate friend, confidant and pupil.[3]
2. James Prinsep had passed on to Cunningham, his lifelong interest in Indian archaeology and antiquity and that is why; Cunningham had taken a keen interest in antiquities early in his career.
3. In 1834 he wrote to the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, an appendix to James Prinsep's article on the relics in the Manikyala Tope. He had conducted excavations at Sarnath in 1837 along with Colonel F.C. Maisey and made careful drawings of the sculptures.
4. The works of two Chinese monks, Fa-hien and Hiuen-Tsang (Zuang Zang) had become available to the British in the 1840s and 1850s through French translations, and they were quickly seen as India’s version of the work of the Greek author Pausanias
5. As Cunningham belonged to that period; the core of his archaeological career was to identify the places mentioned by the two Chinese monks, Fa-hien and Hiuen-Tsang (Zuang Zang).
6. In the Indian context, following Jean-Baptiste Ventura, general of Ranjit Singh, who inspired by the French explorers in Egypt had excavated the bases of pillars to discover large stashes of Bactrian and Roman coins, excavations became a regular activity among British antiquarians since then and Cunningham also followed suite.
7. In 1842 he excavated at Sankissa and at Sanchi in 1851.
8. In 1848, he identified some of the places mentioned in the travels of Hiuen Tsang (Zuang Zang).
9. In 1854 he published The Bhilsa Topes, an attempt to establish the history of Buddhism based on architectural evidence.
10. Cunningham visited Rajgir for the first time in 1861-62 and again in 1872-4 But he had prefigured it as specifically ‘Buddhist’ from at least 1843, when he first announced his programme for utilizing the Chinese records to locate Buddhism's most significant sites, including Rajagrha.
11. In 1848 he published his proposal for systematic archaeological investigation in India, most of which is devoted to a justification of the study of Buddhist remains. Hindu ruins are mentioned once, its texts are dismissed as useless, and Islam is referred to only as the force that destroyed Buddhism. When he arrived at Rajgir, he therefore spent his energies identifying as many Buddhist structures as he could.
12. By 1851 he also began to communicate to William Henry Sykes and the East India Company on the value of an archaeological survey.
13. In 1851, he explored the Buddhist monuments of Central India along with Lieutenant Maisey, and wrote an account of these.[10]
14. In 1861, Charles John Canning, then the viceroy of India appointed Cunningham as archaeological surveyor to the government of India.] This position was held from 1861 to 1865 but this was terminated due to lack of funds.
15. Cunningham returned to England and wrote the first part of his Ancient Geography of India (1871) to cover the Buddhist period but failed to complete the second part to cover the Muslim period. During this period in London he worked as director of the Delhi and London Bank.
BRITISH APPROACH TO INDIA’S PAST: - TUSSLE BETWEEN MODERNISTS AND HARDLINERS VIS-A-VIS CUNNINGHAM’S POSITION
1. Since the mid-eighteenth century, several scholars, of whom Sir William Jones (1746-94) was the most famous, developed
i. The concept of an India that had more or less declined from a golden age. They defined this golden age as the period in which Hinduism's Vedic texts, which were just being discovered and translated, were composed.
ii. If India was to progress, it needed to do so by rediscovering this past and learning from Europe through the medium of its own languages.
2. A counter movement, developing from the late eighteenth century and represented in the nineteenth by commentators on the condition of India (most notably James Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay) rejected this view of Indian history.
i. Instead, India had never had a past that could be valued and it had been held back in particular by the brahman priesthood.
ii. Progress (which included the spread of Christianity) could be made only through separating the country from its past and by Anglicizing its language and society.
The two camps were in conflict in the early part of the nineteenth century, but the modernizers won the day, well before the Indian Mutiny of 1857 hardened British opinion even further. Strangely, accounts of this debate have tended to underplay both the role of archaeology and the place of Buddhist studies in it.
3. In Cunningham's early writings, one sees a position distinct from both. Alexander Cunningham had come from an antiquarian and Romantic background.
i. His father was Allan Cunningham, who collected folk songs of the Scottish Highlands and who was an associate of Sir Waiter Scott (the man responsible for gaining Alexander his India commission).
ii. Once in India, Cunningham came under the wing of James Prinsep (1799-1840), the leader of the local antiquarian community there, who helped develop his interest in the Indian past.
iii. But the modernizing camp was already strong, and Cunningham's position represents a blending of the two.
iv. Cunningham’s perception: - He believed that India had indeed enjoyed a golden age, but a Buddhist one, the era in which Buddhism had been the dominant faith. That religion had fallen and India was now in the grip of Hinduism and Islam. However, archaeology had a role to play in the recovery of this Buddhist past, and therefore in India's future.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF INDIA
1. In 1870, Lord Mayo re-established the Archaeological Survey of India with Cunningham as its director-general from 1 January 1871.
2. Cunningham returned to India and made field explorations each winter, conducting excavations and surveys from Taxila to Gaur.
3. He produced twenty-four reports, thirteen as author and the rest under his supervision by others such as J. D. Beglar.
4. Other major works included the first volume of Corpus inscriptionum Indicarum (1877) which included copies of the edicts of Asoka, the Stupa of Bharhut (1879) and the Book of Indian Eras (1883) which allowed dating of Indian antiquities. He retired from the Archaeological Survey on 30 September 1885 and returned to London to continue his research and writing.
5. Cunningham made a large numismatic collection, but much of this was lost when the steamship he was travelling in, the Indus, was wrecked off the coast of Sri Lanka in November 1884.
6. The British Museum however obtained most of the gold and silver coins.
7. He had suggested to the British Museum that they should use the arch from the Sanchi Stupa to mark the entrance of a new section on Indian history.
8. He also published numerous papers in the Journal of the Asiatic Society and the Numismatic Chronicle.
AWARDS AND MEMORIALS
1. He was awarded the CSI on 20 May 1870 and CIE in 1878.
2. In 1887, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire.[4]
3. Cunningham died on 28 November 1893 at his home in South Kensington and was buried at Kensal Green cemetery, London.
PUBLICATIONS
Some Books written by him include:
1. LADĀK: Physical, Statistical, and Historical with Notices of the Surrounding Countries (1854).
2. Bhilsa Topes (1854), a history of Buddhism
3. The Ancient Geography of India (1871)
4. Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum. Volume 1. (1877)
5. The Stupa of Bharhut: A Buddhist Monument Ornamented with Numerous Sculptures Illustrative of Buddhist Legend and History in the Third Century B.C.(1879)
6. The Book of Indian Eras (1883)
7. Coins of Ancient India (1891)
8. Mahâbodhi, or the great Buddhist temple under the Bodhi tree at Buddha-Gaya (1892)
CUNNINGHAM’S PLACE IN HISTORY
Cunningham might have his limitations due to his upbringing in the Victorian age where colonial arrogance and Christian religious perception had its influence in his mindset but his progressive outlook for the love of antiquarian remains and love for exploring the historical past has made him very special and he is rightly figured as the pioneer of the Indian Archaeology.
REFERENCES AND EXCERPTS
1. Sir Alexander Cunningham and the beginnings of Indian Archaeology by Iman, Abu (1966) (Asiatic Society of Pakistan, Dacca)
2. The Buddhists landscapes of Rajgir, Northern India by Robert Harding (Archeology International)
3. Wikepedia
4. Report of a tour in Bihar and Bengal in 1879-80 from Patna to Sonargaon (Archaeological Survey of India)
5. Report of a tour in North and South Bihar in 1880-81 (Archaeological Survey of India).
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What are the exact coordinates of Sagardih
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