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I WONDER how many people here know anything about the Museum in Kabul, but when I saw it for the first time – this was a truly long time ago – I was dazzled by the riches it contained: fine sculptures in Gandharan and Shahi styles; fragments of murals gathered from various sites and re-installed with care; the most delicate of ivories, including some famed ones from Begram; glittering jewellery. And then, suddenly, one heard that everything was gone. Afghanistan had become, yet again, a major theatre of war: all that one read about was sanguine, local upheavals, the Russian intrusion, the bitter battle of attrition that kept being fought on the ground for years. And, in the midst of all this, the museum and its treasures were being vandalised with great regularity: objects not destroyed so much as stolen, pilfered.
Something similar has been happening to Tibet and its art treasures. The great cultural heritage of that ravaged land became endangered the day Mao Tse-tung’s tanks moved into the reclusive Himalayan kingdom in 1951. For, with that invasion began a sustained, systematic attack on Tibetan art, language and culture. The story is long, and unspeakably sad. The fury of the Chinese attack on Tibetan culture became even more intense with the Cultural Revolution of 1966, and even if, in these matters, there has been some thaw in Mainland China in recent years, the culture of Tibet remains a favoured target of attack, some new wrinkle on an already angry brow appearing every other day. All those exquisitely fashioned Tibetan works – sculptures and paintings which are witnesses to a passion and an intensity not often matched elsewhere, mean little to the Chinese. That these are artefacts which are not only expressive of a deep faith but have in their own way sustained it over an unbroken period of centuries, is a matter of no concern to the occupying forces. Thangkas have been destroyed by the thousand, as have been gilt bronzes and manuscripts. If the Dalai Lama himself blessed those who were trying to smuggle sacred objects out of Tibet into the free world, having bought them from the monks, one can understand the pain behind the decision. |
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| Two uncommon – and hopeful –
bits of information came my way recently, in this
context, however, both reflecting deep concern with what
is happening to Tibetan art and heritage. One knows that,
in the west, there are many who are passionately fond of
Tibetan art; but one American couple – Shelley and
Donald Rubin – seems to have decided to try and save
Tibetan art in their own manner. Through a Foundation
bearing their name, they have created what is being
spoken of as "the world’s largest museum of
Tibetan painting": a virtual museum, if you like,
for it is on the internet, the site being named . On
this, one can visit not only the large collection of
thangkas that the Rubins own themselves, but an enormous
number of other works, because the site is open to all
– institutions and individuals alike – who
would like to place in it objects, information,
photographs, contextual material. A vast number of images
can be accessed in this fashion, and information
exchanged. The idea clearly is that if not all the works
themselves, at least their memory should survive, in this
fashion. The Foundation is also involved in supporting
small institutions should they be interested in sharing
information about their holdings in Tibetan art. As a
distinguished example of this is cited the case of a
little museum in Erie, Pennsylvania, which has ninety
little known Tibetan paintings in its collection –
gifted by some local donor who collected them at an early
point of time – and which is now being helped by the
Foundation, through a grant, to document them in great
detail. The second bit of information that comes in is of a very different order. This involves, surprisingly, a group of foreign residents in Tibet itself: Lhasa proper, in fact. Greatly disturbed by what was happening in terms of destruction of old sites and artefacts around them, these residents galvanised themselves into action and founded the Tibetan Heritage Fund, which serves as a funding agency for conservation on the one hand, and a pressure group on the other. It all started five years ago, when these foreigners saw what was happening in the heart of the old city of Lhasa, around the seventh-century Jokhang Temple. In the circular network of alleyways, known as the Barkor, old buildings were being pulled down to make way for high-rise cement lodges, which the Chinese State planners saw as being synonymous with ‘progress’. The Heritage Fund, using a variety of means and pressures, finally succeeded in halting the destruction of the area of Barkor, and has now, in fact, through sheer persistence and persuasion, emerged as a partner of the Cultural Relics Bureau set up by the Chinese. Buildings are being identified and tagged for official protection; metal plaques are going up everywhere; the living conditions of people occupying old buildings are also being improved. An extraordinary private initiative seems to be succeeding where even a programme set up by Unesco earlier had failed. Perhaps there is some hope in all this. Systematic wiping out Back to Afghanistan. I spoke first of what had happened to the collection of the National Museum in Kabul. But there is much more. Eyewitnesses, back from Afghanistan, report that a truly vast number of sites have been destroyed, or vandalised. The two monumental Buddha figures at Bamiyan – among the largest sculptures to have come down in history – have been a special target. The Great Buddha has suffered damage to its robe and upper body; the caves between the two Buddhas have been occupied by refugees, and the frescoes in them destroyed by smoke from wood and charcoal fires; the head of the smaller Buddha has been blown off by an act of deliberate iconoclasm. Meanwhile, objects looted from Bactrian and Kushan sites are, with depressing regularity, finding their way, via Uzbekistan, into the hands of the new Russian art mafia that has emerged. So much for the care that man takes of his past. |
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One got
to know about this when pieces from the collection
started appearing on the art market in the west. A few
museums and private collections were the richer for it,
but Afghanistan, and the world of art in general,
decidedly poorer.