The discovery of a monument
By Manohar Malgonkar

I AM one of those who hold the view that while our ancient monuments are a boon for our tourism industry, the tourism industry is not necessarily a good thing for our monuments.

The classic case, of course is that of the Ajanta caves. They date back to the third century B.C. and even the later caves were created, if that is the word, in the sixth century A.D. which means that their creation had gone on for something like 900 years. They were used as places of worship, meditation, classrooms or as living quarters for a religious order. The Chinese traveller, Hiuen Tsang visited these caves in the mid-seventh century, but since then there is no mention in history of anyone else having seen them. It was as though they had dropped out of the scene, erased from public memory.

They were discovered by some British army officers who had been out on a hunting trip, in 1819, and soon won fame as one of India’s treasures. Art critics have praised their sense of reality, and their exuberance. "Never again would Indian painting achieve these great heights," Robert Payne tells us.

The point is that, at the time of their discovery, the Ajanta frescoes which were more than 1000 years old and had been remarkably well-preserved. In the less than two centuries that have elapsed since their presence became known, most of these paintings are faded, their surfaces scorched or peeled off and the paint cracked. This is because the earlier visitors to the caves used to light little bonfires of straw within the caves to be able to see the paintings clearly, and later on they began to take in kerosene flares.

Imagine someone taking a kerosene flare into the Tate Gallery or the Prado!

It is a good thing that most of our other treasures from the past are far less fragile. By and large, they’re temples constructed in stone, and should thus be thought to be imperishable. Alas, most of our temples were the principal targets of waves of conquerors. And the very few that somehow managed to escape total or even partial destructions have been steadily vandalised by human bandicoots who make a business of selling hacked out sculptures as souvenirs.

Some 30 years ago, I took John Morris, who had earlier headed the BBC’s prestigious Third Programme, to see the Badami caves. I quote from Morris’s account of the visit:

"While I was waiting a man approached me with a piece of sculpture wrapped in a dirty cloth. It was a female head, much weathered and inexpertly hacked from the rest of the body. ‘Fifteen rupees’ the man said in English...but when I asked him how he came to possess the head...he made off as though pursued by a bulldog."

That is just it. There are those among us who will bash a statue 1000 years old to be able to sell its head for the price of a shirt. Oh, yes, in those days you could buy quite a decent shirt for that price.

So it is with a mixed feeling that I report the discovery of the Mahadeva temple at a place called Tambde Surle in Goa which, like the Ajanta caves, had all but dropped out of the scene for nearly 700 years. That temple is Goa’s oldest monument and a real boom to its already overblown tourist industry. Did its finder do a disservice to the temple itself?

The reason why no one even in Goa knew of the existence of the temple was its inaccessibility. It stands by itself on a spur of the mountains, isolated, because even the village after which it is known, Tambde Surle, is a couple of kilometres away. There was no way to getting to it except over a footpath that snaked through some of India’s most difficult terrain; towering mountains and deep valleys covered with dark, matted jungle and which, for three months every year, June through August, is battered by torrential rain.

In the spring of the year 1935, the Portuguese administration in Goa sent up a survey team to this area with a view to constructing a cart-track to join some of the outlying villages in these mountains to Goa’s road network. One of the members of this team was a young man called Anant Dhume who, even though working in the survey department, was greatly interested in Goa’s history. Camped under canvas in the eastern part of the Sanguen taluka of Goa, one of the local workmen told Dhume that there was an old temple within a couple of hours’ of walking distance. Dhume decided to go and see this temple, and reports that he had to engage a guide to show him the way.

"I was surprised," Dhume tells us, in an account he wrote many years later.

Surprised? was that all? Well, I who saw that temple 47 years later confess to have been struck speechless. I and the artist Mario Miranda were taken to see the temple by officials of the Goa Government. This was in 1982, when the road to Tambde Surle was a barely jeepable cart-track, and then, still some 2 km from our destination, we found that we had to get out and walk the rest of the distance because there was no bridge across the rivulet called Ragoda. We had to hop from rock to rock to cross the stream and then go on a few hundred yards through dense forest and suddenly, it was there, as Christopher Turner who has written an excellent guidebook on Goa describes it: "the temple nestling in the mountains dramatically appearing without warning."

I have myself described that first sight of the Tambde Surle temple as being like walking into a cultural ambush.

Anyhow, stunned, astonished, or merely surprised, young Dhume, practical to the last, got down to taking measurements and copying some of the inscriptions on stones and otherwise to collect as much evidence as he could to show as proof that a temple really existed in this remote part of Goa. After he returned to his base in Panjim, he reported his findings to his maternal uncle, Dr P. Pisurlenkar, one of India’s most eminent historians, who, at the time, was employed in the Archives department of the Government of Goa. Pisurlenkar, in turn, passed on Dhume’s notes to his own chief, Major Hygino Lopez. This Lopez was obviously a human dynamo. He made up his mind to go and see the temple himself, doing the last 20 km or so on horseback.

Major Lopez was so impressed by Tambde Surle, that he prevailed upon the Governor General of Goa, Carvario Lopez, to declare Tambde Surle as a national monument. The Governor-General also happened to be Major Lopez’s father.

Somehow it just seems right that this man Hygino Lopez, the very first non-Indian to have taken the trouble to go and see Tambde Surle, should rise high in life.

He did. He became the President of Portugal.