Kumrahar
Kumrahar, located in Patna, Bihar, is historically significant as part of ancient Pataliputra, the capital of the Mauryan and Gupta empires. Excavations have revealed an 80-pillared hall and evidence of advanced urban planning, alongside artifacts that reflect its cultural and religious connections to Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. Preservation challenges include flooding, encroachment, and urbanization. The excavations of D. B. Spooner in 1912-13 at Kumrahar, and of M. Ghosis at Bulandibagh in 1926-8 had led to important discoveries and it was felt that further work might be started at these sites. There were questions of practical consideration also, which suggested the same course. Dr. A. S. Altekar, then the Hony. Director of the Institute, was also a University Professor at Patna University and the student supervisors of excava tions, who belonged to his post-graduate classes, could not conveniently stay away from Patna for a long time. It was, therefore, decided to further excavate the area at Kumrahar, situated 34 miles to the east of Patna Junction Railway station. The excavations were started on the 28th of March, 1951 with the co-operation of the Archaeological Department and the Patna University. Shri Krishna Deva, M.A., Superintendent, Archaeological Department, Mid-Eastern Circle, Patna (1949-53) and his successor, Dr. D. R. Patil, M.A., Ph.D., offered valuable co-operation in the excavation work. Shri Krishna Deva acted as Field-Director in the first season and later on offered valuable advice and guidance. The coins and iron objects. The Superintendent, Archaeological Department, Mid-Eastern Circle, Patna, placed the services of his photographer at our disposal whenever they were needed. The excavations of the 1st season, (March to May, 1951) were carried on almost entirely by the staff and students of the Department of Ancient Indian History and Culture, Patna University. The main work was entrusted to Shri Vijayakanta Mishra, the-then Research Assistant in the above Department. Dr. B. P. Sinha, Mr. Basudeva Upadhyaya and Mr. M. M. Singh of the Department of Ancient Indian History and Culture, Patna University, Mr. Yogendra Mishra of the History Department of Patna College and Messrs. A. K. Narain, Mangal Nath and Ratan Chandra Agarwal of Banaras Hindu University, Mr. R. K. Chaudhari of Begusarai College and Mr. B. N. Mishra of Nalanda Museum also offered valuable help. Besides all the post-graduate students of the Department of Ancient Indian History and Culture participated in the work. From the second season (January to April, 1952), Mr. Vijayakanta Mishra, who had been then appointed Research Fellow at the K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute, worked as the Field-Director. Besides Dr. B. P. Sinha, Mr. Basudeva Upadhyaya, Mr. Madan Mohan Singh, Research Assistant, and the post-graduate students of the Department of Ancient Indian History and Culture and Mr. D. K. Sinha of the Banaras Hindu University, Messrs. R. C. Agarwal, Aruna Deva Singh, Bhaskar Nath Mishra and Yogendra Mishra also offered valuable assistance as field supervisors, During the third year excavation, (January to July, 1953) Mr. R. K. Sharma of the Chapra College, Messrs. M. S. Pandey, J. S. Jha and Q. Ahmed, Research Fellows of the Institute, two post-graduate students of the Department of Ancient Indian History and Culture, Patna University worked as supervisors. During the fourth excavation season (February to May, 1954) Pandit Shri Vishnu Lal Shastri, Messrs. Surendra Prasad and Mithilesh Kumar Sinha of History Department, Patna College and Messrs. Madan Mohan Singh, S. R. Roy, B. S. Varma and H. K. Prasad of Department of Ancient Indian History and Culture, Patna University, offered valuable assistance in the excavation. During the fifth season (January to April, 1955) the excavation was entirely conducted by the excava-tion staff of the Institute. Dr. A. S. Altekar, the then Hony. Director of the Institute, was guiding and super-vising the excavation operations except during the fourth excavation season (February to May, 1954), when he was away at Yale University, U.S.A., as a visting Lecturer. The Surveyor-cum-Draftsman Mr. S. K. Kaviraj and Photographer-cum-Draftsmen Messrs. S. Chatterji and N. Ghosh were of very great associated in the excavation and allied work. Spooner's annual reports to the Archaeologi-cal Survey of India and his article "The Zoro-astrian Period of Indian History" attest to the depth and breadth of his enquiries and erudi-tion. And yet, while Western archaeologists and art historians persist in the notion that a Maur-yan palace was discovered at Kumrahar, they do so without ever mentioning Spooner. Spooner was the only American archaeologist to have worked for the British Archaeological Survey of India. Given his thorough and persis-tent disposition, the story would have been vastly different had Spooner survived beyond his forty-sixth year. At the time of his death in 1925 he was still developing and refining his Persian theories. He began his career as Superintendent, Frontier Circle, in 1906, excavating Buddhist sites at Sahri-Bahlol and in 1907 at the nearby Takht-i-Bahi. At Shah-ji-ki-Dheri, he discovered the Kanishka reliquary. He became Superinten-dent, Eastern Circle, in 1910, exploring first at Basrah (Vaisali), and then at Patna and Nalanda. In addition to his field and circle supervisory work he often assumed administrative and edi-torial duties for the ASI Director General, John Marshall. In 1919 he was appointed Deputy Di-rector General. His colleagues may not always have agreed with his theories, but they respected his enterprise. For his services he was awarded an O.B.E. When in 1912 the Indian industrialist Mr. Ratan Tata proposed to give the ASI a gift of Rs. 20,000 a year toward excavations of the would-be palace of the Mauryan rulers, Spooner was se-lected to take charge of the exploration. In his initial report, Spooner noted that in 1892, at the Pataliputra site known as Bulandi Bagh, Col. L. A. Waddell had unearthed a sandstone column capital he thought was Persian. But Spooner chose to begin his explorations at Kum-rahar, to the south of Bulandi Bagh (fig. 1). On 7 February 1913, he uncovered most of a square substructure, laid out in ten rows of eight col-umns, a Mauryan pillared hall. On the southern end, he found a series of parallel wooden plat-forms (figs. 2-6). He wrote at the time: "The resulting plan thus exhibits a pronounced simi-larity in essential features with the famous hall of a hundred columns at Persepolis, and this to-gether with certain other established points of similarity would seem at present to indicate a probable connection between the two." For all Spooner's caution, the discovery must have been an exhilarating experience. As his earlier ASI reports and his Handbook to the Sculptures in the Peshawar Museum indicate, he had often remarked on evidence of Persian influences and workmanship throughout Gan-dhara. However, the Kumrahar explorations re-vealed only one probable piece of evidence, a large column, 14'3" high (fig. 7). It was the only full column he found at the site. On its bottom were a series of mason's marks. As to these, he found a similarity with Persian marks described in Diculafoy's L'art antique de la Perse, which he extended to Kumrahar (fig. 8). The other col-umns, he speculated, had sunk into the soft clay below (fig. 9). Unfortunately, in the season of 1913-1914, Spooner's field efforts to advance his Kumrahar-Persepolis connection were completely frustra-ted. Heavy monsoon floods, swamping "twenty or thirty thousand square feet" to a depth of between fourteen and twenty-two feet, rendered the site unworkable. Marshall commented: "In-deed, Dr. Spooner himself goes so far as to ex-press a regret that a report on the excavations] should be necessary at all at the present junc-ture, seeing that the problems that present themselves are so numerous and perplexing, and that the digging has not advanced far enough to enable him to approach them with any degree of confidence. Nevertheless, his conjectures, al-though admittedly tentative, are so interesting and suggestive in themselves that I feel reluc-tant to pass them by in silence." Indeed, the evidence was slim. Spooner's sup-ports for his argument for the Persian presence at Kumrahar were: 1) the columns; 2) their spac-ing the Persian and Indian systems of distance measurement are similar); 3) the discovery of a head of a statue he thought might have "stood in the hall", 4) the discovery of a seal depicting a three-storeyed hall, which he relates to the Per-sian talar, such as is found in the pillared hall at Persepolis and on the façade of Darius' tomb." Marshall remained skeptical. "Brilliant and at-tractive as these theories are," he wrote, "it must be borne in mind that the evidence on which they are based is at present very slender and that the explorer himself does not put them forward as anything more than reasonable conjectures. Unable to continue his exploration at Kum-rahar, Spooner turned his attention to other considerations, starting with "stratigraphical evidences" in the soil and debris, and in the pro-cess developing his pillar sinkage theory. His second line of enquiry involved extrapolating a enquiry Mauryan palace, of of which the pillared hall was but one part, from Lord Curzon's plan of Perse-polis. All about him at Kumrahar were mounds that appeared to conform to the plan. The ex ploratory trenches he dug revealed a brick wall and some artefacts, but no further evidence of a Mauryan palace, The site was still waterlogged in the 1914-1915 season. Spooner had used his leave time for preparing his article on the Persepolitan connec-tion for publication in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. In the field, he shifted his focus to Waddell's sites, especially Bulandi Bagh, where, he now stated, Waddell had unearthed a "Persian" capital in 1903. Here Spooner found a wooden palisade, reputedly the wall surround-ing the ancient city of Pataliputra as mentioned by Megasthenes. Back at Kumrahar, exploring the mounds contingent to the pillared hall, he found a "boundary wall" at the southwest cor-ner of the terrace. Again he tried to equate his discovery of the wall with the "Achemaedian platform" upon which the Persepolitan palace buildings stood. In attempting to trace the wall around the site, he encountered a Muslim cem-etery. At this point all work at Kumrahar ceased. Spooner's final discovery at Kumrahar, at a site southwest of the terrace known as Mauri Pokhar, was a potsherd bearing "a very unmistakable em-blem of the Zoroastrian fire altar (fig. 10). The figure is remarkably similar to that form of fire altar which is shown on the facade of Darius's tomb at Persepolis. The same device has been found at Vaisali and at Bhita on sealings, and we have even seen it among the seals recovered this year at this very site. "14 The site name, Spooner said, means Magian's Pool. Thus, he felt that the Persian/Mauryan connection was complete. 15 In this same report Spooner mentioned the publication of his article, "The Zoroastrian Period of Indian History." If the pillared hall at Kumrahar had been located from literary sources, surely a literary argument could be made for its significance in Indian history. For this he had called on his academic training as a classicist. He had attended Stanford University ("the one college in America where a mere undergrad-uate could take up the study of Sanskrit"), and Harvard University, where he completed a Ph.D. with Lanman. He had studied and taught in Tokyo (his "guru" was Takakusu), Benares and Berlin. It was his wife, also a student of Lan-man's, who had initially called his attention to the possible connection between Kumrahar and Persepolis." Spooner also read Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish. His sources range from the classi-cal through the European translations of the Chinese pilgrims' accounts (he even questioned some English renderings of the Chinese), to his European and Indian contemporaries in the fields of Indian and Persian archaeology, history of art and architecture, paleography, history, et-ymology, geography, numismatics and religious studies. In all, he cited some sixty-one sources. Briefly, Spooner argued for many and various parallels between Persian (Zoroastrian) and Indian customs and traditions, similarities in words and their meanings, sculptural conven-tions, all pointing to Persian origin of not only the Mauryan dynasty but the Sakyan dynasty (the family of the Buddha) and a decidedly Zoroastrian element, if not origination, of Bud-dhism. As E. A. Horne observed: "Such a revo-lutionary body of doctrine was unlikely to win ready acceptance." He noted that Spooner was in the process of completing a book "embodying his maturer views," which he had just about finished when he died. Lamenting his demise on the brink of a significant historic contribution, Horne said: "Already it seems certain that it will be necessary to re-examine Dr. Spooner's discov eries at Pataliputra, and the daring speculations which they suggested to him, from an entirely new angle. "19 However, this never happened. A. Berriedale Keith and F. W. Thomas offered criticism of some of his etymological points. Overall, Berrie-dale Keith was caustic, dismissive: The only conclusion to be drawn from the evidence is clear. Iran sic may and no doubt did lend India ideas of various kinds, in each case these must be carefully looked for and examined, and ascribed to Iran only if another and Indian origin is not possible and natural. A Zoroastrian period of Indian history never existed, nor indeed was any such existence to be expected.