Darkening of the sun temples

Angkor Vat, Konark: Temples that have been vandalised by antiquarians and "restored" by hamhanded repairers like the Archaeological Survey of India, depriving millions of windows into their aesthetic past

When the sun rises each morning, some of its early rays fall on many structures that our ancestors created all over the world to celebrate the sun's munificence. While the Sun Temples in Peru, Egypt, Angkor Vat in Cambodia, and Konark in India have meant, and continue to mean, different things to different people, they have imbued a sense of history into everyone who has had a chance to see them in their sunlit glory.

The vagaries of nature and rapacious human beings have ravaged many of these grand buildings. For years, dense foliage hid Konark till an Englishman rediscovered it in the 19th century. Angkor Vat was probably vandalised the worst: an ensemble of many temples and royal living quarters, Angkor Vat today stands as humanity's most breathtaking work of art. Angkor Vat has faced wars, vandals, and a tropical forest where trees have a way of elbowing through stone, bringing down hefty stone pillars. The temple has also had to contend with the worst kind of archaeological predators in human history: the well-heeled and educated smugglers from Western countries like England and France. Also, the countries where the temples stand were colonial outposts, and there was no real resistance from the local people when the Westerners went on their vandalising and appropriation spree.

Early last century, the French writer Andre Malraux, who was culture minister in Charles de Gaulle's government, was briefly jailed for having used a handsaw, chisel and crowbar to take seven stones from the Angkor Vat temple of Banteay Srei. Fortunately, there have been other enlightened Westerners who have more than compensated for the likes of Malraux. The French government set up a committee to reclaim Angkor Vat from the jungles and restore it. Drawings were made of the frescoes and the carvings and preserved so that they could be repeated.

But all this happened in the early part of the 20th century. When Cambodia was devastated by war and consequent human misery, Angkor Vat became an obvious casualty. During the war with the US, some bombs reportedly exploded near Angkor Vat. Thereafter, civil war drove out anyone involved in the restoration of these structures. When Hun Sen's Kampuchean government came to power in July 1998 and faced a Western embargo, the Indian government was the only one to offer help for Angkor Vat's restoration. (Many of Angkor's structures were, in fact, "restored" under the aegis of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge).

During my trip to Angkor Vat some years ago, I was told by Cambodian officials about the work that the Indian Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) had done, work that had drawn criticism from many experts. The Indians, they said, had not taken into cognisance the intricate carvings and murals on various epics and had carelessly slapped mortar on cracks and faultlines. I saw many of those places: it became clear to me that the restoration needed careful handling.

A similar recklessness was at display when I recently visited the Sun temple at Konark in Orissa. It was my first visit there, and although I didn't know how it had looked earlier, what I saw pained me. Konark's surroundings were badly managed. (In fact, Angkor Vat, even after years of neglect — and a stinky absence of  toilets — looked better preserved.) In Konark, many frescoes and statues had "disappeared", and the gaps their absence had left were injudiciously grouted in by mortar.

In some places, the ASI restorers had patched various statues together. The manner in which it was done gave the impression that the surgically-precise business of restoration had been given to an ordinary contractor who had no feel for the greatness he was handling.

I was told that some years ago, Konark had had many more figures and statues. So, where are they? Are they ending up in the lucrative antiques market? Obviously, no one will own it up, but it is clear that things are not quite sunny and sanguine here. Does Konark's decrepitude have any thing to do with the degrading poverty that surrounds it or the predatory drive of those tasked with looking after it?

Difficult question — in fact, there is no public display of drawings to show how much of our heritage is still intact and how much has ended up in the drawing rooms of antiques buyers and museums abroad.

It is time that the ASI pulled itself up and objectively introspected on how it goes about preserving our considerable legacy.