Sanchi's Great Stupa Survived a Top-to-Bottom Breach in 1822 and the Digs of 1851, and Its Four Gateways Stayed in Bhopal While 112 Plaster Pieces of the East Gate Went to Europe Instead

The breach in the side of Sanchi’s Great Stupa was cut in 1822 by Captain Johnson, the assistant political agent in Bhopal, according to John Marshall, who directed the Archaeological Survey’s repairs there from 1912. Alexander Cunningham, who sank a shaft through the same dome in 1851, wrote that the 1822 party carried its excavation from the south-west side down to the foundation and still missed the centre.

The monument itself is described in tuput’s account of the Great Stupa. This piece follows what happened to it after 1818: the treasure hunt, the digs of 1851, a proposal to send two gateways to the British Museum, the plaster casts that went to Europe instead, and the rulers of Bhopal who owned the hill.

A visit in 1819, a treasure hunt in 1822

Captain E. Fell wrote the first published account of Sanchi in 1819, which Marshall’s notes place in Buckingham’s Calcutta Journal that July. Cunningham quotes it as saying the Second Stupa was then “in perfect repair, not a stone having fallen,” and adds that in 1819 the pillars of the railing on top of the Great Stupa were all still in place.

Three years later came Johnson’s opening. By Marshall’s account the site “quickly became a hunting-ground for treasure-seekers and amateur archaeologists.” Johnson’s breach caused much later damage to the body of the stupa and the collapse of the Western Gateway, Marshall wrote, and the same man was probably responsible for the partial destruction of the Second and Third Stupas. Maisey called it an “unsuccessful and carelessly conducted search for buried treasure.” Cunningham found the Great Stupa partly ruined “without any discovery having been made to repay its destruction.”

The 1851 shafts: nothing in Stupa 1, ten saints in Stupa 2, two disciples in Stupa 3

Cunningham and Maisey opened the stupas around Bhilsa in the last days of January and the first of February 1851. To spare the outside of the Great Stupa, they sank a shaft 5 feet across down its middle, through solid brickwork. It produced no relics, only spiral shells embedded in the mud that held the bricks together. Cunningham took the empty core to mean the stupa was dedicated to Adi-Buddha, the primeval Buddha, since in his account such stupas held no deposit. Marshall later said these theories “have no foundation in fact,” and dated the original brick stupa to the reign of Ashoka.

The Second Stupa had been breached in 1822 as well. Cunningham confessed a “secret satisfaction” that the earlier workers had found nothing, though he feared they had reached the centre. He and Maisey concluded the breach had stopped within about a foot of it. A shaft down the middle exposed a small chamber of six stones, two feet west of centre, with a sandstone box 11 inches long. Its inscription named teachers including Kasapagota. Inside were four steatite (soapstone) caskets of burnt bone, and Marshall counts ten saints named on them.

The Third Stupa gave the best-known find. Under a slab more than 5 feet long lay two stone boxes, their lids reading “Sariputasa” and “Mahamogalanasa,” the relics of Sariputra and Mahamogalana, the two chief disciples of the Buddha. Sariputra’s steatite casket held one bone fragment scarcely an inch long and seven beads of pearl, garnet, lapis lazuli, crystal and amethyst. Mahamogalana’s held two fragments, the larger under half an inch. Cunningham noted that the only other occupant of Sariputra’s box was a live spider.

Marshall called the excavations “hasty” and said the relics “hardly compensated” for the damage. He credited Maisey’s drawings and Cunningham’s Bhilsa Topes, a book he said would probably never have been written without the digs.

A proposal to send two gateways to the British Museum

Cunningham’s preface to The Bhilsa Topes (published 1854) makes the proposal in plain words. He recommended that the two fallen gateways be removed to the British Museum, “where they would form the most striking objects in a Hall of Indian Antiquities,” and added that “their removal to England would ensure their preservation.” Maisey recommended something different, plaster moulds of the east gateway, in his original report of 1851.

The hill belonged to Bhopal. Shah Jahan Begum, who ruled from 1868 to 1901, left her own account in her History of Bhopal, translated by H. C. Barstow in 1876. On a tour that ended on 16 February 1871 she visited Sanchi and inspected “the ancient gateway.” She writes that the ruins “appear to be objects of great interest to European gentlemen” and that “a gentleman took a cast of them to set up in London.”

The Class XII history textbook of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) adds that the French sought Shah Jahan Begum’s permission to take away the eastern gateway for a museum in France, that for a while some Englishmen also wanted to do the same, and that both were satisfied with plaster casts. The chapter cites no document for the French request, and the Cole papers used here do not mention it. Marshall, who dates the casting to 1869, gives the same outcome: casts of the east gate were made “as an indirect result of a request by Napoleon III for one of the richly carved gates.”

Why the gateways stayed

None of the papers quoted here gives one reason why the gateways were not shipped, but several point the same way.

The first report of Henry Cole, the Government of India’s Curator of Ancient Monuments, published in 1882, lists under 1868 that “the Government of Sir John Lawrence prevented the demolition of the Sanchi Tope Gateways.” The entry does not say who proposed it. In the same 1882 report Cole argued that in India, which he called a British possession, the authorities were responsible for monuments and should keep them “in situ, if possible,” with casts supplying the museums. He printed Fergusson’s 1868 memorandum, which gave the architectural reason: Indian sculpture was “so essentially a part of the architecture” that it could not be judged apart from it.

The practical papers date from the same years. A Government of India letter of June 1868 said casts of the most interesting parts of the stupa would be obtained and a set presented to the French Government. A dispatch of 2 March 1869 reported a minute of the Committee of Council on Education in England on paying for casts so that three copies could go to South Kensington, Dublin and Edinburgh. A letter of 11 February 1869 reported that the Prussian Ambassador had asked what a cast would cost. Cole’s inspection added a physical problem. The piers of both fallen gateways were split down their whole length, and he judged restoring them very expensive and extremely difficult.

A camp of 28 tons of materials and 112 plaster pieces

Lieutenant Henry Hardy Cole of the Royal Engineers learned moulding in London in 1869 with three sappers and chose gelatine moulds as best for Indian carving. His 88 boxes of materials, weighing 28 tons, left Howrah for Jubbulpore, where more than 60 country carts were needed. At Sanchi on 7 January 1870 the party found a Bhopal tahsildar, a district revenue officer, already helping to find labourers and scaffolding.

Cole chose the eastern gateway. It was less perfect in some respects than the northern, he wrote, but the northern one leaned about a foot out of the vertical and he had no strong chains to support it. Casting began on 19 January, and the 737 square feet of carved work came off as 112 pieces, the last finished on 21 February.

Casts of the east gateway stood at the Kensington Museum, in Edinburgh and in Paris, Cole’s second report says, and Marshall adds Dublin and Berlin. The V&A’s record of a painting of the camp says the cast was destroyed in the mid-1950s when the Indian Museum was demolished to make way for Imperial College.

The hill’s owners and what they allowed

Maisey wrote that Sanchi lay in the Begum of Bhopal’s territory, and Marshall that the hill and “all its treasures” belonged to the Bhopal Darbar, the state’s court. In 1869 and 1870 Cole recommended that the Begum take steps to stop the two standing gateways from falling, and wrote that the fallen ones could be restored if she sent about 30 masons and labourers to work under him.

Returning in November 1880, Cole found that local people, “natives” in his word, had recently been mutilating carvings on the east gateway and had cut up one of the Ashokan pillars for grindstones. He asked for a trustworthy watchman. His report of 10 January 1881 says the Government of India had sanctioned 2,000 rupees, not enough to clear the jungle and rebuild the gateways, and that the Begum had offered, he understood, to help with labour.

Cole cleared the hilltop and filled the 1822 breach in 1881, Marshall records, and in the next two years the fallen south and west gateways and the small gateway at the Third Stupa went up again at the Imperial Government’s expense. Cole’s second report puts the structural repairs, gateways included, as finished by mid-April 1883 under his assistant Major Keith. It adds that Sir Lepel Griffin had told the Government the Begum proposed to build a travellers’ bungalow near the monument.

The larger repair came under Marshall from 1912 to 1919, with the “ready approval and active help” of the Bhopal Darbar. In 1916 and 1917 more than a third of the Great Stupa came down to its foundations, because the south-west quadrant, filled in 1881 with random rubble, was subsiding. Marshall called the task “arduous and costly.” His 1918 guide is dedicated to the ruler of Bhopal, Sultan Jahan Begum, “to whose interest and generosity is due all that has been done in recent years.” The NCERT chapter adds that she funded the museum at Sanchi, the guesthouse where Marshall lived and wrote, and the publication of his volumes.

Where the relics went

Marshall’s 1918 guide says the relic caskets from the Second and Third Stupas were “subsequently lost.” Other records place them in London. Nyanaponika Thera’s account in The Life of Sariputta says the relics of Sariputra and Mahamogalana were kept at the Victoria and Albert Museum until 1939, when the Maha Bodhi Society asked the British Government to return them. The war delayed the handover to 24 February 1947, when the society’s representatives received them at the museum.

They were shown at the Colombo Museum for two and a half months, where the account estimates two million people paid homage, and then at the society’s Dharmarajika Vihara in Calcutta. On 20 October 1950 a portion went to Burma for the Kaba Aye Zedi near Rangoon, and another to a stupa the Maha Bodhi Society of Sri Lanka was building. On 30 November 1952 the remaining relics were enshrined at Sanchi in the new Chetiyagiri Vihara. Cunningham had identified Chetiyagiri, the “Chaitya-hill” of the Sri Lankan chronicles, with the hill of Sanchi, an identification Marshall called reasonable but unsafe for dating the monuments.

Custody between 1851 and 1952 is not fully settled. Torkel Brekke’s 2007 study in Numen, which draws on the V&A’s archives, says Buddhists and scholars wrongly assumed Cunningham had possessed the relics brought back to India, so their whereabouts in the intervening century were unclear.

The V&A still holds caskets from the Sanchi and Sonari stupas, catalogued from the Maisey collection. Its record for one says the Ministry of Education suggested offering the relics from the two sites to the Indian Government, and that in 1958 two bone fragments went to Mr Perera, the Deputy High Commissioner for Ceylon, and two to Professor M. S. Sundaram at the Indian High Commission. A second record gives 18 June 1958 as the day a fragment was handed to Sundaram for the Government of India.