After the visit we moved towards the road to Rajgir for having an experience of the the visual delights of a route which was frequented in the ancient times. I left the village with mixed feelings. While I was glad that I had accomplished the long planned task of visiting the great site, I was deeply disappointed as I had witnessed an important site which had lost its former splendor. A site which had excited visits of foreign visitors like Fa Hian and Hieun Tsang in the ancient times had no more much to offer to the occasional tourist in terms of visual delights. The inhabitants we met seemed to be largely unaware of the legends and the former importance that the place had occupied in the ancient times.


Promise held by the Site for future Study

The new village seems to have come up on the mounds of the earlier inhabited site. I was informed that statues are often found upon digging the area for building of houses. The local DSP who had accompanied us during the visit informed that the villagers did not want the site to be excavated further due to the fear of losing their lands and property. Seeing the size and elevation of the mound was indicative that a lot of promise still lied beneath.

It was observed that the ruins of Kurkihar have not been systematically explored or excavated so far. In the past, Kittoe did his digging for images and Cunningham merely described the ruins without doing any thorough exploration and indicating the nature and character of the monuments buried underneath. The discovery of the bronze and other objects was made accidentally in the course of quarrying for materials. Though the antiquities discovered in 1930 have been carefully studied, mainly iconographically, the history and antiquity of the ruins themselves remain to be tackled systematically.

To be continued...