Rakhaldas bandyopadhyay biography of alberta
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His independent streak and defiance of colonial protocols often landed him in trouble - tainting his reputation and perhaps even erasing parts of his contribution from global memory.
Interestingly, Banerjee's reports on Mohenjo-daro were never published by the ASI. Archaeologist PK Mishra later accused then ASI chief John Marshall of suppressing Banerjee's findings and claiming credit for the discovery himself.
"The world knows Marshall discovered the civilisation's ruins and it is taught in institutions.
He justifiably identified one of them as that of Panchamukha Shivalinga. However, Rakhal’s assumption regarding the antiquity of the remains was confirmed through radiocarbon dating. In most cases, readings of texts of the inscriptions given by Rakhaldas still remain unchallenged. Further excavations revealed an array of ancient cities lying deep underneath, with continuous human movements for over several thousand years.
Rakhal’s genius was not only in the field of history and archaeology but also in his writing skills.
That’s where the real story begins. But protecting them? He edited and re-edited more than eighty inscriptions, published in different volumes of the Epigraphia Indica, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Indian Antiquary, Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, etc. But he always had an adventurous streak.
Once, when he was tasked with writing an essay about the Scythian period of Indian history, he travelled to a museum in a neighbouring state to study first-hand sculptures and scripts from that era.
In her book, The Life and Works of Rakhaldas Banerji, author Yama Pande notes how Banerjee joined the ASI as an excavation assistant in 1910 and rose quickly within the ranks to become a superintending archaeologist in western India in 1917.
It was in this post that he first set eyes on Mohenjo-daro in Sindh in 1919.
Rakhaldas treated the history of Bengal in an Indian perspective beginning with the dawn of civilisation in the Middle East and racial movements into India in early days.
At that time, historians had not yet discovered the full scale of the Indus Civilisation which, we now know, covered an expanse of approximately 386,000 sq miles (999,735 sq km) along the Indus river valley.
Three seals from Banerjee's excavation bore images and scripts similar to those from Harappa in the Punjab province in present-day Pakistan.
In 1928, he joined the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) as a professor. As Superintending Archaeologist of the Western Circle he had gone to the Sind region in search of Greek pillars of victory and while unearthing the Buddist Vihara surmounting the mound he came upon certain objects which reminded him of similar specimens found by Sahani from Harappa.
It is memory, emotion, celebration, and identity. But unfortunately we currently cannot access them from our system.
Another time, Banerjee attempted to relocate some stone sculptures from a museum in Bengal to the one he was stationed at without the necessary permissions. His sudden demise put a temporary pause to the genuine effort of unearthing history.
Rakhal’s discovery of Mohenjo-daro symbolized a resurrection of history cultivated by “The wonder that was India”, proving that India’s urban tradition predated even Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian civilizations in numerous aspects of planning and architecture, which was not really accepted by the then Academia.
Rakhal’s career began at a time of a heightened spirit of innovation, marked by a huge number of patent filings in the Western world.
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Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay's zodiac sign was Aries. He died just two years later at the age of 45.
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In the chapter on architecture of Orissa, he distinguished the Orissan temple style from the Nagara style of northern India and characterised the Orissan temples as specimens of Kalinga style on the basis of a reference found in the Amrteshvara temple inscription from the Bellary district of Karnataka.
Therefore, Indian history was merely limited to Alexander’s invasion and questionable success, and 16-‘mahajanapadas’, established by the Aryan intruders who established the civilization.
This logic was buried by the discovery of Mahenjo-daro, opening a “Golden Fleece” that later to be known as Harappa civilization, and still later, Indus Valley civilization.