Footloose, NOS, The News International
The rape of Ketas
In an effort to beautify the ancient temples, the officials have in fact ruined the history
By Salman Rashid
No one in the blighted department of archaeology is capable of understanding the essence of conservation — that an ancient monument must never ever be rebuilt, that the best conservation is simply to arrest further decay. And if anything need be done, the restoration should be in exact accordance with the soul of the original.
But in six-and-a-half decades we have not been able to get this right. In the early 1990s, we destroyed the Baradari of Kamran Mirza that once stood in its ruinous state on an island in the Ravi. Since there was no record of what the original looked like in the mid-16th century when Kamran (Babur’s son) ordered it, some government department under orders of the chief minister tore down the shell and rebuilt the gaudy new structure. Men like Dr Ajaz Anwar created a shindig, but that was merely stonewalling a deaf wall. Being ignoramuses we do not realise that the building in the Ravi is no longer Kamran’s Baradari.
Then we did in Akbar’s bath inside Delhi Gate. The tanks were filled in, plastered over and, if memory serves, given a marble floor. For some years in the early 1990s, the historic building served as a wedding hall!
And now the department of archaeology is doing a hatchet job at Ketas. Among the holiest of the holy shrines of Hinduism, Ketas sits just outside Choa Saidan Shah in the Salt Range. First of all there is a bunch of individuals infesting the premises, claiming to be from the department, who go into spasms the minute they see a camera on a tripod. “No photography!” they admonish. For crying out loud, is this another one of those many places where we hide our nuclear war heads?
But what appals is the rape of the place with marble tiles. Where, until only a few years ago, I walked on roughly cut steps in the grey limestone, there are now staircases with railings and marble risers. The temples all have marble floors. The interior of the haveli of Sardar Hari Singh Nalva, though inaccessible because of the padlocked door, also has marble flooring! And the worst is yet to come.
On the high ground behind the haveli, there is a complex of buildings. The white-washed temples here once rose above three ruinous buildings made of dark gray limestone. These three date from the latter Hindu Shahya period, that is, from about the year 1000 CE. There is one chunky building with its roof and much of the walls gone. This is flanked by two smaller buildings which are clearly temples.
I have returned to Ketas dozens of times over the past three decades, and am witness to the rape of this place by vandals, particularly following the destruction of Babri Mosque in December 1992. But recently with a bunch of youngsters from LACAS, I saw the worst ever official vandalism of Ketas. This was not the first time idiotic officialdom had tried to ‘beautify’ the place, but this certainly was the worst.
Some three years ago, they added steel piping as railings at random spots. But this time around, the morons of the department of archaeology have destroyed the Hindu Shahya temples. The ancient buildings have been either demolished and rebuilt or they have been extensively remodelled and added to.
We know that such temples had porches above the entrances. But in Ketas, the porch of the one on the right had collapsed at some point in the past. Only the one on the left had a vestige still clinging on. The most interesting aspect of these two buildings was that their porches had cinquefoil arches. Among Hindu Shahya temples in Pakistan, cinquefoil arches are only found at Amb (in one of the two temples) and Bilot and Tilot (Dera Ismail Khan). All others have trefoil arches.
The department that has rebuilt the Hindu Shahya temples of Ketas have redesigned the cinquefoils. They are nothing like the original anymore. Students of ancient architecture who could earlier have simply stepped off their cars and studied these architectural features at Ketas will now have to take the tedious journey to Amb or the dangerous one to Tilot or Bilot — dangerous because of proximity to South Waziristan.
The mind boggles at the stupidity of officialdom. If these people did not have a clue about conservation, why did they not consult those who know the business? But I suppose there is a secret room in every government department where they crack open the skulls of all new entrants to put in some diabolical programme that makes them turn into unthinking vermin who only believe that they know best.
Did these fools not know there were experts like Kamil Khan Mumtaz, to name only one, who could have put them on the right track? Had they never heard of their own illustrious predecessor Dr Saifur Rahman Dar? Why is it that we must go from bad to worse with every passing year?
Time will come when the department of archaeology (whether provincial or federal) will have successfully ravaged every single historical monument so that students of architecture will never know what was being built in, say, the 10th century. We have started well with Ketas. It will soon be a monument of tinsel.