Ninth century Kamboja Parvati -- head of pratima discovered, thanks to Fre

[Guest guest]

HinduThought, "S. Kalyanaraman"

<kalyan97> wrote:

After 500 years, sheer chance reunites head and body of Hindu statue

in

Paris By John Lichfield in Paris Published: 19 May 2006

A wife of the Hindu god Shiva, decapitated in Cambodia in the 15th

century,

finally has her head back, after it was discovered 500 years later

on the

other side of the world.

A Paris museum dedicated to Asia, the Musée Guimet, is celebrating

the

implausible chain of events that reunited a divided masterpiece of

ninth-century Cambodian art.

The headless body of a wife of the Hindu god of destruction and

renewal was

found by French archaeologists near the shattered temple of Bakong,

amid the

celebrated Angkor ruins, in 1935. The statue has been exhibited

since 1938

at the Musée Guimet in the Place d'Iéna in Paris, which has the

finest

collection of ancient Khmer artefacts outside Cambodia.

Last autumn, the museum held an exhibition on Vietnamese art which

paid

tribute in its catalogue to a retired American diplomat, John

Gunther Dean.

The catalogue recounted Mr Dean's efforts, as ambassador to Cambodia

in the

early 1970s, to rescue ancient Khmer art from the ravages of the

Khmer

Rouge, which was determined to expunge all record of Cambodia's

past.

To thank the museum, Mr Dean, now 80, offered a gift from his own

collection

of ancient Khmer artefacts. Last month, the gift arrived, the

sculpted head

of a woman found at the Bakong temple site in 1939.

"I asked him for a Khmer head because we only had headless statues

but I

didn't think for a moment about a possible match," said Pierre

Baptiste, the

museum's curator for south-east Asian art.

"I brought the head into our [Cambodian] hall looking for a place

that it

could be exhibited," said M. Baptiste. "I had a sudden notion the

two pieces

resembled each other but then thought, 'no, things never happen that

way'.

"I put the head on the statue's shoulders. It shifted a few

millimetres. I

heard the little click that you get when two stones fit together and

the

head fell perfectly into place. It was as if it had put itself

together. I

still get goose-bumps thinking about it."

The reformed statue, which is 4ft 10in high, was beheaded in the

temple when

it was destroyed in the 15th century.

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article548119.ece