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Sacred Bengal Part 2: Bansberia, Kalna and Guptipara

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The idea of a trip to see the Terracotta temples of Hooghly came to me from a chance encounter with some beautiful photographs of ruined temples.The images evoked loss and desolation but also stirred ones memories and cultural roots.  These photos were taken by a close friend's school mate who happened to be a Government officer with a dual passion of photography and terracotta temples. That was the start of my journey about these popularly little known and acknowledged part of Bengali heritage. My earlier trip in the autumn of 2017 took me deep into the Hooghly hinterland- historically prosperous villages, trading towns and river ports in a land of agricultural plenty. I wrote about this in my blog  https://desieyeinlondon.blogspot.com/2017/10/sacred-bengal-retracing-david.html Some of the beautifully carved Terracotta temples in these villages and towns are in dire need of preservation like the Raj Rajeswar temple in Kotolpur. I was awestruck by molten gold colour of it...
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Sacred Bengal: Retracing David McCutchion's journey

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It took an English man to show us the sublime beauty of our temples in Bengal. Armed with a tripos in modern languages from Cambridge, David McCutchion came to India in the 1950s. While teaching English in Viswa-Bharati in Santiniketan he visited some local terracotta temples and this led to his life long passion about the late medieval temples of Bengal. He travelled extensively in both Bengals sometimes on foot and sometimes on cycle and tirelessly documented thousands of beautiful terracotta temples that dot the landscape. He was responsible for helping an entire generation of Bengalis rediscover their heritage. I was intrigued by this story of a Cambridge educated gent scouring the West Bengal and Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) rural landscape through the 1950s/60s till the Naxal unrest and the Bangladesh civil war stopped his ramblings. Egged on by a close friend – my engineering college buddy Amit, I decided to trace a part of his journey during this trip to Kolkata From K...
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