Sacred Bengal: Retracing David McCutchion's journey
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...