________________
२४८
tra HIRUT.....
The Director General of the ASI visited the Telkupi site with Dr. Mrs. Debala Mitra and they went to Bhairavasthan and according to Mitra in the Preface to her monograph on Telkupi (1969) they learned locally that most of the temples and the greater part of the village had gone under water and find only the tops of Temples 6, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15 and 16 protruding above the waters of the Damodar, and temples 17 and 18 standing at the edge of the water. The Eastern Circle photos of 1960 show the temples mentioned above standing above the water in fairly reasonable condition on dry land, there was still a chance to remove the temples. In the photograph of Archaeology, the temples are submerged. What happened could only be the result of extreme negligence, and callousness on the part of the development authorities. This should not have occurred again. But in the Chandil Dam on the Suvarnarekha river this is precisely what happened nearly forty years later.
The West Bengal Goverment was thereafter asked to order the dewatering of the area so that the Temples could at least be examind and possible translocation considered. But it was too late and the authorities concerned considered dewatering the area impractical and the most priceless Jain temple architecture of Jharkhand and West Bengal was needlessly destroyed and became “The Ghost Temples of Telkup.”
opel Rey en foto Archeological Survey of India, Kolkata ने इन निदर्शनों को सुरक्षित रखने की पहल नहीं की । क्यों पश्चिम बंगाल की सरकार ने इसकी अनदेखी की। भारत की संस्कृति की एक मूल्यवान धरोहर को इस तरह खुलेआम नष्ट हो जाने क्यों दिया गया ? सिर्फ कुछ ही मूर्तियों को दामोदर के पानी से निकाला गया बाकी सब पानी में बह गयी । इससे कोई सबक क्यों नहीं लिया गया।