Gardez Shiva is an image of a Sassinid-Hindu sculpture from the National Museum of Afghanistan,which was destroyed by members of the Taliban in 2001. The Taliban used the teachings of the Koran, specifically the prohibition against depictions of beings created in God's image, to justify their destruction of part of the world's heritage.
Gardez Shiva is one of the Kabul Series, with Hadda Buddha, and Tapakalan Hera.
The original Gardez Shiva came from Bamiyan, a site which is now infamous for the destruction in 2001 of the monumental Bamiyan Buddhas which had been sculpted in the 4th-5th centuries CE, possibly by theBuddhist Kushan rulers. The Gardez Shiva was from the later Hindu Shahi period, 8th-10th centuries CE, an era of Hindu kings ruling from Kabul and the Ghazni region of Afghanistan. The sculpture displays a mixture of styles from Sassinid Iran (the headdress) and Hindu India (the shape of the facial features.)
|
About a thousand years ago, Bamiyan was the literal crossroads of Asia, a midpoint on the traderoutes between Gandhara in the east and the roads to India and China, and Bactria in the West and the roads to Iran and Arabia.
Today, Bamiyan and Afghanistan are still crossroads, they're yet places where various cultures and ways of life intersect and clash. The Taliban resolved to close those roads to other cultures, and strived to form a society that was monolithic and self-sustaining, and emphatically anti-urban.
They failed, and the lesson that we can take from their failure is that closed societies always fail, that eventually their walls, either real or imaginary, crumble from the primeval human pressure to react, to transact, to interact.
In the Nevèryon books of Samuel R. Delaney, in which he wrote about a civilization forming its first city, the prime initiating factor for the city's creation was sexual desire. The need for choice in sexual partners drives the initiative to build structures and institutions around a crossroads.
|
When the Taliban fell, and a shaky measure of security was restored to Kabul, among the first things that people did were actions to reassert their sense of sexual attractiveness, women discarded their burkas, men shaved their beards. And traditional customs of gay sexuality such as the Pashtun ashna were also asserted. Ashna means “beloved,”and the custom bears similarity to the Ancient Greek institution of the “erastoi” and “eromenos.”
I found the image of this lost sculpture in A Guide to the Kabul Museum, a book compiled and written by Ann Dupree, Louis Dupree, and A.A. Motamedi and published in Afghanistan in 1968.
Louis Dupree was a famous and influential American scholar of Afghan history and culture. His widow Nancy Hatch Dupree is involved with the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage (SPACH). devoted to recovering and protecting the Afghan cultural inheritance for the future benefit of the Afghan people.
|
