![]() ![]() Gopal, a native Tamil speaker from southern India, dismissed this conclusion immediately. It looked old, after all, and the script had been previously dated to the 14th or 15th century. One thing people familiar with the Tamil Bell had agreed: It must be very old. In her 1996 book New Zealand Mysteries, historian Robyn Gosset suggested that a ghost ship-its crew having died or abandoned the vessel-might have drifted for thousands of miles before wrecking on New Zealand shores. As early as 1882, New Zealand scientist William Maskell believed that the bell might have been in the possession of some well-traveled sailor, who kept it as a souvenir from a South Asian port but lost it somehow on the North Island. Gopal dug into previous theories about the bell. Its size raises questions about Colenso’s original story: Would it have been big enough for cooking potatoes? “Maybe baby potatoes,” Gopal says with a laugh. The bell’s original swell is gone, and only the crown, not much larger than her cupped hands, remains. There are no historical records or archaeological evidence that Tamil seafarers ever sailed to or traded with New Zealand. As with Colenso nearly two centuries earlier, Gopal was struck by the Tamil Bell’s incongruence. “It was a surreal moment,” she says, her eyes lighting up at the memory. Touching the cold bronze of the Tamil bell for the first time ignited Gopal’s interest. Her tenacious detective work would reveal surprising details about the bell-and also raise new questions. Almost everything else about the bell, including how it ended up in New Zealand, remained a mystery until Nalina Gopal, an inquisitive museum curator from Singapore’s Indian Heritage Centre, arrived in Wellington in 2019. When he died in 1899, the object was bequeathed to the Colonial Museum, which would later become the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, located in Wellington.įor more than a century, scholars puzzled over the object, known as the Tamil Bell for its embossed writing, which is in Tamil, a language spoken today in southeastern India, Sri Lanka, and Singapore. Intrigued, Colenso traded the bell for a cast iron pot. The Māori women told Colenso that it had been with them for generations: Their ancestors had found it in the roots of a tree that had toppled in a storm.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |