(ORDO NEWS) — The strange bronze artifact has puzzled scientists for over a century, including how it ended up so far from home.
Arriving in a Maori village in the lush forests of New Zealand’s North Island in the late 1830s, Cornish missionary William Colenso noticed something curious.
It was a significant event – Colenso became the first European to visit this community, but a pot caught his attention.
According to his account, Maori women cooked “potatoes” (perhaps kumara, a tuber similar to sweet potatoes) in a bronze pot on a hearth, rather than in the more traditional way by placing red-hot stones in a wooden vessel.
This was especially strange because the village did not trade with foreigners and therefore, Colenso thought, did not have access to bronze, which at that time was not produced on the island.
Colenso looked. It was a really strange pot. Approximately 16 cm high and 15 cm across, it had noticeable protrusions and a jagged edge, as if part of the pot had broken off.
The bronze was embossed with letters and squiggles in some language. It wasn’t a pot, Colenso realized. It was the top part of the ship’s bell.
The Maori women told Colenso that they had had this bell for generations: Their ancestors found it in the roots of a tree that had fallen during a storm. Intrigued, Colenso traded the bell for a cast iron pot.
After his death in 1899, the item was bequeathed to the Colonial Museum, which later became the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, located in Wellington.
For more than a century, scholars have puzzled over this object, known as the “Tamil Bell” for its relief inscription in the Tamil language, which is today spoken in southeast India, Sri Lanka and Singapore.
Almost everything else about the bell, including how it ended up in New Zealand, remained a mystery until Nalina Gopal, an inquisitive museum curator at Singapore’s Indian Heritage Centre, arrived in Wellington in 2019.
Her persistent detective work will uncover surprising details about the bell, as well as raise new questions.
The first touch of the cold bronze of the Tamil bell sparked Gopal’s interest.
“It was a surreal moment,” she says, her eyes lighting up at the memory. Like Colenso almost two centuries earlier, Gopal was struck by the inadequacy of the Tamil bell.
There is no historical record or archaeological evidence that Tamil seafarers ever sailed to or traded with New Zealand.
Simply put, the bell defies explanation. “He looks like a UFO,” says Gopal.
The original bulge of the bell has disappeared, leaving only the crown, which is not much larger than her clasped hands.
Gopal rummaged through previous theories about the bell.
Back in 1882, New Zealand scholar William Maskell believed that the bell might have been in the possession of some traveling sailor who left it as a souvenir in a South Asian port but somehow lost it on the North Island.
In her 1996 book New Zealand Mysteries, historian Robin Gosset speculated that the ghost ship its crew died or abandoned ship may have drifted thousands of miles before crashing off the coast of New Zealand.
People familiar with the Tamil bell agreed on one thing: it must be very old. After all, it looked old and the type had previously been dated to the 14th or 15th century.
Gopal, a native Tamil speaker from southern India, immediately dismissed this conclusion.
“The older the Tamil language gets, the harder it is to read because it’s getting further and further away from today’s writing,” Gopal says, adding that when she saw the bell, “I was able to read Tamil.”
With the help of an archaeologist who specializes in analyzing ancient scripts, Gopal determined that the bell was most likely made in the 17th or 18th century.
She then drew attention to the meaning of the inscription, which had previously been translated as “the bell of the ship of Mohideen Bux”.
Although the English spelling of the name was uncertain – it could have been Mohideen Baksh or Mohaideen Bakhsh – it was generally accepted that the bell definitely belonged to a ship owned by Mohideen Bux. Gopal found the opposite.
“The translation of the inscription on the bell was quite literal,” she says. “And I don’t think they did much research into who or what Mohideen Bux could be.”
While browsing books for more information, she came across the work of J. Raj Mohamad, a Tamil Nadu researcher and former curator of the regional museum. Mohamad has been trying to solve the mystery of the bell since the 1980s.
Mohamad was the first to suggest that Mohideen Bux might not have been the owner of the ship, but the name of the ship itself.
Gopal and Mohamad joined forces to find out more. Mohamad studied the Tamil Nadu maritime archives, while Gopal combed through documents in the National Archives of Singapore.
Shipping documents are analogous and require many hours of painstaking searching. Their careful work led to an unexpected find.
“Many Muslim trading communities in Southeast Asia venerated a saint named Mohideen Bux,” says Gopal.
Mohideen Bux, she and Mohamad learned, was the common name for ships sailing from Tamil Nadu. “The idea was that the ship would be protected because it was named after a saint,” says Gopal.
She saw the inscription on the Tamil bell “Mohideen Bux udiya kappal udiya mani” in a new light. “Udiya” means “belonging to someone,” says Gopal.
“Perhaps in this case they meant that the ship was under the care of a saint, and not that it belonged to some person.”
Gopal and Mohamad failed to make contact between the Tamil ships and New Zealand. They did not find any evidence of lost trading networks and could not pinpoint which ship the Tamil bell might have been on.
After the story of the bell was widely publicized in the local media in 1975, several families in the region laid claim to it, according to Mohamad.
The three families believed they were descended from sea merchants who may have once owned a ship of that name.
One family even approached the Te Papa Museum to return the bell to Tamil Nadu, where they thought it should have been.
When Gopal returned to Singapore, she took the bell with her, lending it to the Indian Heritage Centre.
According to Gopal, during the seven months he was on display before returning to Te Papa, he attracted Tamil Muslims who were delighted to see this piece of their past.
Ultimately, Gopal believes that the bell should remain in New Zealand. “It’s part of the bell’s journey,” she says.
Perhaps, she adds, the bell will be able to do what it seems to have always done: move around visiting various museums, just as the ship that carried it once called in distant ports.
In the meantime, the bell rests in Te Pape, still dressed in a halo of mystery.
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