Hunting for a Georgian queen in Goa
Ruins of Saint Augustine complex, Old Goa.
A 17th century royal martyr, Portuguese friars, a ruined Augustine church and a search that stretched on for over 25 years
Once
upon a time, in a land far away, lived a queen named Ketevan. And
centuries later, two governments, priests, archaeologists, historians
and genomics researchers would work together to try and find a part of
her body lost in the ruins of a Goan church.
The
time, to be precise, was the early 17th century. The land, Kakheti in
eastern Georgia, a hilly region known for its wine. Ketevan’s husband
had died after ruling briefly, and her son Teimuraz was king, but as a
vassal of the Persian Shah Abbas I.
Teimuraz
was proving a less-than-ideal ruler of a dependent kingdom. He had
flirted with the Ottomans and Russians, both rivals to the Persians.
Abbas was threatening to invade Kakheti. In 1614, Ketevan offered
herself as a hostage to Abbas in a failed attempt to prevent carnage.
She
was held in Shiraz until 1624, when Abbas offered Ketevan, a
grandmother in her 60s and a devout follower of the Georgian orthodox
church, the option of converting to Islam and joining his harem. She
refused and was killed—strangled, after her flesh had been picked apart
by red hot tongs.
In Shiraz at the time were two
Portuguese friars of the order of St Augustine from whom Ketevan had
taken some comfort. Since she was seen as having died for her religion,
she was a martyr.
The Augustinians hoped that
with a little finessing about how close she had been to becoming a
Catholic, Rome might make her a saint. This would be strategically
convenient for spreading the faith in Eurasian lands, which had
well-established churches of their own.
For
saints to be venerated, you ideally needed relics. So, the friars
exhumed Ketevan’s body. In 1628, they took some of her remains to her
grateful son, who had them interred at Alaverdi cathedral—and allowed
the friars to open a mission in Georgia.
Ketevan
did end up a saint, but of the Georgian church. Her remains were being
moved from Alaverdi to a safer location amid raids on the region when
the horse carrying the remains lost its footing and fell into the river
Aragvi. The relics were washed away. Fragments of her body were thought
to be in other places, but this much was known from contemporary
accounts: her right arm had been taken to Goa in 1627 by Portuguese
friars to be interred in the St Augustine complex.
The
Augustinians left the complex in 1835, after which it collapsed in
stages (to become what may be familiar to Hindi film viewers as the 1965
thriller Gumnaam’s eerie overgrown-by-forest structure through which the cast bemusedly wanders as the song Gumnaam Hai Koi plays). There was no record of what happened to Ketevan’s relic when the complex was abandoned.
Today,
the St Augustine complex is a spectacular ruin. A towering shard from
what used to be a five-storey facade pierces the sky. Around it lies an
expanse of laterite blocks, basalt slabs, masses of bricks, once-indoor
tombstones bearing coats of arms.
It’s
palpable—the grandeur of what must have been, and indeed the futility
of grandeur itself. But to walk around the complex with Sidh
Mendiratta—a researcher whose area of interest is at the junction of
history, heritage and architecture—is to have it all come alive again.
He
points out patches of faded red oxide work, sections of walls where the
original azulejos tile-work has been restored. From weathered stone, he
extrapolates to lives once lived here, to chambers in the convent where
the monks ate, prayed and rested.
In the early
2000s, Mendiratta was a Portuguese exchange student studying
architecture in Goa, when he visited the ruins. “It was love at first
sight with the site,” he says with a laugh. (An enduring love too, for
though he’s now a postdoctoral researcher at Coimbra University,
Portugal, he returns when he can.)
Mendiratta
ended up making the ruins part of his studies—his final project was to
build a computer model of the complex in its prime. That brought him in
touch with the Goa circle of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).
Beginning
in the late 1980s, the Soviet Union and then independent Georgia began
efforts to locate the Goan relic of Ketevan. This seems to have been
prompted by the publication of a book in 1985 by Armenian historian
Roberto Gulbenkian that for the first time brought together fragmentary
accounts to present the story of Queen Ketevan.
Over
the next 25 years, multiple Georgian delegations descended on Goa; the
foreign minister of Georgia visited his counterpart Jaswant Singh and
requested assistance in finding the relic; Georgian archaeologists
conducted an unsuccessful excavation in the church complex; ASI teams
looked for the bone without luck.
In 2003,
Nizamuddin Taher of the ASI took over as head of the Goa circle. “It was
my first independent charge,” he recalls. “I was not looking at any
fresh excavations.”
His priority was to resolve
certain administrative issues. For the St Augustine complex, his plans
were limited to clearing some of the piled-up debris so that visitors
could move about the complex. But the previous searches for the relic
had got the locals excited.
“There was a
romantic hype,” Taher says. “The story of Queen Ketevan was prevalent in
Old Goa.” Taher’s colleagues were keen to work on the site, and then
Mendiratta came along, asking to study the ground plan of the church.
They started removing debris to make a transverse path in January 2004.
Where
the relic of Queen Ketevan was concerned, previous teams were working
from a single clue (probably obtained from a huge 1958 collation by
Silva Rego of historical documents relating to Portuguese missions in
the East). It stated that a black box containing the bones of Ketevan
was installed on the second window on the epistle side of a chapel. The
Georgian team, sure that it had to be the main chapel, had taken apart
the area with such enthusiasm that it needed to be reconstructed with
cement. They found nothing.
Taher and his team
were not really looking for the queen’s relic as they continued clearing
debris in 2004. Then, they found a basalt tombstone at the floor level
under two metres of rubble. It had the name Manuel de Siqueira engraved
on it. Mendiratta was intrigued. There was something familiar about the
name, but he could not quite place it. He went to the library. “Sidh did
not sleep that night,” Taher recalls.
It
finally came to him. Mendiratta says, “The tombstone with the coat of
arms is mentioned in an old chronicle as being in a place called the
Chapter chapel.” It was in the 12th volume of Rego’s collation and it
mentioned all the tombs in the St Augustinian complex. It said the
Chapter chapel with the tomb of Manuel de Siqueira also held the black
box with the Ketevan relic.
“I am very dispassionate,” Taher says. “As an archaeologist, bahut kahani sunte rehte hai... (we keep hearing stories...), but when this clue came in—we all had gooseflesh.”
It
took work to identify the second window of the chapel on the epistle
side. But when they looked under it—nothing. There was no trace of the
sarcophagus. Mendiratta says, “We were both excited and disappointed. We
were sure that we were in the right place, but the box was not there.”
They
resumed work in 2005. Taher explains that excavation sites are covered
in between seasons of work. When excavation resumes, “you remove the
cover and you do brushing”. They had started on the brushing, when,
“First thing—we get a bone.” It was just lying there, in two pieces.
Taher’s colleagues were excited, but he was wary.
“It
was out of context,” he explains. It was found a couple of metres away
from the second window, and there was no trace of the box. To add to the
uncertainty, they found two more bone fragments. And the lid of the
sarcophagus, fallen on the other side of the window, but no trace of the
box itself.
A Georgian delegation arrived in
2006, headed by father Giorgi Razmadze of Tbilisi’s St Ketevan church.
They requested the relics be handed over to them. Taher asks, “How could
we give them the bone unless we were sure it belonged to the queen?”
He
felt genetic analysis may establish the provenance of the bones.
Several laboratories in the US and Europe had been successful in
obtaining DNA from old, unpreserved samples. But, Taher says, “It is
difficult to send an archaeological antiquity to another country.” So,
the analysis would have to be done in India. The trouble was—no ancient
DNA studies had ever come out of India.
Taher
got in touch with K. Thangaraj at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular
Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad. Thangaraj had just started the first ancient
DNA facility in India. He agreed to try and extract DNA from Taher’s
samples.
We are made of cells; almost all cells
contain DNA; a person’s DNA can be unique in the manner of a
fingerprint. Hence, the use of DNA in placing people at a crime scene or
establishing parentage. But how was DNA to prove useful with the old
bones found at the St Augustine complex?
For
starters, even obtaining DNA from the bones could not be taken for
granted. Ancient DNA—that is, DNA from old, unpreserved specimens—is
notoriously hard to work with. Thangaraj says, “There is no single
protocol that works with all samples. We have to keep modifying the
procedure for different samples.”
And then,
even if the bones yielded DNA, what could it be compared with? There was
a small relic claimed to be from Ketevan at the church in Tbilisi, but
the history around it was murky enough that its own provenance could not
be taken for granted.
Thangaraj and his
colleagues decided to go at the problem by trying to extract from the
bone samples a kind of DNA known as mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). There are
more copies of mtDNA in a cell as compared to the other sort, so it’s
easier to work with when genetic material is not forthcoming.
The
other thing about mtDNA is that it is usually passed down unchanged
from mother to child. But on the rare occasion it will undergo a random
change, and this will mark all the woman’s descendants from then on. The
tag marking a new branch of descendants is called a haplogroup.
Identifying haplogroups in a person’s mtDNA can help geneticists place
her geographically, which is what the researchers hoped would happen
with the bone samples they had.
“An
archaeologist should never part with his samples,” says Taher. So, he
went to Hyderabad in November 2006, carrying with him the bones wrapped
in cotton. A CCMB team took samples and worked on them for almost three
years but could not successfully amplify DNA from the bones.
Niraj
Rai is a researcher at CCMB who worked on the bone samples from 2010
onwards. “The best source for ancient DNA,” says Rai, “is the tooth.”
Then, in order, the bone of the inner ear, ribs, finger-bones, the skull
and finally, the long bones. “Unfortunately, what I got was a long
bone.” And even then, keeping the significance of the relic in mind, he
had to work using only a tiny amount of bone powder.
Because
it is so hard to obtain DNA from old specimens, and so easy to
contaminate them with genetic material from people working in the lab,
ancient DNA labs tend to be fortresses of a peculiar sort.
Take
the ancient DNA facility at CCMB. It is in a building that houses lab
animals to keep it away from other labs with human DNA. The building
itself has a retractable staircase—Rai has to press a button so the
flight of steps reaches the building. (This is apparently to keep snakes
from snacking on lab animals.)
Then, footwear
must be changed at two points before getting to the lab and protective
clothing worn. The air-circulating system is such that filtered air
flows outwards from the lab and then the chamber beyond. Outside is a
list of almost comically stern instructions, including one that says all
pens and calculators that enter the lab must have been irradiated in UV
light for at least two days.
For their second
attempt, the CCMB team had refined their technique and had access to
better equipment. This time, they were successful in sequencing mtDNA
from the bone samples. The first bone that had been recovered from the
St Augustine complex had a haplogroup—U1b—they had never seen in
contemporary Indian DNA samples. They wanted to compare the sequence
with mtDNA from modern Georgians.
The St
Ketevan Church in Tbilisi swung into action and shipped over saliva
samples from 30 east Georgians. (Perhaps never before has a religious
establishment been such a willing partner in a scientific
investigation.) Some of them had the U1b haplogroup, showing it was
prevalent in the region.
The other two bone
samples had haplogroups typical of western India and likely came from
locals. Additional tests confirmed that the U1b bone came from a woman.
So, in 2013, it was established that the bone found in two pieces in
2005 was consistent with being from a Georgian woman.
It
was the first time an ancient DNA result was being reported from India.
When Rai, Taher, Thangaraj and their colleagues tried to publish their
findings in a scientific journal, they were asked to verify their work
by repeating it in a different lab.
Thangaraj
points out that this is a fairly standard precaution with ancient DNA
results. “Unfortunately, there is no other lab in India,” he says. The
researchers argued that contamination was unlikely because the U1b
haplogroup they were reporting had not been seen in India in the more
than 20,000 samples they had in their database.
The journal did not relent and the paper, titled Relic excavated in western India is probably of Georgian Queen Ketevan, was published in another journal—Mitochondrion—which agreed with their reasoning.
As
the “probably” in the paper’s title suggests, it still cannot
definitively be said that the bone belonged to Queen Ketevan, but as
Taher puts it, the combined weight of “history, literary documents,
archaeological excavations and genetic analysis” point to it being so.
“Our work is over,” he says.
But what is
definitive, anyway? At the Archaeological Museum at old Goa is the image
of a haloed, determined-looking woman wearing a small crown. And in
front of her is a glass box with two brown tubules. A placard says they
are the relics of Queen St Ketevan of Georgia.
I’m
thrilled to think of the human drama they have been connected with. I
ask the museum in-charge if they are original. He says, “If we keep the
original there, I will have to hold a lathi and stand next to it day and
night.”
He enjoys a laugh at my naivete, then
continues. “If anything happens to the bone, first the excavators will
get a heart attack. Then, I will get a heart attack.”
Asked where the relic is now, Taher says, “It’s somewhere in India. We do not disclose the location.”
Relics
are believed to possess an aura. Even independent of the religious
dimension, Ketevan’s certainly does. Perhaps it comes from the combined
light of being many things to many people.
It
is an object of veneration to the Georgians, something that is no doubt
redoubled by their having expended resources and emotion in its pursuit.
To the archaeologists, it is the significant discovery that can come
along only a few times in a career that involves such painstaking,
meticulous work. To the Indian scientists, the relic is associated with
their first result from a technique that is expected to make major
contributions to what we know of our past.
And
it must mean something to the organizers of the Ketevan Music Festival
that began this year—with some of the concerts held in the St Augustine
ruins.
In 2010 a filmmaker and artist named
Gayatri Kodikal went to the St Augustine complex to shoot the ruins. The
ASI was at work and the site was closed. She got talking with some of
the archaeologists and heard about Queen Ketevan and the relic. “I was
hooked on the story,” she says.
Since then, her
obsession with the tale has taken her to Georgia and Portugal to visit
archives and see places, people and artefacts related to the story.
Currently, it is the inspiration for a board game she is creating. It’s
called The Travelling Hand.
The queen’s
post-mortem travels may not be finished yet. Talks are on between the
governments of India and Georgia, and who knows, it may not be long
before Queen Ketevan’s travelling hand finally reaches home, 400 years
after she left for Shiraz.
Srinath Perur is the author of the travelogue If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai and the translator of Ghachar Ghochar.
No comments:
Post a Comment