The sacred Buddhist Piprahwa Relics have been saved from a Hong Kong auction—and have been returned home to India, thanks to Godrej, the country’s famous dyeing firm.

India’s best-known hair dyeing firm, Godrej Industries, stepped in to the rescue and, for an undisclosed but estimated sum of 100 million Hong Kong dollars, purchased the sacred trove of gemstones and bone relics of Gautama the Buddha.

It had been unearthed by an English estate manager, William Claxton Peppé, in 1898 from a stupa in Piprahwa, near Kapilavasthu, the Buddha’s birthplace. 1,800 pearls, rubies, sapphires and gold sheets—buried alongside bone fragments identified by an inscribed urn as belonging to the Buddha himself.

HOMECOMING: India finally receives the Piprahwa Relics of the Buddha

Peppé handed most of them to the colonial Indian Government but retained nearly 350 of them. They remained unseen in his private vault until his great-grandson inherited the trove and decided to place it under the auctioneer’s hammer.

They were the mortal remains of India’s Greatest Son, sacred relics that would have received public adoration and worship had they been enshrined in a temple’s inner sanctum, even as the Buddha’s Tooth Relic receives public veneration and worship daily at the Dalada Maligawa in Kandy.

Instead, they were condemned to profanation and forced to go under Sotheby’s squalid auctioneer’s hammer, up for grabs to the highest bidder. Sotheby’s stands condemned for the crass insensitivity they’ve shown in their unscrupulous pursuit to make a quick buck by the sale of these relics to collectors to store in their vaults and boast to their friends as little curios they picked up on their latest voyage to the sleazy world of Suzy Wong.

The Indian authorities were alerted to the auction by a listing on Sotheby’s website. It said, “Sotheby’s is honoured to present the Piprahwa gems, appearing for the first time in Hong Kong. The 1898 discovery of these gems by William Claxton Peppé at Piprahwa in northern India—where they were found buried together in reliquaries with the corporeal relics of the Historical Buddha—ranks among the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of all time.”

The Sunday Punch asked on May 11th, “What honour is there but sacrilege for Sotheby’s of London in selling ‘the corporeal relics of the Historical Buddha’? Sure, they are not from a fictitious Buddha, are they? Really, do Sotheby’s have no sense of Buddhist sensitivities that they wantonly trample on without remorse nor of the pain they cause when they act like ghouls, preying on the corporal remains of the historically dead? Will Sotheby’s of London have the impudence to do the same with the Holy Sepulchre?”

After Pirojsha Godrej, of the Godrej Foundation for Art and Culture, bought and saved the Buddha’s relics for all mankind to behold and worship in India, Sotheby’s had the cheek to declare, “It is delighted to have facilitated the historic return of the gems to India.”

It did no such thing. It didn’t give a toss whether it ended up as a curio in some Macau drug lord’s seedy private boudoir as long as it received its auctioneer’s commission. It now preaches sanctimonious babble by saying, “This completes our active search over the past two months to identify the best possible custodian for the gems,” when it was merely fishing around for someone with the biggest financial teeth.

Pirojsha Godrej said: “We are deeply honoured to contribute to this historic moment. The Piprahwa gems are not just artefacts; they are timeless symbols of peace, compassion and the shared heritage of humanity.”

As part of the agreement, the entire collection will be displayed at the National Museum in New Delhi for three months. For the next five years, a “large portion” of the relics will remain on loan at the museum, while the remainder will be housed in a new cultural institution that the Godrej Foundation plans to establish in Mumbai by then.

Buddhists all over the world should be delighted to see the safe return of sacred Buddhist relics from an English manor’s attic closet to be on public display in the land of Gautama’s birth and should raise both hands in a salute of gratitude to the Godrej family for practicing philanthropy at its best.

For centuries it has been the exclusive preserve of the male and has provided safe refuge for man on his way home to slake his thirst, to rest his limbs from the toils of the world, a temporary haven before facing the horrors awaiting him at home.

A welcome port of rest in which to nurse his drink in solitude and peace, assured in the knowledge that no bolt nor thunderous growl nor murderous frown from home could intrude to shatter the sanctity found within walls, fortified by manmade laws, of this all-male citadel, strictly forbidden to single predatory females.

FANCY MEETING YOU HERE: What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? Funny you should ask? Just about to ask you the same thing

But now it’s under siege, and pounding in every manly breast is the dread of hearing the imminent tick-tock of stiletto heels walking the bar floor beat, the sound of high-pitched nagging rap preceding its entrance.

The Lankan male has long held out yielding sovereignty over this hallowed ground, surrendering not one inch of his temple of evening worship. But now it has been breached. A government gazette notification, proclaiming the right of any woman to buy a drink at a bar and booze alone, has put paid to male exclusivity in this bohemian zone where Bacchus rules.

The gazette notification permits women to buy liquor from any licensed place, work in establishments engaged in liquor production, and consume liquor at any hotel or tavern. Lankan law now recognises equal rights for women to sell, manufacture, and buy and drink liquor.

The leave to appeal motion had been granted by the Supreme Court on 9 July 2018 in terms of Articles 12(1)(2) and 14(1)(g) of the constitution.

And in the light of the gazette proclamation to enshrine the right of a woman to habituate the bar alone in legal eyes, the fundamental rights petition filed by Professor Camena Guneratne on behalf of Women & Media Collective and the Centre for Women’s Research was allowed to be withdrawn by the Supreme Court, making the right complete.

Will these Elysian fields no more be that clime where peace once forever dwelled, where males of the species could meet in a spirit of bonhomie at their favourite waterholes and, over chat and a drink, gain therapeutic relief from the stresses of the world and home, free from all fears of being invaded by the deadlier of the species and ignominiously dragged home?

What though the field be lost? One cannot stop the tides of history nor prevent its repetition.

Even as history relates, when Adam found, when he awoke in his exclusive Garden of Eden one morning, he had been robbed of a rib, a rib he could hardly afford to spare, by a mysterious intruder who had stolen in the night, clad only in a flimsy fig leaf, and claimed to be the female of the species. What else could he have done but accept a sip from her forbidden fruit drink?

Today, as history is re-enacted, what else can man do but accept another round of a newly liberated Eve’s forbidden fruit drink and, with the loss of an all-male Eden again, remain shackled to woe a second time around?