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. General Photographic Agency/Getty Imagesįor 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. Before the availability of metal vessels, cooking in Aotearoa New Zealand typically involved placing heated stones in wooden containers. A Māori woman cooking in a hot spring in Rotorua, circa 1933. 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. 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. Embossed on the bronze were loops and swirls of a language that wasn’t English. ![]() Roughly 6.5 inches high and 6 inches across, it had prominent ridges and an uneven lip, as if part of the pot had broken off. It was particularly odd because the village had not established trade with foreigners and therefore, thought Colenso, had no access to bronze, which was not manufactured on the island at the time.Ĭolenso looked closer. ![]() According to his account, Māori women were cooking “potatoes” (possibly kumara, a sweet potato-like tuber) in a bronze pot over a hearth, rather than the more traditional method of placing heated stones in a wooden vessel. It was a momentous occasion-Colenso was reportedly the first European to visit the community-but he was distracted by a pot. Upon his arrival at a Māori village in the lush North Island forests of Aotearoa New Zealand sometime in the late 1830s, Cornish missionary William Colenso noticed something curious.
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