This true account of the scandal that enveloped the 1898 discovery of an inscribed casket said to contain the ashes of the Buddha is set against the high noon of the British Raj. The discovery at Piprahwa in northern India aroused worldwide interest, not least in the Buddhist world, since no other well-authenticated relics of the Buddha had ever been found. But almost immediately it became known that a German archaeologist, Dr. Anton Führer, working nearby at the same time had not only made bogus claims and faked his results, but he had also been associated with the dig. Renowned India expert Charles Allen—author of God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult And the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad and, most famously, Plain Tales from the Raj—tells the story, weaving in the results of a conference held at Harewood House in June 2006 on the validity of the Piprahwa dig and considering the results of recent carbon dating.
