In complete contrast, across the Subcontinental expanse in present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, there is (or was) Buddhistic art and statuary in abundance but hardly any sensitivity for the Buddha. Unlike a Bangladesh made up of silt thousands of feet deep, northern Punjab and Afghanistan are all rock—schist and conglomerate. No wonder, the art of statuary flourished here, after kings like Kanishka of the Kushana dynasty, coming in from the north and east, took to the Buddha's teachings at the very start of the first millennium. It was in this region, just a few centuries after the passing of the Sakyamuni, that his image was for the first time locked into human form. What emerged in and around the centre of Taxila came to be known as the Gandhara shaili.
Unlike the snub-nosed, round-faced, Mongoloid images of the more oriental Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of Nepal, Tibet and elsewhere, the 'original Buddhas' of Gandhara were decidedly occidental. They took after Greco-Roman and Persian traditions of statuary, wearing thick togas, and sporting aquiline features on an oval face, most prominently a straight nose and occasionally even a moustache.
Northern Punjab and Afghanistan have been the inheritors of the relics of that long-ago Buddhistic epoch on the headwaters of the Indus, and since British times it is the Lahore Museum which has been the institutional repository of much of the art from that period, including the 'Starving Buddha'. But the state ideology of Pakistan, geared to Islamic nation-building alone, makes it difficult for Pakistanis to proudly call this Buddhist iconography their own. This, too, has been the reason why the loot of Gandharan period statuary continues today from crude excavations in Pakistan headed for Western museums and private collections, with little concern among the citizenry.
The Pakistani's absence of consideration for Gandhara period-pieces expresses itself as indifference to excavated loot. Tragically in Talibanised Afghanistan, it was hostility rather than indifference, and it allowed the Gandhara statuary to be hacked, blasted, destroyed in March 2001, after standing for two millennia.