On the occasion of World Bicycle Day, Union Culture Minister Prahlad Singh Patel on Wednesday tweeted photos of wall carvings purportedly depicting bicycles at a Tamil Nadu temple 2,000 years ago and questioned whether the cycle was indeed invented 200 years ago.
The tweet, which was deleted later, said the invention of the cycle was believed to be 200 years ago, while the 2,000-year-old Panchavarnaswamy Temple in Tiruchi has a statue of a man on a cycle on the door. “Avishkar kahan hua hoga [Where would the invention have taken place?],” he asked.
Mr. Patel then issued a clarification via two tweets. Apologising for his earlier tweet, he said the Chola era temple was built between the 9th and 12th century and one of the pillars still had the figure of the cycle.
He said that some had questioned the antiquity of the figure in light of renovations during British rule, “but there is no document with the Government of Tamil Nadu or Archaeological Survey of India to doubt its antiquity.” He also shared a video of the temple showing the figure.
One of the images shared by the Minister had gone viral a few years ago, but fact-checkers found the 2,000-year-old claim to be wrong. The Hindu had reported in 2015 that the depiction of a man cycling might have been added to the temple during renovations in the 1920s, according to Dr. R. Kalaikovan of the Dr. M. Rajamanikkanar Centre for Historical Research Centre in Tiruchi. The location of the second image shared by the Minister in the deleted tweet was not clear.
