Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  I returned to gaze upon its amazing wheels. Made of stone, indeed, they could not have weighed less than a ton each, and yet, with a touch of the finger, they could be set in motion to revolve! Each spoke of each wheel was carved as delicately as a spoon’s handle, its filigreed body carved, too, of golden stone. It sat there in the sun, the most ornamented cart I had ever seen, modeled on the wooden chariots used to carry images of the gods in festival processions, gigantic, and at least four hundred years old. How could I comprehend such elaboration and abandonment?

  Stone chariot

  There were very few people about. The little map I had torn from the guidebook indicated it was about a nine kilometer walk around the road that now circled what was left of Vijayanagar, a city, it said, that had once covered thirty-three square kilometers. An easy walk. I set off down a country road, soft beige-colored dust whose edges merged with the land. With the major ruins at my back, I began to walk through weedy land dotted with short trees. On my right cultivated fields began, and after not too far, on my left, appeared another bazaar, like a skeleton of Hampi. It had the huge double rows of columns, long paved walkways, broken and weed-grown steps, and not a soul around. Here, if one paused to hear the slight sound of the wind playing about the columns, one could dream the marketplace that was: the silks and spices that must have been for sale, the jewels glinting in the sun, the exotic fruits and vegetables, the people from as far as Rome, Venice, Tibetans with their tasseled umbrellas. I could imagine the rugs that must have been for sale in 1509. I closed my eyes and saw in technicolor the merchants, the saried women, the opulence, the wandering goats, the cows, heard the noise, smelt the smell of India. But in fact there was no scent here in Vijayanagar. I opened my eyes again to the short trees, the weeds, and the columns—some of which were there and some that had vanished.

  Vijayanagar had an almost Aztec thirst for blood sacrifice. Each of the sheep cut up for shanks in the bazaar was butchered on the steps of the temple, its blood and wooly head offered up to a sticky red idol. On one festival day the king personally presided over the ritual slaughter of 250 buffaloes and 4,500 nanny-goats. But the metropolis’s citizenry had a romantic streak as well. Abdur-Razzaq, a Muslim diplomat, observed: “Roses are sold everywhere. These people coud not live without roses, and they look upon them as quite as necessary as food.”

  —Jonah Blank, Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana through India

  The dusty road made a gentle curve and I was surrounded on both sides by banana orchards, a banana plantation as might be seen in Hawaii, I thought, having never seen one. And a road leading, no doubt, to a house, a regular house, where the plantation owner lived, not like the squatters at Hampi.

  I walked on and on, seeing scattered ruins here and there: a suggestion of a wall, a mound that had perhaps been a building. A sugar cane field on my right. I went through a vast crumbling gate and the road turned into desert, wide fields of nothingness. In the hot sun I was in bliss. I love the desert and the nothingness of blowing sand. I felt like Jesus on his trek—they say he came to India, you know—as if I had come on some meaningful mission to save humanity, humanity perhaps in the form of my own soul. I chanted Hari Krishna, and other bhajans I had learned at an ashram, to the peopleless landscape.

  There was no one on the road. Not another tourist, not a single person, not one cultivator of the land. I was alone beneath the ruined wall that followed my path on the crest of the hill to my right and the desert extending out to what I could not make out on my left. In its day, they say, Vijayanagar had seven concentric lines of fortifications around a half million people—where I now walked in solitude.

  The rocks. There were no more of the building-sized black rocks to be seen. Why choose, I wondered, to build something as exquisite as the Vittala Temple among the uninviting rocks? Fortifications? Very likely.

  My little map said their were more ruins ahead, so I walked on, across a vast barren stretch of rocky ground.

  There were, read the map, other ruins out there to my left, but they were too far away to see. To my right the hill rose. I walked on and on through the heat and dust. For me it was like heaven. I could worry about hunger and I could worry about thirst, the basics of life which I had hardly ever given a thought to. Had I been foolish to try a full circumnavigation? Nobody else seemed to have chosen my route.

  Then to my right the hills tapered down, and the same barren rocky ground stretched itself on all sides, and emerging from it, I could see, on the left, a long way off the dusty road, buildings the same color as the land.

  I left the road to cut across the intervening sand. I had to put my sandals on again, for the stones beneath the sand, some far bigger than marbles, hurt my feet. I had not seen any of the black rocks since leaving the river. Why were the huge black rocks only along the river? I would never know.

  What had looked like a village from a distance turned out to be the King’s Palace, the Lotus Mahal, the Hall of Victory, Dasara Platform, and Hazarama Temple. Even rinsed of their facings, rinsed right down to the same dirt across which I trod, they still had an elegance to them, with their fine straight walls. A winged roof still sheltered one tower, but the three-story-high stairway leading up to it was exposed to the elements. For the rest, you could wander in and out of the doorways and, in most of the buildings, in and out through the walls. The buildings had fallen to ruin—the Lotus Mahal, the Dasara Platform, the Khanavami-Dibba, the Zenana Enclosure—they had such beautiful names. And the most beautiful building of all, with its long row of curved stone walls, like enormous cylinders set side by side, was the elephant stables. Each of its domes roofed a huge round room where, presumably, each elephant had had a kingdom to itself. I ran my hands along the walls, murmured words to hear them echoed by the domes, stood enthralled. Elephants.

  There were a few people here, like me, walking in and out of the ruins. All of us were silent in the deserted grandeur, gazing at the unfaced buildings, marveling at the colossal remnants of what had been the capital of an empire, a city surpassing Rome. It was like seeing a monarch in his undergarments. Embroidered though they were with a few remaining arches, the pomp and glory were missing, the robes, the crowns, the jewels were gone.

  But not entirely. On the back side of the King’s Palace, along friezes near the ground, and extending maybe two feet high, were lines of exquisitely carved elephants, trunk to tail, each procession not more than a foot high—and a man, a living man, on his knees, counting them, making notations in a book.

  “What are you doing?” I hadn’t spoken to a human being in several hours.

  “Counting the elephants.” The young Indian motioned me to silence until he came to a seam in the wall.

  “Why?”

  “We’re doing an archaeological survey.”

  “Oh. Who?” I looked around. For it was only he I saw at work.

  “Most of the people are at the Queen’s Bath and at the camp. They excavated the Queen’s Bath recently.”

  I was intrigued. Having an amateur’s interest in archaeology, I wanted to know more, but, though helpful in pointing out the beauty and details of the procession of elephants, horses, dancers, he didn’t know much about the “dig,” and urged me to go on to the Queen’s Bath or the camp. I could tell he was very keen on his job, his responsibility in counting the elephants, and wanted to get back to his task.

  I walked on. I was on another road that passed through ruined walls; somehow the desert, the dryness, the dust, made it all look so neat, until I came upon mounds of fresh dug dirt, and a huge deep rectangular hole, built of precisely cut stone, magnificent in its proportions. This was the Queen’s Bath, awesome in its newly exposed emptiness. There was only one person there, eager to hurry off. It was lunch time, it appeared, back at the camp. “Come there,” he urged and walked away.

  I sat on the rim of the bath for a while, imagining it full of sparkling water beneath the blue-white sun-filled sky, and the water filled wit
h splashing, laughing, incredibly beautiful, bathing women. The kings were reported to have had thousands of wives. Or had the bath been reserved for just one queen? I did not know. It was immense, far larger than any modern swimming pool.

  Then I started along the road the man had indicated as leading to the archaeologist’s camp. It was still a mile or more away. I walked and mused.

  It had always been one of my dreams to be part of an archaeological team, to know and understand, first hand, by sifting its dust, an ancient civilization. Since I was in no hurry, only wandering, expected nowhere, I decided, as I walked along, that I could volunteer a few days. I, too, could count elephants, dust stones delicately with a fine brush, record minutiae of which, quite probably, I would never know the meaning. I quickened my stride. I felt buoyant. I entered the camp with confidence, met some charming people sitting on the steps of a ramshackle building and asked to see the director of the site.

  The directors turned out to be an Australian and an American, both wearing khaki shorts, as they sat in a tent that stood beside the building where I had inquired. It was hot and dusty, organized, and, under the open tent wings, shaded to a greenish hue—all an amateur archaeologist could hope for. The two young men were most welcoming, in that way that foreigners in a foreign land are pleased to see another foreigner. I made my offer. They turned me down with regret, saying that only Indians could be hired for the project.

  “What about you?”

  “Oh well,” they laughed, “we’re just the directors. The Indians have other priorities. They’re not interested in investing money in digging up their past, not such a recent past as this.”

  “Recent?”

  “The major ruins date back only to the fourteenth century.”

  “That seems old enough to me.”

  “Not in India. No investigation of the ruins has ever been attempted. They’re too new, uninteresting, in a land where two thousand-year-old ruins go begging for excavation.”

  “Why?”

  “The government has to cope with the living problems. But they welcomed our suggestion, stipulating only that our work force must be composed of citizens of India. It’s a boon to the economy out here in the desert.”

  “But I’m volunteering.”

  “Even then the government asks that we take only Indians, for our volunteers get educational credit—and they are fed.”

  Without further ceremony, the two men rose, saying it was lunch time and inviting me to join them. I went with them onto the open porch of another building. There I was introduced to seven or eight groups of people sitting at many tables, and ate one of the most interesting lunches of my life. The spicy food was delicious, though, perhaps, by Indian standards rather plain, since they served only two or three dishes. The company was superb, the knowledge I gleaned quite marvelous. Vijayanagar, I was told, had ruled all of southern India off and on from 1336 to 1565. How precise it all was, I thought, for being so unstudied. But it appears the history was known, if not the remains.

  There were other visitors from the States, quite a number of Indians, a few Australians. Everyone talked excitedly about the Queen’s Bath. It, apparently, was their major accomplishment for the whole dig. Their funds were getting low. The work could not go on too much longer, but, eventually, they hoped a book would come from their efforts. For, to their knowledge, there was only one book ever published about the site, and it lacked pictures. One of their goals was to make a photographic record of the remaining buildings, and, along with their research, publish a splendid coffee-table book. In my mind’s eye, I already saw photographs of the Vittala Temple. The book would be breathtaking.

  Someone read a passage from Abdur-Razzaq, who had visited the Empire in 1443, “The city,” he had written, “is such that eye has not seen or ear heard of any place resembling it upon the whole earth.” He went on to describe the palaces, between which streams flowed in “channels of cut stone, polished and even,” the bazaars full of merchandise from the world over, and fragrant with flowers, sparkling with jewels: rubies, pearls, diamonds, and emeralds for sale “openly in the bazaar.”

  “In the King’s Treasury,” Abdur-Razzaq noted, “there are chambers, with excavations in them, filled with molten gold, forming one mass. All the inhabitants of the country, whether high or low…wear jewels and gilt ornaments in their ears and around their necks, arms, wrists, and fingers.”

  The gold was all gone, the archaeologists cheerfully acknowledged, by the time they got there. Indeed, the Empire of Vijayanagar was annihilated in a period of five months, the American Director told me, in an orgy of deliberate destruction probably surpassed only by that wreaked upon the Aztecs by the Spanish when they razed every stone and building right down to the ground. The American read from another book, quoting Sewell,“Never perhaps in the history of the world has such havoc been wrought, and wrought so suddenly, on so splendid a city; teeming with a wealthy and industrious population in the full plenitude of prosperity one day, and on the next seized, pillaged, and reduced to ruins, amid scenes of savage massacre and horrors beggaring description.” This pillaging followed, the Australian director added, the decisive battle of Talikota fought on January 23, 1565, by Vijayanagar against an alliance of four sultans from the north.

  As I walked away from the good company after the good lunch, my immediate path lay past a row of buildings in use. They stood like temporary buildings lightly upon the dust. It may have been the village of Kamalapura. I walked on, thinking about the line, “…the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome…” Realizing for the first time that India was filled with lost empires as grand or grander than any of those in the West, empires of which neither I nor most Westerners knew even the names.

  At the end of the road, the circuit should have brought me back to Hampi, to the market, to the bazaar, but I did not recognize my surroundings. The road did not make a perfect circle was all I could guess, maybe it was a spiral. It did not meet its beginning. But, to my astonishment, there, to my left, higher than anything else in all the landscape, towered the Virupaksha Temple with its eleven-story gateway glistening white in the last rays of the sun. It was so immense, so carved with figures, that surely it portrayed half the population of India upon its rising wedge shaped tower. How had I missed it on my arrival at Hampi? It was in such fine repair that I thought, at first, it might have just been built. I walked down into its courtyard, under the heavy roof to view the three-story gateway that led into the inner temple. I looked about in disbelief. It was not so finely carved as the Vittala Temple, but there was a plaque indicating it was even older than the Empire. It was overwhelming in its extent. How had I missed it?

  To this day I have found no books on Vijayanagar.

  Unless I return to walk the dusty roads, tap again the singing columns, I may never know more about what I have seen, where I have been. Authors who do mention Vijayanagar say it is just one monument among many which are not even listed in most guidebooks. The Dravidians, you see, always controlled, and still control, the south, while the Aryans, Hindus, and Muslims came in from the north. The present, as in other countries on earth, spars with the past.

  Jan Haag also contributed “A Wedding in Mahabaleshwar” to Part I and “Sick under the Bo Tree” to Part III.

  The wise old sorceress that she is, India is always at the ready to conjure up other acts when the freak shows wear thin. This land in which people spend lifetimes exorcising the demands of the flesh is at heart a sensual one, celebrating her earthiness with stone carved as finely as lace, rich food, rainbows of shining silks, intricately woven carpets, and exuberant dance. She is, after all, the home of our most graphic depiction of sexual passion, the Khajuraho temples, with delicately chiseled sculptures illustrating every sexual position you’ve ever fantasized about and then some.

  —Cheryl Bentley, “Enchanted”

  Scribes of Bengal

  JULIAN CRANDALL HOLLICK

  Calcutta is known for its sl
ums and misery, but it is also a center of arts and letters, India’s city of poets.

  RABINDRANAGAR IS A BUSTEE, OR SLUM, IN CALCUTTA, UNLOVED and unrecognized, home to six hundred men, women and children. It consists of eighty one-room thatched huts, squeezed between a stagnant pond and the main road that leads from the downtown heart of Calcutta past Salt Lake, a suburb of gray apartment blocks built just twenty-five years ago but prematurely aged and yellowing, victims of the constant humidity.

  It was dusk, a soft smoky haze punctuated by the wan smiles of underpowered street lamps. In this entire slum, there was just one light bulb, jury-rigged illegally from the nearest telephone pole. My friend Raja Chatterjee and I held flashlights while ten-year-old Samra Bhaja, sitting cross-legged on a rug thrown over the bare earth, accompanied herself on the harmonium.

  Samra had never attended school. She probably never would. Most days she helped her mother roll bidis, cheap Indian cigarettes—cut tobacco rolled in leaves and held together with thread. Samra’s voice was pure, untrained, with perfect pitch, full of pale melancholy as she unfolded her song: “This necklace bruises me; it strangles me when I try to take it off. It chokes my singing. Take it from me! I’m ashamed to wear it. Give me a simple garland in its place.”

  “Who wrote this song?” I asked. Samra was too shy to answer. Raja was astonished:“Tagore! Rabindranath Tagore! Surely you’ve heard of him?” I hadn’t then. But over the past few years, Raja has almost single-handedly educated me, not only about Tagore but also about all of Calcutta’s myriad cultures.

  Calcutta. The name conjures up an image of poverty and human suffering: the Black Hole, starvation, barefoot beggars. It is a city of somewhere around eleven million people, about five million of whom live in slums, perhaps another quarter-million living on the streets. Yet, ironically, something else is going on in Calcutta, something that doesn’t recognize the boundaries of caste or class, education or illiteracy. For if there is any one thing that binds Brahmin and Untouchable, babu and domestic worker, slum dweller and rich socialite, it is a passion for culture. Indeed, Calcutta as a city proudly defines itself through this passion.