My hard disc is full of ghosts. Electrons streamed through complex orderings of magnetic fields. I dredged out a few images. The end of December is always a calm and quiet time it seems. In years without the omicron I have strolled through gardens, walked on deserted beaches, sailed through calm lagoons.
We seemed to have traveled without a passport on most Decembers. The furthest photo in this bunch was the beach in the Andaman’s Neil Island. We have travelled north, into the colder parts of India, or stayed by the warm shorelines.
Every time I look at a collection of photos, something different leaps out at me. This time it was this photo taken in Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar. The duo look like chess players: looking into the interior of a baroque piece of ancient electronics. A very close look before the next move, I’m sure.
On our visit to Bhopal in 2012, we spent many hours in Bharat Bhavan. This is a lovely complex where you can look at contemporary art, watch plays, listen to poetry readings, view traditional art (a beautiful example above), talk to artists, or sit in the cafeteria and drink coffee or eat snacks. We did all of this. We thought Bhopal is the finest place to have a center of this kind; it is almost the cradle of Indian art, with Sanchi and the Bhimbetka caves just a short drive away.
The permanent collection of Bharat Bhavan is a museum called Roopantar (meaning transformation). One wing contains a very thoughtful selection of contemporary art. We spent a slow morning walking through this gallery. Then after a lunch in the cafeteria, we walked through the other wing: the stunning collection of Indian tribal art. The Family and I walked through it in a trance, dazzled by artistic traditions we had barely seen before. The scale of some of the work was astounding; the blue elephant whose photo you see here was taller than a man.
Traditional art differs from contemporary art in a crucial way. Modern art is produced for commerce, the artist lets go of the artifact to the buyer for a price. But traditional art becomes a part of the life of the artist, often in a ritual sense. Although that connection is not retained in the collection of Bharat Bhavan, the variety of artistic styles indicate the variety of lifestyles they spring from.
Bhopal also has the Museum of Man where you can get a glimpse of this connection between the artist and the work. Going back and forth between these museums added a new layer to our appreciation of this body of art.
The rock shelters of Bhimbetka are less than 50 Kms from Bhopal: an easy drive on a good road. In less than an hour we traveled from the city to this magical world. The paintings were discovered in 1957 by Vishnu Wakankar, a historian involved in studies of rock art in France and Spain, when he was beginning his work in India. Wakankar was traveling by train to Bhopal and noticed rock formations similar to ones he had worked on abroad. He went there and discovered the paintings.
Work is still going on in this area, but some of the shelters are open to the public. These are not closed caves with little openings. The picture on the right shows what they are: overhangs, some low, some high enough that we could stand upright. It rained quite heavily while we were there, and we could find shelter under some of the rocks, more or less like our prehistoric cousins would have. But the fact that the shelters are exposed also means that there has been more weathering here than in closed caves. In spite of this, many of the paintings are spectacular.
These shelters were inhabited till the medieval period. The earliest paintings are made with a single pigment, either red, which is the oldest, or white. Art from later times used multiple colours: yellows and greens appear. I wanted to know how old the earliest paintings are. There is no clear answer yet. Excavations have yielded stone tools, the oldest from the late Acheulian period. Some are in display in the museums in Bhopal. Acheulian tools in India were dated recently as more than 1 million years old. This is the deep Paleolithic, from long before Homo Sapiens arrived. However, the oldest paintings are thought to be more recent, and estimates quoted in plaques in Bhimbetka say they are probably from the Mesolithic period. That means they were painted by humans.
Near the entrance to the complex we saw this outline of a human hand. Apparently these are common in rock art, and it is believed that they were made by putting an actual hand on the rock face, and painting around it. I put my hand over it, the outline was substantially smaller. The Family compared her hand with it; it was smaller than hers. This fits with our understanding that early humans were relatively small compared to us. I have seen Ashoka’s stone inscriptions, the Rosetta stone, Hammurabi’s code etched on a stone. They are barely a few thousand years old. This connection of our hands was with another human who lived tens of thousands of years ago, perhaps even a good fraction of a hundred thousand years ago. The sense of deep time overwhelmed us for a while. Walking the streets of Rome, Patna and Xi’an, you are aware of the history of a couple of thousand years. The people who lived here would have been walking on ground familiar to other people tens of thousands of years before them!
We saw enigmatic holes in the rock face, like in the photo above. They are associated with rock paintings across the world and are called cupules. There are no experts on these. There is a consensus that they are deliberate, and that they are not functional, but served some artistic or symbolic need. They are older than rock paintings, and some people date them to a hundred thousand years before the paintings. Could this be the art of Homo Habilis, the art of an alien species?
We spent several hours at the site. Some caves were like zoos: full of wild animal figures, sometimes layers painted over previous layers. Elsewhere, you would come to an exposed rock face and see maybe a line of faded red colour, the whole painting would appear slowly to your eye as you stood and followed the faint lines. In some paintings, like in the boar in the featured photo, the pigment would be bright and eye-catching. We left, but we are not finished with Bhimbetka. We plan to return. And now that we have seen this, and read about rock paintings in India, we plan to explore many other sites across the country.
I was airlifted to Bhopal for a day. Three minutes out of the airport, on the side of a road, I saw two camels. They were content to sit under a tree as the nomadic shepherds from Rajasthan who had got them there busied themselves setting up a pen for the sheep. Watching the camels (or, possibly, Dromedaries), a poem by Ogden Nash came to mind.
The camel has a single hump; The dromedary, two; Or else, the other way around. I’m never sure. Are you?
Ogden Nash
I saw nothing else of much interest. That is a lesson not to go on unplanned trips, even if they are business trips, because I know that Bhopal has many things to see. The lake, Bharat Bhavan, the Museum of Man, the Bhimbetka caves, and Sanchi are just the tip of an iceberg, the parts that every traveller sees.
I had visited Bhopal once before, that time for a holiday. The Family and I stayed in a wonderful hotel called the Jehan Numa Palace, and had dinner in their courtyard restaurant every night. Their Shammi and Galoti kababs remain fresh in our minds. We saw the usual sights with a wonderful driver. One day we asked him what he would like us to see. It was one of the best questions we asked on that trip. He took us into parts of the town where the ghosts of the old Nawabi past linger in locked houses with ornate doors, crowded courtyards surrounded by walls with faded paintings, dazzling glass set in windows looking out of grimy facades. The area surrounds the world’s biggest industrial accident: the Union Carbide plant, which is still slowly releasing its poisons into the groundwater. I have so many photos from that day to remind us that we have only scratched the surface of Bhopal on our one holiday there. We will be back, but don’t hold your breath; the world is large and strange.
Don't hold your breath 