Beautiful Badami

Hugh and Colleen Gantzer visit the rock-cut cave temples sculpted between the sixth
and eighth centuries. These temples in Karnataka are considered an example of
Indian rock-cut architecture, especially of the Chalukya period

WE were led to Badami by a man we have never met. Satish Gover, our favourite architectural historian, had described it as ‘picturesquely located on a lake, surrounded by steeply rising cliffs," and that when the powerful Chalukyan empire had shifted its capital to Badami, "rock cutters were soon at work carving out halls from the scarp of the hill." The dynasty had been formed in the sixth century AD and so the crafted caves were more than 1,500 years old. We decided that we must visit them and we were happy that we did.

The town massed on an undulating plain on one side of a huge lake: the Agasthya Tirtha. The other three sides of this reservoir were ringed by coloured hills in shades ranging from cinnamon through cocoa to caf`E9-au-lait and burnt-rose. We left our car, bought tickets at a booth in the parking lot at the base of the right spur of this amphitheatre of hills, and began to climb up a flight of steps cut into the rocks. Above us, served by the rising steps, lay the ancient rock-cut sculptures. As we climbed, the views of the town and lake changed. Sometimes, they were framed in soaring rocks; at others it almost seemed as if we were looking out between the hulking shoulders of bare-bodied, ochre-skinned, giants.

From the very start of our journey around the sculpted caves, we got the impression that they were deliberately asserting the essential unity of all, apparent, contradictions: Creation and Destruction, Static and Dynamic, Siva and Vishnu, Male and Female. In the first cave, for instance, there was a superb fusion of devotion, dance and modern stroboscopic imagery. The multi-armed Siva, carved on the wall of the cave, captured the Lord of the Tandav dance ... the dance of destruction and re-creation ... in 81 poses of the classical Bharatnatayam. Here we were joined by a group, which had clearly been here before. They carried powerful torches, illuminated the multi-armed Shiva, and then shifted their beams slowly. Highlights and shadows changed subtly: the sculpture began to move. And then, as the beams were flipped faster and faster, Shiva danced, his arms and legs keeping pace with the beats of a small hand-drum played by one of the men. It was as dramatic as a son-et-lumiere (sound and light show): Static and Dynamic perfectly matched.

Up another 31 steps we came to the second cave. Carved on the left was Varaha and, on the right, Vamana. The first was the boar incarnation of Lord Vishnu, the Preserver; the second was the dwarf incarnation. The boar could exemplify the emergence of warm-blooded creatures on the evolutionary ladder; the dwarf could indicate an awareness of our proto-human ancestors like Ramapithecus

We trudged on, wary of the tribes of questing monkeys that have been known to snatch cameras and small handbags.

A further 61 steps brought us to the third cave: the most impressive of them all. It has been cut into the base of a sheer face of rock. The pillars, here, show the development of such cave architecture. There are square pillars and rounded ones and, within these two broad classifications, these pillars have embellishments, which span much of the creative range of rock-cut pillars all over our land.

Carved on the rock outside the cave were Vamana and Vishnu with eight arms. Inside the anteroom of the cave were carvings of Vishnu sitting on the coils of Sesha as if on a throne. Sesha is an immortal serpent, who has been variously described as representing the power of the ocean or, more imaginatively, the slowly moving currents of molten rock or magma on which the continental slabs rest, or even a totem worshipped by pre-Indo-Iranian tribes now absorbed into the Hindu pantheon. Then there were Narasimha and Harihara. The Man-lion, Narasimha, is the most fearsome of the successive incarnations of Vishnu and could be a stylised depiction of a Neanderthal: a rather brutish and extinct human species and now considered to be one of our direct evolutionary ancestors. An inscription in this cave indicates that it was carved in AD 578. Had Darwin’s theory been pre-empted by our ancient sages?

We felt particularly insecure when climbing the last flight of rain-slicked steps. But the views from this height made the risk worthwhile. The Agasthya Tirtha lake spread below and it was full. According to legend, sage Agasthya slew a fiendish giant here and gave his name to this water-body. We looked out over the water, with our backs resting against the outer wall of the last cave. To the right of the reservoir was the Bhootnath Group of Temples. To the left of the tank, the town spread with a white, domed, mosque close to the banks of the lake. Near the top of the hill opposite, on the far side of the tirtha tank, rose a fort and two pavilions. We turned around and entered the last cave temple on this spur of the hill.

This cave had been carved by the Jains. The central figure was that of their 24th tirthanka, Mahavira. He had been a contemporary of the Buddha in the sixth century BC. On the right of this image was that of the 23rd tirthanka, Parsavanath, who, according to the Enclyclopaedia Britannica, lived about 250 years before Mahavira. To the left was the image of tirthanka Bahubali. We had visited his giant, monolithic sculpture at Sravanabelagola.

There are many who believe that Mahavira had founded the Jain religion. Our Jain friends, however, contend that he was the last of their tirthankas and that their faith predated Aryan beliefs by many centuries.

We can’t express an opinion on this. All we do know that when we stood on that high place, the artistic heritage of our land unrolled like a great and ageless scroll sculpted into the rose and cocoa rocks of Karnataka’s Badami.

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