Friday, February 8, 2013
Friday, February 8, 2013
We are on our way to even earlier historical sights, from the 3rd through 7th centuries. The temples of Aihole, the world heritage site of Pattadakal and the caves of Badami.
Here are some interesting things we see along the road: a sign painted on the wall outside a girls school prohibiting the sale of cigarettes in the immediate area (excellent!), a group of women squatting by the roadside selling fish by the edge of a river near the Tungabhadra Fish Farm, a large wind turbine blade on a flatbed truck (we have seen a number of wind farms on hillsides), and a herd of water buffalo that surround our car as we pass through a small town and push in our side view mirror. We see tractors decorated in front like beauty queens, garlanded with bright colored flowers and ribbons, in the same way that trucks are decorated or the bullocks pulling carts are adorned. And cars as well. Our driver bought a string of small limes which he placed across the front grill of his car after he visited the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai. For good luck, he says.
We enter a beautiful divided tollway, a National Highway, with two lanes on each side, with bougainvillea plantings in the median. But wait! Beth gasps and notices there is a motorcycle and then a car coming towards us going the other way in our lane. Our driver says passenger vehicles sometime do this to avoid making a loop to find a crossing point. Okay, but then there is a small truck facing us stopped dead ahead in our lane, so our driver moves around him and just laughs and says, this is an example of “Incredible India”. Progress is indeed being made but with India’s own indelible imprint. Photo of an unstrapped boulder on a very bumpy road on a truck right in front of our car.
Sitting on the porch of our hotel room this evening, there is a magnificent pink and purple sky behind a row of trees, a field of vegetables and then a line of coconut and banana trees. The sounds at sunset are memorable and soothing: the whoo whoo whoo of monkeys calling to each other in the trees near us and the mooing of cows a little further away and beyond that the light honk of the motor rickshaws, the deeper sound of truck gears, and the faint sound of music, Indian movie music, from someone’s speakers as well as temple sounds in the far distance. After putting up a clothes line for some laundry outside, I realized it is too tempting for the monkeys and bring it all indoors.
The Badami caves this afternoon were a carnival of people and children. It appears to be a favorite location for a field trip for school children and Beth and I were surrounded by children who acted like they had never seen anyone like us before. And blond Beth was a tempting target who agreed to some handshakes and soon found that this act was interpreted to mean permission to begin touching other parts of her body. And although it would be easy to escalate this to describe a microcosm of older men’s attitudes of privilege over women in India, I have to say that we experienced a similar phenomenon in other temples with young girls as well. Beth and I discussed this reaction of children here and think, perhaps falsely, that American children would not interact in a similar way if someone totally unique walked into their sphere. Perhaps because our culture instills in us from birth a sense of personal space whereas here in a crowded populous culture with little privacy, there is no sense of distance between people. So it is acceptable to invade a stranger’s world by touching or pulling on clothes or sticking out your hand in front of someone’s face.
The four caves themselves are from different periods and have detailed carvings on the outside with less decorative pillars deeper inside the cavern structure. They overlook a lake and must have been hidden enough to avoid desecration over the years from pillaging invaders.
The temples of Aihole were magnificent examples of very early temple architecture: 4th and 5th century structures, displaying the experiments and advances in temple design with the first attempts at an apsidal structure and later a tiered roof. The Pattadakal site contains 10 temples from the 7th and 8th centuries reflecting early evidence of the ornate carvings of the Hindu pantheon which we associate with great Indian art. Included are carvings telling the story of the Mahabharata, depictions of everyday life including the hair and clothing styles of those time, and more secular carvings of men and women together in intimate positions. All interesting.
We see a lot of tourists and ask our guide about the nationality of most of his clients. He says that for this part of India it is 90% French, then Italians, Russians and last of all British and Americans. We have only run into one other American tourist to date.
Beth and I have a world class dinner at the all-vegetarian hotel we are staying in. Our driver tells us that Badami is a dirty town he does not like. I like it all.