Badami: In Search of an Imperial City
I — Exploring Small Towns in India
For someone like me who was born and bred in Mumbai, it is difficult to imagine towns which are smaller than an average suburb of the city. When I started traveling to small towns in India, first as part of work and then out of pleasure and a sense of curiosity, it opened up my mind. As Amanda Kendle writes in this blog post in Vagabondish, travel does make you more open minded and develop the ability to have empathy for everyone. Which is definitely a good thing to have in India.
II — Badami, Karnataka, February 2010
One of my first solo trips to a small town was a weekend in Badami in Karnataka. This was in February 2010. To be precise, the very last two days of February. I read about the great Chalukyan empire and how Badami was once an imperial capital back in the first millennium.
Hitherto, my idea of Imperial capitals was Delhi with its magnificent domes and forts or Calcutta with its Victorian era mansions and government halls. Via the Internet, one saw pictures of Rome, Athens, London, Istanbul and so on, there was this narrow concept of a great city of power etched in the mind. With this in mind, I headed out to Badami.
III — Getting There
Reaching Badami from Bombay requires two (or three) different bus rides. The first one is from Bombay to Hubli. This is the easiest of the lot. On the now improved NH4, a fast bus can put you down in Hubli in 8–10 hours. From the Hubli bus stand, one had to take a NWKRTC bus to Ilkal. It was a 4 hour ride with a lunch stop in between. There are just two buses in the day that go from Hubli to Badami. The alternate option is to go to Gadag (there’s a bus from Hubli every 15–20 minutes) and take another bus (every hour) from Gadag. Having done all this, one can reach Badami by 4pm. There is a train, the Lokmanya Tilak — Hubli Express which starts from Kurla at 9:15 pm and reaches Badami in the afternoon the next day at 1.55pm. There are trains from Secunderabad and Bangalore as well.
IV — First Sight
The first sight of Badami was at the bus stand when I got down from the NWKRTC bus from Hubli. There were these two black pigs scurrying around the compound. Much as I like pork, the sewer black colour of these porcine specimens were greatly uninspiring. I stepped out of the bus stand compound onto what effectively was the Main Street. As I later found out, you could walk ten minutes in either direction and you were out of the town.
On either side were small shops of groceries, household goods, hardware and farm equipment. There were street stalls and the products on display, whether fruits, vegetables, toys or cheap underwear, all had a withered, aged look as I they had been lying there for centuries with no buyers. And there were cows. Scrawny looking, withered cows. This was not a very happy town.
But beyond the immediate line of houses, shops and hawkers, the twin hills of Badami were clearly visible. Brown, the dull shade from months of dry weather, with occasional streaks of red from the walls of the Badami fort, the tiara like skyline in the distance contrasted with the more rustic streetscape in the foreground.
IV — Settling In
I found a hotel next to the bus stand. There was a wine shop on the ground floor as well. At Rs. 400 for the night, a single bed (with clean white sheets), a spacious bathroom with a shower (and running water) and a large fan was a good bargain. In the room, an entire flat by Bombay standards, there was a sheet of A4 paper stuck on the wall warning you about the monkey menace. Nice!
There was a garden restaurant and bar opposite the hotel. The garden consisted of a balcony shaded with transparent plastic sheets and two large pots to provide the greenery. As I had my lunch of chicken fried rice washed down with lager beer, I was entertained by a medley of conversations between farmers and traders, panchayat officials and their minions and in the corner, couple of urban-wear clad tourists who seemed to be architecture students on a field visit. I would bump into them again at the various locations and the paraphernalia that they carried confirmed my guess.
V — Lay of the Land
To get an idea about Badami, imagine a small lake in the middle. There are two large red sandstone hills on either side i.e. north and south. The two hills taper and meet on the east side. On the west side of the lake is the modern day urban settlement. This urban settlement is served by one metalled road which also doubles up as the district highway. The railway station is at one end and the bus stand is at the other. The 2011 Census says there are about 6000 houses in the town and the population is about 30,000. This is less than the number of people in a single street in Andheri or Bandra on any given day.
25 kilometres to the east is Aihole. Around the midpoint between Badami and Aihole is Pattadakal, on the banks of the Malaprabha. The landscape is undulating. In February, with the monsoon long gone, it was a dull dry brown with specks of green trees. The land is on the edge of the Deccan Traps, the solidified volcanic rock formed all those million years ago.
VI — The Tourist Sites
I spent the weekend exploring the different sites — the Badami rock caves, the Agastya tank, the Bhootnatha temple, the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Pattadakkal, the Chalukyan temple architecture laboratory at Aihole and all the other random period structures that kept appearing at every turn of the road.
There are four main heritage zones in the area
1. Aihole is a village today. But it was architecturally the genesis of Indian temple architecture. The archaeological site that is maintained today contains prototypes and early designs of what would become the ubiquitous styles used for Hindu temples all over the Deccan / South India.
2. The Pattadakal World Heritage Site was the complex of temples and sacred edifices where the Chalukyan kings conducted their coronation ceremonies, victory celebrations and other things to uplift their souls.
Then there are two halves to Badami itself:
3. The Badami Fort on the northern side of the tank. Here you will get to see the citadel itself where the Chalukyans established their capital. Of course, the original structure was destroyed in the 7th century itself by the Pallavas. The current structure dates to a later period when the town was under the rule of other monarchies like the Vijayanagar and the Bijapur dynasties.
4. The Badami Caves on the southern side of the tank. Four caves with exquisite carvings from Hindu mythology await you here.
In between all these sites, there are numerous ancient temples scattered all over the land.
I have written about the Chalukyan trails before.
VII — Comparing The Two Badamis — Past & Present
While exploring these sites, there are two main points which hit about Badami. Inside the archaeological sites, you are in another world, almost like being inside Red Fort or the temples of Hampi. You see opulence. You see indulgence. You see great art. The kings, the nobility and the businessmen who patronized these artisans were definitely sophisticated, cultured and extremely rich. They had a lot of time and they were quite discerning about their choices. But when you come out back into the present world, you see a town whose people are on their knees struggling with their lives. Agriculture is the main occupation with jowar and bajra dominating the crop production and while this region was quite strong, over the years the returns have been diminishing.
One indicator of the prosperity (or the lack of) is the state of the street dog. Living on garbage, a street dog will be healthy and strong if a lot of food is thrown in the garbage. And that will happen if it is a prosperous place. Nothing of the sort. The street dogs of Badami look straight out of a poverty porn movie that Indian art film makers were fond of making. Some of the ruins, wonderful examples of civil engineering, were used as shitting spots for humans and animals.
The other thing that strikes you is that there is nothing that connects the people who are living there today with any of the historic structures. There are no communities descended from the old dynasties. There is no craft or artistic industry of any sort. In short there is no legacy. Of course, many temples are still extant and there is regular stream of devotees visiting the sites.
It is this second phenomenon which strikes me as significant. The great Indian polymath DD Kosambi wrote about the concept of “living prehistory” — of stuff from the days of yore which are embedded in the daily customs and practices of people, in their day to day life, in their rituals and events, in their languages and idioms. I could find nothing from the Chalukyan era. It would appear that in between the people and culture of Badami in the first Millennium and the people and culture of today, there seems to have been a system reboot done and the old stuff formatted and erased and new stuff, without the prosperity, brought in.
VIII — Epilogue
Such are small towns like Badami. Behind their extremely innocuous, nondescript present day ambience lies a great history, uncared and forgotten.
In January 2015, the central government announced a new scheme to rehabilitate heritage cities. 12 cities have been identified — Badami is one of them. It is to be seen what the money gets used for.
