The public walls of Bangalore are painted over with scenes of ruins of our historical monuments, and larger-than-hoarding depictions of our beasts and birds and beaches. I was sitting in the Cafe Coffee Day by the highway at Hirisave, a hundred and ten kilometers west of Bangalore. The tourists who had filled the cafe and the highway were headed to the ghats, to rest there among the quiet coffee, and to trek into the forests, there to turn inward; none might miss a visit to the monuments built by the Hoysala dynasty over four centuries, beginning tenth century, AD. The Hoysalas began as men of the hills, of the thick jungles that matted the hills. They were virile, industrious, fired by a vitality that their environs imparted to them—qualities which they put to use to prey on traders carrying merchandise to the plains from the sea, or offer the traders protection against other forest brigands. Their other profitable occupation was to swoop down to the plains on marauding excursions, and bring home pillaged grain and stolen women. Then, as now, these plains were irrigated by small reservoirs. Every few minutes on the road on these plains you notice a reservoir, which have provided water for centuries, to peasants under the Hoysalas, under the Turks, under the Vijayanagar kings, under British rule, and now to peasants in our socialist democratic republic.
This is Karnataka, where so much has changed yet nothing seems different. Where the present still holds together the stories of its past.
The historic Sira Fort is a large, public, alfresco lavatory. It was built in the time of the Vijayanagara empire, and it has had different masters thereafter: the Bijapur sultans, the Mughals, Haidar Ali of Mysore, the Marathas, Tipu Sultan, and finally, the Empire. Now the natives have possession of the republican asset, and they use it for their basic human need, performing in a space open wide to the sky, and flanked by two fair-size lakes, one (Chikkakere) on the north, the other (Doddakere) in the south.I first made the discovery of what the fort has turned into while trying to arrange the Sira Lake (Doddakere) with the ramparts in my camera frame. Just in time I saw what I was going to step on.
It is not a large fort, and evokes none of the grandeur of the Mughals, or the mega-monuments of the Bijapur kings, or the mighty edifices of Vijayanagara. It is not a hill fort either, flat and square on the plains with a moat round it. The fort consists the tombs of Kasturi Rangappa Nayaka, his queen and the Prince and two wells.
There is quite a fascinating story surrounding this place. Seven divine maathrikes who had been living their immortal lives in Varanasi came floating southward a great many ages ago, and paused over Hassan. In those days when the western ghats were pure jungle and Hassan was a mere small habitation a short distance from the hills, on jungly plains, what lay below bewitched the divine ladies, and they landed softly in town. Seeing how it was beautiful even up close, they decided they must live forever there. For the divine, forever is truly forever, and the maathrikes live in Hassan even now.
Another story says Malik Kafur, Alauddin Khilji's general who pillaged the Dwarasamudra (Halebid) Temple of the Hoysalas thirty kilometers from the town-center of modern Hassan, was resting his troops somewhere in Hassan. His men cooked a meal of meat and consumed it near the anthills where the devis had by now been long in residence, and so angered the devis that in consequence his troops began to fall dead a man at a time. A stricken Kafur quickly met the priests of the devis but they couldn't help him, the affront on the devis being so terrible. But Hasanamba, who is God to all men and forgives every penitent, appeared to Kafur in a dream and suggested he build a temple to her, which he did using local expertise, and earned forgiveness, and thereafter continued his campaign and celebrated great victories.
We went to the quieter Jain temples behind the Hoysaleswara temple, where the carvings are fewer, and the austerity of the Jain religion prevails. Prayers are offered daily to the three thirthankaras by the two Jain families in the village at the feet of the temple terrace. When they were new they'd have been terribly important, with Queen Shanthala their patron, and the completion of the Parshwanatha temple coinciding with a great victory for King Vishnuvardhana against a northern enemy. Down the street from the temple, under the noonday sun, in the summer's heat, Halebid’s women had lined the entire embankment on the town’s side of the Dwarasamudra tank that the Hoysala built nine-hundred years ago. I turned left and a vision of the splendor of the place when it was a capital appeared to me under the blazing sun. There, across this lake, on the promontory, the thin veneer of trees dissolved to reveal the Hoysaleswara Temple and, behind it, the Jain temples, and next to the Jain temples, by the lake shore again, the Kedareshwara Temple. Behind the temples, near the Royal Bath, the Hoysala's Grand Palace floated in rarefied air, but the man-made lake that lay before me began to glitter and I blinked and blinked and fell back to my time.
In Angadi, the monuments are small. There are rises all round, hemmed in by coffee plantations. On the first rise I saw a modern temple and turned back. In a short while I was before two rises on either side of me. If you’ve come searching for Angadi, you have the story of Sala in mind. Searching for the story of Sala I was directed to a new temple. The deities in it are female, with round, mother’s faces. They are of mud, and are ten centuries old. Sometime in their life someone has glazed their faces into a smooth-china finish, any woman’s envy. The rakshasa’s head is at the feet of Vasanthaparameshwari in the center; next to her, Varahi is on her haunches, and she has a sow’s sweet face—the only such face on a goddess that I've seen. They are vanadevate-yaru, goddesses of the forest. In their early life they sat in the open, with the jungle canopy their shelter, and this, when it was an open spot, according to the priest, was the gurukul of Sala, where his Jain guru threw him the staff, and the exhortation, Hoy! Sala! With that staff Sala killed the tiger that had come upon them, and gave birth to a name, and a dynasty.
In this vast panorama only a fifth—maybe tenth—of the land is filled with trees. The rest was taken by thigh-high, chest-high upended cones of the shrub. There were hundreds of acres of them, falling away before me, rising on the hills on my left, on the hills on the right, running up the hills ahead, and everywhere behind me. I spent an hour and a half walking in the creases between tea patches and then I climbed back up to the bungalow and sat on the ledge that frames the front steps. It was raining. With four-hundred inches of rain it is no more Agumbe, but this Kadamane Tea Estate here that receives the most rainfall in Karnataka. After a long day of breathing fresh air, I retreated to my Bungalow. Read a lovely book by the fire and closed my eyes to be lost in deep sleep.
Years ago, I often shuttled with my parents between Bangalore (and Mysore) and Mangalore, and crossed the coffee-belt midway. In all my memories I peer through the trees of the plantations from the rear window, always through mist or rain or the dark, looking for the fabled estate-mansions. To sense that past, I went with Nagegowda's Bettadinda Battalige to the Munzerabad Club, established in 1893 by white planters, for white people. Ramachandra, its president today, is a lean, fit, reticent, classical planter with modern problems, worrying what to do with the horn-bearing skulls of wild game that gazed upon us while we chatted about the times when they were hunted down. Ramachandra and I went to Anand Pereira's plantation. Pereira begins and ends his workday zen-fashion, meditating by a high tank teeming with Japanese koi: the sprawl of his estate is on full display from the tank. With trees looming round us, there was such silence in that womb in which we sat, except for children scoring and denying runs, and prayers welled up in me for his success, for success for all planters, prayers that were, in truth, utterly selfish.
