The Cultural Traveller

A FEW MONTHS AGO, IN BOILING SUMMER, LARGELY DRIVEN BY A visiting relative’s desire to see the Elephanta Caves, we headed out, reaching the ferry early morning. I was last there decades ago and had no memory of it except for a vague outline. The boat took about an hour crossing waters on which merchant and naval ships jostled for space as they harboured. Elephanta is on an island off Mumbai. The city itself has a number of cave complexes. There is one in the suburb of Jogeshwari. It was made around the 6th century CE by the Pasupatas, a sect rooted in asceticism and worshipping Shiva. It has a cavernous dark hall with massive pillars and a central sanctum housing a shivling, giving the feel of a temple. After we got off the ferry and climbed the steps to reach Elephanta, which is hewn off a hill, and entered the main cave in the complex, I found it to be a bigger, more refined version of the Jogeshwari cave. There was no mystery to it. It is what time does to art. Both caves were made by the same Pasupatas. Jogeshwari came half-a-century earlier. By the time they got down to carve Elephanta, artistic sensibility and resources had evolved to reach a grander expression.

We got out and climbed further up the hill and saw two long cannons left behind by the British overlooking the sea below that led to Mumbai. The island had changed hands and empires and become a strategic defence installa­tion. Religion, art, armaments, history, commerce—it could all come together in this place jutting out of the Arabian Sea if you knew the story. But the story did not begin with the caves. Centuries before that, as early as the 2nd century CE, ships carrying Roman goods would dock here, because it was a centre for their trade with the subcontinent. Remnants of Roman amphorae had been found on the island.

I remember once going to a small town called Ter, in the district of Osmanabad in Maharashtra. It had a huge mound. If you sifted the soil around it, there could be found shards of pottery thousands of years old. There were also pieces of amphorae from Rome. Because Ter used to be known as Tagara once upon a time and was a centre along the trade route with Rome too.

The Roman Empire would collapse and the city of Rome would be revived to resplendent glory by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. In a story in this Travel Issue, you will find a writer describe what one still experiences under the domes of Rome, most famous of them being the St Peter’s Basilica (in the Vatican City) where Michelangelo wrought his immor­tal art. By then Tagara itself had become memory but nearby, in Osmanabad, the Adil Shahi dynasty would raise the Bijapur Sultanate of the Deccan against whom Maratha Emperor Shivaji would first earn his stripes before taking on the Mughals under Aurangzeb. And his own capital was 400 kilometres away in Raigad which, as another story will tell you, is mostly just ruins but still a place of veneration and pilgrimage for the thousands who throng there in the memory of what he was able to do.

The world and its elements, we know, have always been linked through time and space. It is to the traveller that the extent of that relationship is available because he feels it firsthand. He might not have the grand picture that the historian is aspiring for, but his end is different—the experience of new entities, and in so doing discover­ing himself. If you go to Meghalaya and see the spring festival, it is a resonance of the festivals that you have been a participant in, from that part of the world you come from. And in New Orleans, when they hold a festival of jazz, they too are paying homage, if only to something more modern. The elements of the celebration—music, dance, food, joy—remain the same in everyone, everywhere. Or if you are in Andretta, high in the Himalayas, where a century ago an Irish actress turned a small scenic village into a centre of the arts whose pottery is famous the world over today, it speaks to the human expression that crosses continents. And in Vietnam when they mark 50 years of a war in which a small country brought down a superpower, it is the ancient tale of David and Goliath that each one of us has heard and admired. You will find these stories and more in the pages that follow.

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