The Eternity of Art in Hampi

A NEGUNDI SITS QUIETLY on the banks of the Tungab­hadra river, a village small enough to be forgotten if it were not for the stories clinging to it—stories of kingdoms and battles and of gods in exile. For this is Kishkinda, the mythological kingdom of the monkey gods. The hills here are scattered with boulders of impossible sizes, piled and balanced as if left by giants. It is easy to imagine these rocks as remnants of a divine quarrel, as stones flung in the heat of battle, now frozen in place by time’s gentle hand. Anegundi is a place where the past is folded into the present, where the epic of Ramayana seems less a story than an inheritance. If Rishimukha hill is believed to be the place where Sugriva, hiding from his brother Vali, formed his alliance with Rama, then Anjanadri, rising sharply against the sky, has a temple at the summit to honour Hanuman, who is said to have taken his first leap here. From the temple, the view spreads wide, a panorama of land caught between the real and the sublime. The Tungabhadra glitters below, a ribbon of life winding through rocky plains, flanked by the scattered green of paddy fields and banana groves. The river is the pulse of this land, its slow movement a counterpoint to the stillness of the hills, binding Hampi and Anegundi together like threads of an old story. Standing here, you feel not just the land’s age but its continuity, the sense that time does not pass so much as accumulate, each moment a layer laid down atop the last.

One such layer, created just 30 years ago, has already become a part of this hal­lowed landscape. When Shama Pawar, an artist and conservationist, first settled down here as a young mother, she was not satisfied with building a charming home for her family. Set amid 10 acres of land, including a fruit orchard—lemons from the gardens are neatly arranged on a platter in the kitchen as though in a still life from another time and place—the house with lime plaster walls, a court­yard and a thatched roof and striking local art collected over the years is where The Kishkinda Trust (TKT) took root. Working in a region where opportuni­ties for women were scarce, Pawar got them to work with a plentiful local resource—banana fibre. Through this humble medium, which they turn into bags, baskets, rugs and works of art, the women have become custodians of their communities. Walk through the facility centre of the Hari Dharti Rural Develop­ment Society on Anegundi’s Chariot Street and you come upon a group of women sitting on the floor chatting and weaving laundry baskets and planters. You see the real beauty of their craft, whose mellow gold seems to hold the essence of the earth itself, each curve and coil carrying the scent of sundried fields, of harvests long gathered, and of hands that know the rhythms of the land. They are not mere objects but vessels of memory, shaped by time and toil. They are born of the same light that graces the stones of Kishkinda—a light that blurs the boundaries between earth and sky, between past and present.

“The banana fibre crafts project is self-sustaining now—I have handed it over to the community and moved on to other things,” says Pawar, who cuts a dapper figure in a kasuti sari, walking through the communal workspace next to her house where the stables used to be. It is teeming with women—dozens of them, creating new objects and finding their way around new materials, their hands moving faster than the conver­sation. “I am excited about hyacinth fibre as the next medium,” Pawar says, stopping to point out the new lab she has set up for experimenting with different media. She is amused that what she has created here has come to be associ­ated with the “heritage” of Hampi—an unlikely bridge between the art of Vijayanagara and present-day consumer culture. It does make sense, however. Because to work with one’s hands is to defy disposability. Just like the monu­ments of Hampi—and Anegundi, which is named after a 15th-century elephant stable located here—do.

Video: Lambadi embroidery in Sandur

The art of Vijayanagara is not something contained or framed. It lives on, not just as artefact but as echo, a presence that lingers in the stone pillars, in the wind that sweeps the plateau, in the shadows that drift and settle in this ancient kingdom. The city of Hampi itself is a masterpiece, a vast canvas with temples as its focal points. Even after its ruin, its forms and styles have seeped into the temples, homes and public spaces of South India. The Nayaka kingdoms of Madurai, Tanjore and Gingee drew deeply from the artis­tic vocabulary of Vijayanagara, inherit­ing its architectural ambition and the fluidity of its murals and frescoes. And then there is the bronze—the bronzes of Vijayanagara have a weightless grace to them, reinterpreting the Chola tradition of bronze casting for a new era. Weaving and smithy were in fact so crucial to the empire that artisan com­munities were granted economic and social privileges by the Vijayanagara court and ritual recognition by temples.

The Vijayanagara craftsmen were not isolated artists, but conduits through which the world flowed—Per­sian motifs meeting local mythologies, ideas drawn from as far as the Khmer and the Sumatran empires, even as their work retained the unmistakable heartbeat of the Deccan. Through contact with traders and emissaries, they wove an international language into their designs. But perhaps the most enduring gift of Vijayanagara to the people of South India is its vision of art as something inseparable from life, as a way of living with the divine. The archi­tecture of Vijayanagara is a reminder that art can elevate, that stone and space can carry meaning across centuries.

Video: Banana fibre weavers of Anegundi

In Hampi Art Labs, a new gallery space and artists’ residency in Vidy­anagar, the Jindal township in north Karnataka with its own airport—the only one serving Ballari, Hospet and Hampi—the dialogue between history and contemporary creativity continues to unfold. The building, designed by Sameep Padora, mirrors the curves of the Tungabhadra and the undulat­ing terrain around it. When I visit, designers are busy putting up the new exhibition—‘Knots that Bind’—that features works from Sangita Jindal’s collection celebrating shared histories and community. There are works by Arpana Caur, Manu Parekh, Himmat Shah, B Prabha and other eminent artists, alongside gorgeous ajrakh and batik tapestries by the Kutch Crafts Collective Shrujan, which together create the perfect context for The Red Dress, a collaborative embroidery project by British artist Kirstie Macleod. The project has travelled the globe and is constructed out of 87 pieces of burgundy silk, worked on by over 350 artists from 51 countries. Here, not far from Hampi Art Labs, the Lambani women of Sandur helped bring The Red Dress to completion, showcasing their intricate embroidery to the world.

In Sandur, a town that lies nestled between low hills and fertile plains, the iron-rich soils burn a vivid red. The rich­ness of the earth here is both its fortune and its curse. Once a princely state ruled by the Ghorpades, Sandur has been mined for centuries—and yet, there is beauty in this unyielding landscape. The Narihalla river shimmers with the quiet confidence of a serpent that has carved its path through stubborn rock over time. Drive for 7km past Sandur town and you find yourself in Sushilanagar, a village that is home to over a thou­sand Lambani households. In almost every home, the women hastily finish up cooking and send their children to school before they spread a bedsheet on the floor and sit down to do what they have always done—embroider garments so intricate and rich that they seem to carry the stories of the plains and the forests they have crossed. The Lambanis are a people who live in move­ment, whose history is not set in stone but stitched into cloth, hammered into metal and sung in the half-light of dawn. They create with a ferocity that defies the roughness of their lives, their art a defi­ant blaze against a world that has often pushed them to the edges.

Sixty-three-year-old Shantibai is one of the last women in the thanda to wear their work with pride. Her blouse is heavy with mirrors and beads and her skirt took two months to make. Her daughters and daughters-in-law wear georgette and chiffon saris but when they embroider, they seem to effortlessly channel their identity and tradition. “Every Lambani child, as young as 10, can embroider,” says Shantibai, peering through thick glasses that she says is the result of decades of work. Her hands move almost in a blur, turning plain fab­ric into a tapestry of symbols. Each motif carries meaning, the patterns drawn from nature and from memory—a line of triangles evoking the mountains, a row of circles resembling the stars that watch over a life lived under the sky. Her daughter Rukkubai and granddaughter Shakunthala, who earn a living from their craft, are more methodical. They make markings on fabric and try new de­signs and patterns. A sari can fetch them ` 4,000-5,000, but the work can take up to a month. “There is a lot of demand now. Contractors have us booked for many months to come, and aside from that, we take up projects independently. There is not a moment to spare,” says Rukkubai, 40, without looking up from the sari she is putting finishing touches to on her front porch.

Video: Hampi Art Labs, a new gallery and residency outside the Jindal township

The bright red thread of the Lamba­nis, the goats that graze by the roadside, the stumps of paddy standing in the winter sun, the banana plantations spar­kling like jewels against the red earth— this is the unseen human side of Hampi, the erstwhile kingdom of stone founded by Harihara and Bukka in the 14th century. Set against a surreal landscape, Hampi is, first and foremost, a crucible of human enterprise, a place where gods stepped down from their celestial realms to inhabit temples that seemed to grow from the earth itself. The towering spire of the Virupaksha temple, stacked with tier upon tier of sculpted deities and mythical beings, was not merely an entrance but a threshold between the earthly and the divine. And in Vittala temple, a labyrinthine marvel, the stone pillars were sculpted not just to stand but to sing. The empire’s brilliance attracted shadows, and in 1565, the Sultanates of the Deccan came like a dark tide. Hampi fell like a toppled idol and the fires, they say, burned for months. Yet Hampi did not die. It lingered in ruin and became a relic in motion, shifting under each dawn and dusk, a place that refuses both life and death. Its columns stand like ribs of a heart stilled. The gods remain, captured in their rocky niches, quiet and watchful, as if waiting for the next invocation.

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