The Incredible Cultural Illiteracy of Our Fellow Indians

The old man, carrying in his hands a worn-out plastic bottle filled with water, hurries towards a row of pillars. Nothing gets his attention, be it the stone pillars strewn around or the intricate engravings of floral patterns and mythological figures, as he hastily heads to relieve himself. A camera lens zooming in on him is the last thing that can stop him from devoting all his attention to answering nature’s mighty call.

The venue -World Heritage site, Hampi!

After the destruction of Vijayanagara (Hampi today) five centuries ago, the city lay in ruins, forgotten until a series of British officials and archaeologists rediscovered it in the eighteenth century.

'The group of monuments at Hampi ...the last capital of the last great Hindu Kingdom of Vijayanagar' encompassing 'an area of 418,724 hectares, located in the Tungabhadra basin' is today considered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a world Heritage site.

Bumpy, pothole ridden, badly maintained roads greet you as you enter Hampi; nothing that would suggest they lead to a preserved archaeological site or a UNESCO endorsed World Heritage Centre.

Post-independence, the archaeology department has no doubt done a great deal of restoration work, excavating structures, restoring damaged portions and repositioning them where they might have once stood. But it looks like greater efforts have been made by successive governments, irrespective of party affiliation, to keep it looking as dreadful as it did when the glorious city first met destruction.

Hygiene and Hampi seem to not see each other in the eye. Sanitary infrastructure is almost non-existent. What one finds in the name of toilets are unapologetically placed conspicuously amidst the temple ruins and are such horribly maintained structures, that one wouldn’t dare even walk past.

It wouldn’t take much to provide this once ‘city of victory’, hygienic infrastructure that serves its purpose without interfering with the ambience of grandeur, sacredness and a sense of tragedy prevailing in Hampi.

Despite feeding the state exchequer enough, the state doesn’t do justice to Hampi. But all the state’s non-doing notwithstanding, tourists still flock the city. There isn’t anything to ease their stay or to lure them to explore Hampi, yet the footfalls only increase every year.

These pilgrims do not seek air-conditioned cottages or even concrete structures, which are reminiscent of Soviet influence on the Indian state. Traditional low-cost structures which can provide the pilgrims with a place to rest, cook and refresh themselves would go a long way in making Hampi hospitable.

Every structure in Hampi has its own intrinsic value. From the stone chariots, the pillar sculptures, the Queens’ Lotus Mahal, to the unique Ganesa sitting on the lap of his mother, each carries the potential of being cultural capital for revenue generation through memorabilia trade. All one gets is a very mediocre reproduction of the stone chariot sold at an atrocious price, sure to chase any interested tourist in utter revulsion.

When one looks at the way Hampi is being disgraced by the lack of proper cultural literacy in our society and the utter failure of the state to create an intelligent coordination between the archeology department, historians, local communities and the tourism department, one feels that the destroyers of the city were perhaps merciful compared to the sustained destruction we are bringing upon this place of historical wonder.

But this narrative is not unique to Hampi.

In Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu, a few years ago, I saw a bunch of students climb on the wonderful sculpture of Krishna holding the Govardhan mountain. The Taliban seemed charitable compared to what these culturally illiterate bunch of college students were doing to the vintage piece of culture.

Some years ago, cadre belonging to Pattali Makkal Katchi, a casteist party, hosted their party flags on some of Mahabalipuram’s iconic structures, claiming ‘ownership’ of the structures on the grounds of being descendants of the Pallavas.

Here’s one more episode: When I went there with my family a decade or so ago, I overheard a guide explaining to a group of foreign tourists, the Gaja Lakshmi relief near the boar incarnation of Vishnu rescuing Goddess Earth, thus: “Because she was touched by the lower caste Dravidian Asura, the upper castes made her take a bath to remove the pollution.” In the vacuum created by cultural illiteracy thrive the forces of venomous pseudo-scientific race theories.

Just two days ago I had gone to Thenkarai, a small part of Cholavanda, a dusty town near Madurai. Dr Prakash Shankaran, a PhD scholar friend, had invited me. With the traditional tuft of hair and brilliant sparkling eyes, my urban conditioned mind finds it hard to believe that this young man holds a doctorate in molecular biology from Prague. He took me to an ancient Siva temple there.

Nagaraja Gurukal, the priest, who looks after the pujas in that temple is also a young bachelor. Unlike most of the priests who do pujas in a listless and robotic manner, thanks to the stranglehold of the Dravidian Reich on temples, this young man is full of life and enthusiasm.He has interacted extensively with an academic from a nearby university who is also interested in the temple. In the inner corridor, on the base of the temple wall, he pointed out some marks and engraved words and then produced a display that the academic had given him. Those markings were actually land measures for different kinds of lands: household lands, agricultural lands and mountain lands. The display is a striking example of the possibilities we have in using the local academics, temple priests and student communities to make them aware of the locally available cultural capital.

Most of the ancient temples in Tamil Nadu are treasure troves of inscriptions. ‘In this temple alone there are a hundred inscriptions’, Nagaraja Gurukal informs me. Most of them have been whitewashed.

‘Perhaps the Hindu endowment board thought they were doing the temple a favour by removing ancient graffiti’, he remarks. But there is a permanent melancholy behind that sadness, like the background radiation that they say exists across the universe. The sadness is of our fall, our collective fall with each of us having an individual responsibility for it. Our ancestors had these treasures saved for us through untold hardships, and here we are, the present generation, allowing them to be destroyed, this time not by invaders but by our own people.

As we walk out of the temple, Sankaran shows me a sculpture before the entrance of the temple. Cloaked in dust, it seems like a figure of a person offering himself for a cause. ‘Quite common’, I think. Then Sankaran asks me to have a closer look. The figure seems to have feminine features. He tells me that the legend is of a temple dancer who willingly offered her own life when the province suffered a severe drought. Such tales of sacrifice by temple dancers, today a much-maligned system, exist in many important temples.

In Sri Rangam, perhaps South India’s most famous temple town, there is a tower which has been dedicated to Vellai Ammal the dancer who saved the temple from being looted by Islamist invaders, by sacrificing her own life.

Today you see desecration of every kind in the temple premises. There is no regard for the sculptural grandeur of the temple. Constructions with no sense of aesthetics disfigure the sculptures. Inside the temple mandapam meant for the deity stands the car of the local officials who run the place like their fiefdom. Centuries old paintings are slowly fading away into extinction.

The problem is systemic, and we do not even know what we are losing and what pace.

In 2005, I did a project on the cultural capital of the ruins in Kanyakumari district. What I found was that an astounding amount of cultural capital which, though distinct from, yet is very much related to economic endeavours of a society, is eroding and becoming extinct at a very faster rate.

For example, the path-Mandapams or Vazhi-Mandapams are structures meant for the pilgrims and traders to rest during a long journey. One can find them along the major ancient trade routes, which have changed today and the pilgrim routes, which have not. Even now these can be used to provide services to pilgrims and to promote value added tourism.

All it needs is some amount of intelligent culturally literate intervention from the state and or private entrepreneurs and the involvement of local communities. It can boost to a large extent, local art forms, local food traditions and local cottage industries. A total neglect of this is making these Mandapams disappear fast. We simply do not even know what we are losing. The same is true for traditional water bodies and even secular structures like ancient fortifications.

As I walk out of the Hampi ruins, I’ve started believing that we, who feel no outrage at the sustained destruction of our cultural monuments, really, don’t have the moral authority to be outraged about the iconoclasts of the past.