Bird's eye view day

Before starting on anything or deciding my research topic, I wanted to look at the temple town from bird's eye view. So I thought of exploring everything without details. 
Today we all had to go on our own which was much better than other two days as it gave us our space to explore whatever we wanted to explore. So again started the bumpy auto journey to Hampi. We walked down to staircase to the river, while we were going down, we stopped at a person who was making a stone chariot miniature model from granite. He told us that he brings stones from Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and the stone is very soft hence is easy to carve. When we walked down the staircase, vendors sitting on the side of the streets started calling us,”Boni kardo madam ji boni kardo! Subah se kuch kharida nahi hai..dekho hmare paas jhumke hai, payal hai. Dekho.”. As we talked to them we came to know that all of them belong to Lambani community!

They live in Kalrapur, Kamlapur and Kadirampur nearby. Many of the products like anklets, bracelets, necklaces are made by them by thread.  What a nice business I thought. Making something on own and selling them. We crossed the river and there stood again the whole market lane and elephant coming out of water after bathing and giving everybody ‘ashirwad’. It was interesting how elephant knew that when people give banana he has to eat it and when they give money he has to give it to his caretaker and for whatever he gets he has to give ashirwad to the person giving it to him. As we walked through the lane one of the astonishing facts about vendors for me was that everybody was their customer and nobody was human amongst them. People were so keen on selling their items that they could cross any line to sale their items. The market was indeed colourful in that way too. Colorful bags, tanned jewellery, clothes, scarfs everything it had. Before starting to work we all wanted to explore the whole Hampi first. So three of us went to cycle stand to get our cycles, just when we were about to hire cycles, one auto guy turned up trying to convince us to hire auto from him and he was giving us a lot of discount, he offered to show us all the famous sites of Hampi in one day. He said “300 ka dena, sirf apke lie discount, hmara service dekhkar ap khud humko 400 dega.” So we finally decided on choosing auto as we three wanted to atleast see whole hampi from birds eye view. So we started our journey with Auto guy. The Auto seemed to dance on the beats of the music which was playing.

Our first stop was Chandikeshwara temple. Scary from inside, it did look like one amongst long lost but beautifully ruined temple of India infact the back side of the temple had so many bushes that few the carvings were hidden too. Hemant, our Auto guy told us the technology the craftsmen used during 14^th century to carve out the musical pillars. The upper base of the pillars was carved until pillars were able to produce proper sounds. These pillars had five sounds: Mrudanga, Tabla, Panchtala, Damru and one more.It was amazing how the pillar not even being hollow was able to produce those sounds.  He also told us that there were no shrines in any of the temples in Hampi. The reason being that in 14^th century there was a ritual that there has to be nidhi(money) beneath the shrines before starting constructing the shrines and the temple and hence Mughals took advantage of the same ritual and destroyed all the shrines in greed to get wealth. Mughals had destroyed only the Hindu temples and all the mosques were intact. I realised that even now the world resembles a lot to 14^th century World. Is it at all a history? Don’t these things happen till now? Structure of activities is same, just the form has changed. 

While we headed to Underground Shiva temple he told us that there are 83 monuments in total in Hampi which are recognized. We saw Krishna Bazar which was Spice bazar of 14^th century and Hampi bazar which was a place for Gold and Diamond marketing. We also saw Toll gate system of 14^th century where there were 3 gates, the centre one being for the king to pass and other two for soldiers and horses.

The next we stopped at Underground Shiva Temple. Anyone on first sight would think that only ruins of the place are left before they went inside and saw the actual underground massive structure. With a Linga inside and a lot of proper drainage places it was definitely a modern structure synonym to today’s basements and drainage done together.  When we came out of Underground temple, we met a soda selling person who was extremely keen on selling all of us his soda even if we do not like soda. He had cunning  answers for for all of our excuses.

The next we headed to beautiful Lotus temple where a Marathi movie shooting was going on by Surupsamartha production house. They chose Hampi as their base for shooting as none of the Marathi movies have been shot before anytime in Hampi.  

There I met Basamma. Here is her story:

Some people have a yellow layer and some have black layer in their glasses based on a how that person looks towards life. It all depends on how the person’s life has been and how she managed in her ups and downs.

It seems that this lady has been through a lot of bad times and is definitely sick of her married life. She says to me,”kya jeena marna, kya shadi, shadi barbadi, kabhi tum shadi mat karna”.

She has been into maintainance of Lotus temple since last 30 years , working in archeological department, Hampi. Her husband does not do any work, so handling all the burdens on her own shoulders her shoulders have certainly bended more as she becomes old. Her son died at the age of 20 years and with all her faith in a baba in Maharashtra she lives just to die one day. Looking into her wet old eyes I did find my own grandmother. Lets hope something revives her trust back to life.

“Ek din sabhi ko jana beti!”

Elephant’s stable was such a long piece of monument. It was really amazing how it was built leaving spaces of human heights so that humans could move inside from one stable to other.

Next we stopped at Hazara Rama Temple. It has 1000 scenes of Rama’s life on it’s walls. You could read a whole pictographic Ramayana here.

We saw Tarari gatta gate next which was entrance for Vijayanagar Empire. We also saw secret chamber, King’s Audience hall, Royal enclosure and pushkarni.

 I strongly felt that 14^th century’s technologies  and tactics were a lot similar to ours, ours is just privatised. The secret chamber was the place where secret meetings of regional importance used to take place. 

The next we went to Stone chariot and Vijay Vithalla Temple. Vijayvithalla Temple had three platforms where dance used to take place. It is said that these three mandapas belonged to three queens who would dance inside the mandapas and all the mandapas had hooks running all over the perimeter for curtains. There was one more Huge mandapa which was Band mandapa of 15^th century, meaning that it was the Mandapa where all the music would be played. The musical pillars had seven different kind of sounds of different instruments. Imagine the music being so loud that all the three queens could hear it from their Mandapas.

One of the things I noticed everywhere today that in most of the places ladies are employed, be it ticket counter or be it people employed for maitainance of monuments.

Then we went to museum in Kamlapur where there was a huge size of 3D structure of whole Hampi how it would look from sky. It was massive.  

That was the last stop after which we returned to the river.

When you end your tour day with a sunset, it is the most beautiful feeling ever. It was six already and we were on our way back to resort. It was the most magical feeling, watching glory standing in front of sunset!