We begin to warm to the charms of India but it is still not really giving a buzz
31th March 2006

Hopefully the end of dreadful road surfaces
Mandu - Afghan fortress displaced by a few thousand kilometres
Ajanta and Ellora Caves - similar but different
Pat gets the sniffles

A final mention about Indian roads. Honest!

I’m aware that I’ve been moaning about the state of the highways in India and it’s my choice to be here and my problem so I promise not to mention how bad the roads are again and will only mention incidents that are worthy of note. Today’s irony was finishing on a perfect ribbon of tar in the middle of nowhere after traversing some atrocious sections of national highway 7. The settlement of Mandu is frequented by a steady stream of tourists and so the approach road from Indore via Dhar has improved for their comfort. We’re not normal and so we didn’t arrive at the railway station in Indore and chose to stay on the perfect by-pass instead of facing the hassle of navigating the city. No doubt there is perfect signposting through Indore to get one on the road to Mandu. Our way was shorter, though. But the road was absolutely dreadful. Everyone we met in Mandu managed a perfect impersonation of Harry Enfield when telling us “Ooh, you didn’t want to go that way.” So, if anyone has arrived at this page by doing a search like ‘indore mandu road’, just take the route via Dhar, OK.

I’ve found a way of relieving my stress each time we hit a huge pothole in the road and rattle every joint in our bodies and compress our spines - I scream obscenities at the top of my voice. Hippy thinks me strange. So do the passers by, who hopefully do not have a great Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. Trouble is though often the only Anglo-Saxon many people know are the swear words. I hope we didn’t cause too much offence. The road was truly dire, the potholed tar was worse than most dirt roads.

There was a peculiarity worthy of note that we observed from the truck drivers. For some reason, in this part of the world, even though the corner may have sufficient radius for a lorry to be able to simply steer round, the drivers at long hairpins head for the outside line which ever way they are going. From their outside position, they both proceed to cut the corner on identical lines from opposite directions. There seems to be no rule about priority for those coming uphill, first to the corner or even biggest truck and so they end up face to face with alarming frequency.

The obstinacy of your Indian truck driver is extraordinary. Whether they are overtired, drunk or out of their trees on some other drug I cannot say, but I have been keeping a record of the number of totalled trucks as an indicator of their ineptitude. In Britain, in over twenty years of driving I think I have seen somewhere in the region of 5 accidents that may have put one of the vehicles ‘beyond economic repair’. In the first four days of riding in India I have seen 2,2,5 and 2 accidents respectively. To qualify for my statistics, these have to be write-offs and to seem to have happened in the last 24 hours. One or two of these may not have been driver error (one seemed to have drifted off the road after a wheel fell off, for instance) but there is no doubt that the majority are down to recklessness. I accept that India is a poor country and the cost of trying to police the roads would be exorbitant but there must surely be some way of straightening things out. I challenge anyone to drive 100 miles in Madhya Pradesh and not see fresh evidence of an accident.

Added to which most people to totally ignore the police, there is so much cacophony of horns that a policemen’s whistles are drowned out. And we are in no way better, various overlanders have told us to simply ignore any police who request us to stop, as many will trump up some spurious charge to fine us with, and they have no guns or radios so there is little they can truly do to stop us if we just ride on.

Hill fort on a huge scale

We like Mandu. It is a small community, it is at sufficient altitude to make the weather bearable, it has a bit of history, a good restaurant and an English Wine Shop. English Wine seems to be a catchall phrase that includes all varieties of alcohol but ironically rarely includes wine. The real joy of the place is that many of the features that were built by the Afghan hordes who invaded way back are still used. There are deep wells with staircases down to them where people bathe - it would be far better if they took the water elsewhere to bathe with rather than taint the well with their sweat and soap. The 20 sq km fortified plateau is littered with substantial palaces dating from around 1500. Along with the palaces are a couple of large mosques, a caravanserai, tombs and large sections of the perimeter fortifications. I could gladly have spent a week pottering around here but we have to be drifting towards Goa and so four days seemed a reasonable compromise.

India was beginning to grow on us. This little town had a certain charm. Ruins of temples, buildings and fortresses, were so commonplace in the place that only the largest structures, were considered worthy of naming. On the road up to Mandu the only bonus on the route we chose was that we saw a number of other ruins, some huge complete battlements which now made nice spacious accommodation for herds of grazing sheep. It kind of reminded me of Bosra in Syria, the way that so many of the structures were still in use. I am sure that the Afghanis would be proud to see how much of their work was still standing.

They say that this was another one of those lost cities that was rediscovered by some British army officer who had nothing better to do with his time. I find it all very hard to believe that any nation could be as careless as to lose so many huge structures, some of which 3 and 4 storeys high. But it seems to be a truism that building loss is a world wide carelessness problem. The Thais lost Sukhothai, the Jordanians lost Petra, the Peruvians lost Machu Picchu, and the Guatemalans lost Tikal. It seems that we are very, very careless. Now some of these losses are understandable, Machu Picchu so high up with nothing but the eagles to see it. Tikal in the middle of a tropical rainforest the temples can be easily overgrown. Petra can only easily be spotted from the air unless you stumble into one of the twisty siqs. But Mandu, is on top of an easily accessible, scrubby plateau where vegetation is thin. Wouldn’t conceal much of a 3 storey edifice. I think they are having us on. Unless of course we are being duped and these buildings have been recently created as the ultimate archaeology con. Aah not thought of that.

Some of the architecture was refined and elegant, some admirable in it’s robustness. The mosques were especially serene, wonderfully airy and cool places, where the sunlight shines through the stone lattice windows creating patterns of the floor. The use of bluish-black marble, set off the pink sand stone and with white marble decoration. Remnants of tiling, gave an inkling of the beauty of these places when they were first built.

We were accompanied as we walked, by a relay of children, in a repetitive chant, of ‘Rupee, rupee, chocolate, bisquite (sic)’. I pondered whether their chanting ever produce the desired effect. Do they really imagine that every foreigner has biscuits and chocolate on them all the time? Some were more persistent than others, believing that their chant would wear you down into submission, when all it did was make you annoyed. There was a more charming selection of children who waved as we passed, saying ‘Bye-bye’. We saw nurturing parents teaching their children this phrase. Why ‘bye-bye’ and not ‘Hello’? Was it a confusion over semantics, after all in Hindi ‘Namaste’ (I salute the God within you) is used both as a greeting and a farewell? Or was it that generations of foreign tourists had replied to persistent begging with a dismissal of ‘Bye-bye’ and that they had learnt the word but had not grasped the sarcasm?

It did start me thinking, what of the 20th and 21st centuries will be left as ruins, to be lost and rediscovered. Huge refuse landfill sites, still leaching toxins into the soil, 500 years down the road. To be honest I cannot think of many structures that will last that long. What will the history books remember us for? The time of invention and technological change when we were so busy moving on that we left nothing for the future; the time of pollution and consumption where our greed made us blind to the obvious damage we caused; the era of the Western dominance until the Chinese took over or the time before ground water ran out. Pat’s theory is that is it not the oil running out that we should be worrying about. Ultimately, we can use other fuels, but water.......... in a decade or 2? Apparently, we heard on the news that Delhi’s ground water is due to run out in 9 years. Arizona is sucking it up so fast to water golf courses, that it’ll be gone just as fast.
Sorry, I’m rambling......

Thank heavens, we were here for the Holi festival. Apparently in large communities Holi can get a bit out of hand with folks consuming far too much beer and bhang lassi (marijuana laced yoghurt drink). Here there was a controlled excitability about it all and we could observe without feeling at all threatened. Killjoys that we are, we decided to forego the colour daubing that goes on. We justify this by pointing out that we’ve previously experienced the chucking of coloured powder and water when we lived in Guyana (there they call the festival Phagwah instead of Holi, don’t ask me why) and we have such a limited supply of clothes that we really couldn’t afford to trash a set. We had also been fortunate that the throwing ability of the children in Mandu wouldn’t get them on the cricket team. The tiny water and dye bombs made from old balloon, were hurled in our direction only to splat a safe distance from us on the road. Poor Hippy got caught by a devilish old lady who snuck up on her blind side while she was taking a photo. The coloured ‘stuff’ that they use here is not the subtly pastel hued talc that we’ve seen before but what seems to be clothes dye. The end result from a good smearing is a skin that becomes semi-permanently bright red, blue, silver or a combination of these colours. Hips dashed off and scrubbed herself with clothes washing powder and came up fairly clean but the Americans in the next room looked proper Charlies a couple of days later. My how we laughed. Our only residual damage is to the t-shirt Hips had been wearing which now has an annoying pink ring around the collar. Not the greatest loss on earth as this shirt was a hand-me-down from Arian who had been given it by Knut to advertise his bike business.

We had seen a group of lads pink from head to toe, strip off at an ancient stepwell to try is rinse the worse of it out before they went home. Despite their efforts with the pink diffusing across the water like an oil slick, their bodies and clothes would bear their Holi-ness for a a while yet. I imagine the the scenes at home. Mother’s telling their kids when they run home for their lunch that if they think that they are eating lunch like that, they have another thing coming and sending them off to the well to make themselves semi presentable.

Holi celebrates the coming of spring, the colours representing the flowers. In Guyana we had been told that the colours for the powders used had originally come from pollen. Although in Mandu the colours had moved on the artificial dyes, there were aspects that were wholly traditional. The night before we had seen small wigwams of sticks hung with necklaces of neat doughnut shaped dried cow dung, with a few conventional cow pats stacked around the base. These offerings were lit at midnight and the ash formed is seen as holy to dust onto your loved ones.

The cow, so revered by Hindus, provides so much to a family here. The dung is never wasted, dried and used as fuel for cooking and the milk to make lassi. It is for many the mode of transport for their good and chattels, carts laden with hay or simply people trundle leisurely along the roads. Some graze freely and are herded seemingly constantly back and forth across roads, Others, where the owners have less land are tied up and fed baskets of grain in the evening. In Mandu we caught sight of our first cow eating a newspaper, I suppose it is, at least, made of cellulose and so more appropriate that Europeans feeding cows ground up meat products. But is their treatment truly reverence? Is it reverent to make an animal pull along a cart for you. To me, the religious cynic, it seems that the cows are so useful to a family, that religion has hijacked this worth and made it holy.

On the second day of Holi the hotel became the scene for several invasions by local groups of revellers. The previous day the restaurants had been pink-ed. The walls chairs, tables, and floor was streaked with pink dye. the hotel workers had spent the next morning scrubbing the place to at least fade the dye to pastel. When the partygoers descended in the afternoon, the workers rushed to stack tables and chairs out of dye throwing zone. The looks on their faces said it all, the people who trashed the place again did not so much as buy a soda, just drank freeby jars of water, smearing the handles and beakers with tell-tail pink hand prints. The hotel staff, not only were working when everything else was partying, but they were having to work ten times as hard for no money. I’m sure they felt very blessed by all the attention from the w-----rs who kept messing everything up.

As dusk fell, the tempo of the revellers mellowed, as they encamped themselves on the lawns of the hotel in circles singing and playing instruments. The staff began to relax, and we decided to would be safe to eat.

India, India........ People had told us that you love or you hate India, but we were ambivalent. Our ambivalence worried us. The traffic and state of the roads was our biggest hate, but we loved that fact that you can eat scrumptious veggy curry 3 times a day. We hate the culture of begging that fosters indignity but delight in the open smiles and waves from children. I love the fact that most things in shops are stamped with a RRP, so it is clear if something is a fair price, but find the sycophantic servile style of waiting staff verges on treating us like we are physically disabled. Most people speak some English which in theory makes communication easier, but it is so heavily accented that they of may as well speak Hindi. The randomness of traffic, means we can do as we please on the road and no one minds, but so does everyone else. Maybe we have travelled too long, but India is not the culture shock others find it to be. The constant power cuts have trained us to type when the power is on, not when we feel like it. This is probably good for us, we often find it hard to motivate ourselves to do our chores.

What troubles me is the level of fatalism that produces inertia. In Mandu, whilst Pat went traipsing across fields to look at a ruin, and I rested next to the simple hut of a some villagers, I was dismayed by their ability to accept their situation to the point of regression. Their hut had gaps in the adobe walls and holes in the thatch. I looked around me, there was earth, a well, twigs, stones large and small, and hay, all the things ingredients to fix his house up lying free about him. But he squatted in front of his house and accepted his lot to have a house that would be drenched in the monsoon in a couple of months. I find this hard to comprehend. Yes, he and his family were very poor, he possibly had no job to earn even the minimum wage, but there were things he could do to improve his lot, but he did not feel it necessary. This acceptance is by no means a solely Indian phenomenon, the guy in Malawi whose crops did not grow because of lack of rain despite there being a gigantic lake by his house from which he could have fetched water. Are these phenomenon the result of a lack of education? Is it stupidity? Is it a lethargy that exists year round though only really relevant during the steamy pre-monsoon months? We pondered this situation and wondered whether this is a national mindset that holds back the development. Probably not. On reflection, it is not really fair to identify this rather pathetic fatalism as being a ‘foreign’ concept. Although they are a tiny minority (I’m probably considered completely politically incorrect for even suggesting this), there are some families in Britain who exist almost completely reliant on social services. It is not hard to imagine some families smashing a window and then sitting belly aching until ‘they’ come round to fix it.

The fatalistic approach to life has its advantages though. With the calm acceptance of events, brings with it a peace. There is no point in stressing about the state of your house, or the accident you had on the road, this is just the way things are. In Britain people live a generally comfortable life, but the motivation to ‘better themselves’ brings with it the side kick of getting anxious about achieving this betterment, or worse failure to succeed. Whether it be the getting the extension sorted, getting the promotion, or trying to rid your garden of couch grass. Is it possible to improve your lot or yourself and be able to have peace of mind?

Maharashtran caves

Having left Mandu, I now have a much better opinion of the manager of our hotel. On first arrival, whether it was a mistake or a breakdown in communication, he demanded more than he had initially quoted. His justification was, “If you are by yourself in a room, you are not charged tax but double occupancy is.” I’ve never heard such apparent twaddle but when you are in India, we are told, these things can actually be true. I’m not sure if this was false in this case but the manager tried to reassure me with, “I would not lie to you, you are my guest” which struck me as one of those ‘If someone tells you that everything they say is a lie, are they telling you the truth?’ type statements. Anyway, his instructions on how to leave the plateau and head to Jalgaon by the most pleasant route so far as the road condition was concerned were accurate to the nearest 50 metres. Perhaps if we’d met someone with such an encyclopaedic knowledge of the roads and road conditions before now we may have spared a few curses.

We were truly ecstatic by evening. The change of states from Madhya Pradesh to Maharashtra brought with it a complete transformation in the state of the roads. Not only was every road that we used covered with a continuous layer of smooth black surfacing, the drivers seemed to respond to this soothing influence with manners and patience. It could be that the wonderful signs at the side of the road were having an effect;
“Mind your nerves in the curves”
“Happiness is a journey not a destination”
“Be alert, accidents hurt”
“Fast don’t last”
“Drive with care, accidents rare”
“Work is worship”
“Better late than never”
Clearly, someone at the Maharashtra highways department is a frustrated and terrible poet/philosopher.

There were little signs that the Holi festival was not completely over. The most extraordinary group that we passed were dressed in out fits that were the spitting image of a famous bizarre bunch of Morris Men (so famous that I cannot even remember their name). There’s no doubt from their tattered rag ‘harlequin’ outfits that one group is a copy of the other, although the Indians had no need to black their faces up as their British counterparts do.

Just before we crossed over to the next state, ladies started to wear clearly different garb in some of the small villages. The saris that we know so well turned into full gathered skirts and tailored short sleeved jackets, all heavily embroidered. Around their arms are thick arm bands of bright cloth or brass worn just above the elbow and their lower legs glint with a clutter of anklets. It was not a complete change of dress and the majority of women still wear saris, but odd that this first appearance would be so close to a state line. We’ve not managed to chat with anyone about this change of apparel yet so we are in the dark.

Jalgaon is not a beautiful city in any way but is conveniently placed for visiting the Ajanta caves. There were none of the signs of filth and squalor that we’ve observed on the approaches to other cities and, I think for our first time in India, there were traffic lights that contained incandescent bulbs that had an effect on the flow of traffic. We’d been recommended a hotel with an effervescent overly helpful manager by folk we’d met in Mandu and so rocked up to check it out. There was a street full of hotels and nice looking restaurants running away from the railway station. India is so huge that only a complete nutter would want to drive between cities and so the rail network is extensive and extensively used. All classes are available and so the nearby hotels that provide for travellers correspondingly come in all categories. There was no off-street parking which would usually have us looking elsewhere but Mr Fixit was assuring us that with the cover over it and watched over by the security guard there would be no problem. He pressed us with tea “Complimentary!” which is the way to our hearts and so we could hardly go elsewhere.

While Hippy was negotiating the room rates, I was accosted by a journalist who was interested in interviewing us. It is so rare that the press shows any interest in what we are doing that I got all excited. We had just reached the point of agreeing to meet in an hour for a formal interview when the hotel manager intervened on my behalf and told Clark Kent to sling his hook. It seems that this guy is some kind of trouble maker who is no stranger to observing clandestinely meeting couples in restaurants and then blackmailing them with threats of exposure. I’ll have no truck with the paparazzi, thank you. What worried me more is that this guy had said to the manager that we had said it was OK for him to sit in our room and wait for us to unpack. We had of course said no such thing. Very dodgy indeed. Our thanks to the manager.

There was a very nice restaurant two doors away and, rather than let us brave the 10 metres alone, the manager summoned the general dogsbody to escort us. Very strange. We were ushered into an air-conditioned side room with four tables where we were issued with menus with slightly different prices. Everything on my menu was Rupees cheaper than Hippy’s. Very strange. We asked the waiter whether we had been given an old menu, although it seemed newer than the one with higher prices. “No, this menu for outside.” I assumed that this meant a takeaway service but we subsequently discovered that apart from a chilly air-con private diner there is a huge fan-cooled dining hall to the rear where the less fancy folk eat. If we’d known and not been shanghaied, we’d have been eating in the real world at the back - we’re not too keen on this in and out of air-conditioning thing. We ate in the back room on later occasions only to discover that this was culturally insensitive. This main back room is the ‘permit room’ as opposed to the family room. In other words it is the whooping hollering drinking den where only women of easy virtue would be seen and only then when dead. Just as most ‘men only’ rooms around the world, nothing more exciting that comparing notes on cricket players was taking place. Look! I wear all men’s clothing does that not qualify me? That’s real discrimination making the men only section cheaper. I understood and agree with charging more for the air-conditioned room, it costs more to run after all, but the men only thing. It was hardly a rough pub in the estates of Newcastle. There were the odd pairs or single guys having a meal, some
washing it down with a beer, but nothing in the lest bit threatening.

So, Ajanta caves. Carelessly lost until discovered by a British hunting party in 1819, like so many things in India, it seems. Carved out of the rock between 200 BC and 600 AD, this is a sent of cave temples and monasteries dedicated to Buddha. The situation of the caves is pretty much ideal. This is a pretty hot part of the world and in this little horseshoe meander there is always a bit of shade. Inside the caves it is always cool, of course. Just a couple of hundred metres further up the valley is a huge pool at the foot of a little waterfall that is obviously the plunge pool that arose when the river was considerably bigger. Given such a nice spot and clean vertical faces of even textures rock, it would be surprising if someone hadn’t built these temples. If you carve something out of the rock, is that still building, is it sculpting, un-building or excavating? Answers on an e-mail.

The real wonder here is the painting inside the caves. The quality is quite extraordinary. Picked out by torchlight (no flash photography unless you are Indian - all the signs were in English and the Indians appeared conveniently not to understand, the guards complicit), there is a rare depth to the shading of faces that I’ve not seen in any other paintings of a similar age. Usually one would expect flat round faces but here the plump cheeks of babies and the full figures of lively ladies jumped out of the murals. Perspective of scenery was not quite so hot but no one really managed that until the more ‘scientific’ European painters did their thing.

The management of the caves was a bit over the top. At the entrance to each (there are about 30) you are reminded to take off your shoes and not to use flash photography. OK, tell me at the first couple and I can catch on pretty quickly what is expected. What I don’t need is a jobsworth telling me to take my shoes over to the rack (walking through the unswept area outside the cave) when all the locals have taken theirs off at the door. I get the impression that it appeals to the smallmindedness of a lot of Indians to exhibit their ‘authority’ by giving meaningless instructions to people, particularly tourists. Come on you can get the some thing in a lot of countries. Put someone in authority and they get all petty minded, put them in a uniform and make them US immigration officials and they become downright obnoxious. One bloke almost physically barred me from entering when I added my shoes to the pile of 20-odd pairs immediately by the door rather than go and place them in the unused rack 10 yards away. The same thing with the photography. We would be shepherded around the caves by a guard parroting, “No flash photography!” while we were demonstrably taking pictures on super long exposures by resting the camera on stationary objects. Then it would be, “Don’t put your camera on there!” as if our 18.9 ounce digital camera would break their steel framed lighting system. Meanwhile, flashguns in the hands of brahmin (I think brahmin should be with a capital ‘B’ but in this case their arrogance so discredits their caste, maybe a small ‘b’ is very apt) caste were popping off left right and centre. Ho hum.

Some rather fit looking folk were being carried aloft in sedan chairs hoisted by four bearers. After an immediate thought of how lazy these folk were, I had to actually admire them for filtering down their tourist cash to the enterprising chaps who offered the service. If they waited for needy folk to come along, they wouldn’t be putting food on the table.

Germ tansfer and more caves

A second dose of Maharashtran roads on the way to Aurangabad confirmed that we had been previously given a poor impression of the subcontinent. Another city, another recommended hotel. For sure there was off-street parking but it was a bit of a dingy establishment. Again, the staff were so obliging, it was hard to pull ourselves away and so we settled for their best room which had the advantage of a telephone; we were hoping to get in touch with some folk in Blighty and we don’t often see phones in our rooms, televisions nearly always.....

Our first room in India had had, in its scruffy rooms, cable TV with brilliant reception, but it has to be the first time that we have had cable TV on a B&W portable!

We caught up on all the current news. No change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nepal, NE India, Thailand, Indonesia. Oh, there is so much joy in the world. At least there is the unifying concept of international sport competition. The Commonwealth Games and test cricket dominate sport on Indian television but can’t come close to the Bollywood bombardment in terms of air time. There is also the religious channels, there was an Islamic debating channel, a mass yoga instruction channel, were it seemed a requirement to have a large beard. Some of these channels were in English, so I listened with curiosity. There was a lot of rhetoric and circular argument, but it makes a chance from Western politicians justifying their actions.

All is well for the Brits in India as we only managed a draw in the test series because of a convenient collapse in the final innings. We will see what the one day matches bring us. Third in the medal table in Melbourne is not an unreasonable achievement for a country with a billion potential athletes. There is a bit of a downside to these huge international events - the eviction of some of those billion people from Delhi and Calcutta to make way for the bulldozers in preparation for Commonwealth 2010. Amazing that they are starting the works so early given the lack of forward planning in so many other situations. In China, following the cultural revolution, people do not display good manners or so the Chinese expert on etiquette told us. A certain amount of re-education is under way to stop people spitting in the street - the reason being that they don’t want to upset tourists visiting the Olympic Games. I wonder if this could become a world movement?

I took over the mantle of cold bearer from Hippy and suffered a day of mucal blockage. I’m not sure if it is viral, bacterial or simply the difficulty for my breathing surfaces to cope with the non-stop bombardment of pollution that we’ve had only a few days respite from in the last couple of months. Our choice of room turned out to be a poor one. Having glass windows may be seen as fancy here but are somewhat superfluous given that the temperature rarely if ever drops below 20 degrees. It would be far better to spend cash on quality netting for the openings and so allow a nice breeze through when it is hot. Here there was no netting at all and we had two sun-facing storage-heater walls. You would have thought that a day of this self imposed sauna would clear all the lurgy out of my tubes but I felt only a tad better the day after. Good enough to go to our next set of caves at Ellora, though.

For a couple of days while Pat festered, I wandered a little in the town on a mission to find fresh fruit to cure the ailing one. As everywhere so far in India, men outnumber women by more than 10 to 1. There were a couple of women selling veg. but very few women working. So many people comment on the subjugation of women in the Islamic world, why does no-one comment on it in India. Is it that their bright, colourful saris makes the odd them stand out and so there is the illusion that there are more women about than there actually are. The fact that women are certainly second class citizens in much of sub-continental Asia, implies it has little or nothing to do with religious teachings and more to do with ingrained perceptions of South Asian people. It was not true to the same extent in SE Asia.

In other ways India if full of adaptability and creativity. I smiled as I watched a cyclist negotiate the traffic. He had no lights so he had improvised as best he could with a luminous balloon that bobbed from a stick strapped to his seat. He had no horn, so he gripped a squeaky toy in his hand as he wove through the traffic.

There are sufficient differences to those just up the road at Ajanta to make a visit a delight rather than a chore for the sake of completeness. Three religious periods are represented at Ellora; firstly the Buddhists, then the revival of Hinduism to the ascendancy with a small selection of Jain temples to finish it all off. Shame the moslems, christians and Zoroastrians never joined the bandwagon of cave carving. That would be truly fascinating. I’m sure there’s enough rock face nearby that could be divided up into lots for a resurgence of trogloid activity. Were this the ‘States it would already have happened and a roller coaster built in front to encourage all ages to ‘Religion Park - the underground spiritual experience for all the family.’

There is surprisingly little painting in the caves given their relative newness when compared to Ajanta - on average 600 years younger at only 1400 years old. The sculpture is quite divine, though, especially in the Jain temples. As the building works were carried out over a much longer period, there is more of a sense of development from cuboidal cave spaces propped by columns similar to the monasteries at Ajanta through to the elaborate Kailasa temple which is carved out from the rock in a single piece. This mammoth undertaking involved the removal of 200,000 tonnes of rock over a 150 year period. It really does make you wonder what people are thinking of when they set out on these great schemes. Surely they must have thought that it would be achievable in their lifetimes or they wouldn’t have bothered starting it. Planting trees makes sense - they’re always trees and you can see them growing, after a while you don’t even have to maintain them, but to initiate something that wont be any use until about 100 years after you’re dead is just plain barmy. Anyway, with a few calculations based on the estimation of 7000 labourers, this means that each man removed just one pound of rock per day (based on a 7-day working week). The Egyptians wouldn’t have stood for such slacking. I digress. Actually, judging by the size of the site, there could have been a maximum of 7000 labourers working here at any time and so my calculations are a little unfair.

There were some rather splendid 3 storey tenements built into the rock as monasteries. The first two levels being very simple cells for the monks, with the 3rd level being the ceremonial room with a load of carvings. As we sat on the top floor resting in the shade we watched tourist after tourist poke their head in on the ground floor, be unimpressed and leave while we had the best bit to ourselves. Even some with guides were not bringing up their clients. all the more pleasant for us.

It was a warm day and the old Watson condition of ‘museum legs’ began to set in. Still struggling to shed of the vestiges of my glutinous lung condition, I was totally lacking in energy and so we ended up missing out on about 5 of the caves. With our usual odd viewpoint, the things that we found more fascinating were almost certainly ignored by the average visitor. It was clear to us that the caves have been used for peasant dwellings at some stage - much as the caves at Petra still are. There were small indentations in the floor all over the place that looked suspiciously like mortars where spices or grains had been milled, larger fire circles had been hewn into the floor, but most interesting of all were the loop holes that had been created in walls and the arises of columns and doorways. These cannot possibly have been part of the original design as they are so poorly executed in comparison to the delicacy of the general masonry. Judging by their positioning, they were placed for hanging curtains of some sort across the external openings and in other situations for tethering animals. There was no mention of a period of occupancy by peasant folk in the literature and we were quite pleased to have noticed the little details that others probably have no interest for and to be able to (we hope) interpret them correctly. We’ve considered archaeology a career change before now, maybe we should put it back on the back burner.

The tiredness thing was a great shame as it prevented us visiting quite a significant fortification on the way back to town. Daulatabad was built in the 14th century by a sultan who decided to move his capital from Delhi. He apparently marched the entire population 1500 km to populate his new capital. There was a certain amount of wastage of his subjects on the way. In a very short time it was found to be unsustainable for so many people and so the capital reverted to the north. The other charming story about the place concerns its impenetrability. Through all manner of cunning structures and the placement of the central keep atop a rocky outcrop, it is considered that it could never have been overcome by force, but it actually was taken by the simple process of bribing the bloke on the gate to open up at an appropriate moment. It’s nice to know that nothing changes.