Perception is that inscriptions
Stone inscriptions unravel lesser-known narratives of Bengaluru's history
Synopsis
Perception is that inscriptions talk about obvious things like dynasties and dates, historians believe that they throw light on religious practices, social structures and ecology.
The Excel sheet is filled with colours green, yellow and red.
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The end count says: 41 intact, 17 not traceable, 04 destroyed.This one sheet of inventory, as PL Udaya Kumar calls it, represents his relentless search for stone inscriptions that tell a different tale of Bengaluru.
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Two months ago, Kumar was one among the many grey-collared engineers of the IT city. That is, until the history buff came across a stone inscription near his Rajajinagar home. It narrated the history of a neighbouring village called Kethmaranahalli, which was gobbled up by an exploding Bengaluru more than a decade ago. Kumar was intrigued by the date 1300 AD, which made the village a full two centuries older than Bengaluru and its founder Kempegowda. “I set out on this self-funded documentation of the 200-odd inscriptions strewn across Bengaluru,“ said Kumar, a Bengalurean who claims that he got to know his city , its people and their stories of their evolution “inside out“ only after making sense of historical inscriptions.Kumar's ambitious project is only 30% complete now. While the engineer intends to eventually hand over his online documentation -photographs and research notes from epigraphic texts -to government officials, Kumar is unsure if the inscriptions would be intact until then.Most of his searches found heritage stones drowning among footpaths, construction debris, garbage, matts, temples, private homes and apartment complexes.They have survived the onslaught of development, changing borders and booming infrastructure, but will vanish if not protected soon.
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Sample this: An 1308 AD Kannada inscription about a land grant made by the chief of farmers during the Hoysala rule is being used to line a roadside drain alongside a few other veeragallus (hero stones).Another 1508 AD Telugu inscription, a territory marker for the land belonging to Vira Narasinga Raya, the brother of Vijayanagara king Krishnadevaraya, lies unprotected in Marathahalli, on a road that sees heavy traffic flow. Kumar states that psychological fear is what protects most of these abandoned stones. “People do not want the curses or punishments mentioned for the stone's destroyer to be transferred to them,“ he says. If only these inscriptions were protected and their contents documented, he continues, we can redraw historic timelines to gain new insight about the city. The most recent excavations conducted by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) tell us how exactly inscriptions can change conventional historical narrative.The Halmidi inscription dated at 450 CE (currently preserved in the Government Museum) is considered as the oldest usage of the Kannada script. However, according to ASI officials, an engraving unearthed in Talagunda village of Shivamogga last week is 70 years older than Halmidi. While that discovery is being studied, a 10th century Ganga dynasty hero stone with striking resemblance to the Bengaluru inscription that first spoke of a battle in a place called 'Bengaluru' was found near the Roerich and Devika Rani estate in Tataguni.“Almost 85% of these excavations have been made in the past 50 years,“ says historian Prof S Settar of the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS). “The challenge is that these findings and their subsequent documentation and publication are highly scattered. It becomes difficult even for academicians and scholars to access and make sense of them.“ To make these works intelligible and accessible to the next generation, Settar has been on a mission for the past 15 years. He is classifying inscriptions according to a timeline with details of how words and contexts have evolved over the centuries. His work, published in eight volumes by the Vishwa Kannada Sammelana, will be out this December.
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Settar, however, cautions that just because their meanings have been translated on paper, it does not mean one ignores the stone structures. “Texts are just derivations. Inscriptions are a direct source of information of what happened and much more. They should not be undermined at any cost.“While popular perception is that inscriptions talk only about obvious things like dynasties and dates, historians believe that they also throw light on religious practices, social structures and ecology .“At face value, one might conclude that some of these `run-of-the-mill' inscriptions had no great historical information. But, in fact, they help us paint a picture of the past. There are things you can learn even about food and agricultural habits,“ says Meera Iyer, co-convenor, Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH).
Iyer explains how etchings in Ajantaand Pitalkhora depicted how early Buddhist caves were built largely with donations from people like carpenters and oilmen, while a few centuries later, it was royalty that largely donated. “Who knows what new tools might be developed (in the future) that might help new information from old inscriptions come to light,“ Iyer continues. “There may be clues waiting to be unravelled depending on where, how and which direction in a landscape something is placed.“
Harini Nagendra, professor of sustainability at Azim PremjiUniversity , agrees with Iyer. Her 2016 book `Nature in the City' studied a changing Bengaluru through an ecological lens. Ancient inscriptions in and around 10 km of BBMP boundaries were her research tools. “I gained immense insight about the topography of the city . Like how the earliest settlements in Bengaluru were located in the flatbeds of the East and it is only due to lack of space during the Hoysala rule (12th to 14th century AD) that they extended to hilly areas in the West, which we call Malnad today ,“ she says.
Near the Agara Lake, Nagendra found inscriptions talking about farmers being granted rights to irrigate land in exchange for lake maintenance, and near Kanakapura, stones talked about man-animal conflicts or hunting expeditions. Some spoke of the 75 villages that existed even before Kempegowda `founded' Bengaluru in 1537. Almost all engravings described wetlands, trees, lakes and wells as signs of a place's prosperity .
This brings up the question of how these inscriptions can be preserved so that the future has a clear view of the past. Iyer suggests that educational institutions nearest to a particular stone could 'adopt' the artefact and be given informal responsibility of its protection. Preservation and technological interventions, however, are not happening at a good pace. As Nagendra puts it: “While historians, academicians, epigraphists and scholars join hands to preserve these inscriptions, there is need for more concerted government attention and effort."
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