B elying the popular myth that cavemen led a barbaric life, are the rock shelters in and around Bhimbetka , 45 kms from Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh. These quartzite rock formations are archival shelters for pictograph clusters on their ceilings, shielded from the vagaries of nature for a 10,000 years! Despite being the ‘World heritage sites’ the place hardly attracts the mainstream tourists or for that matter the local elite of Bhopal except a rare visitor or two with historical interest and curiosity. But once visited, it is a marvel that defies logic.
The stone-laden pathway around the forest enclosed rock shelters makes for an intriguing trek. As you wind your way, you stop in your tracks at the sight of a huge rock that opens like an arched gateway to the most awesome sight of a series of rock shelters, not exactly caves, open on both ends but with a depth to the sideways to house a family or even a community of people. The Archaeological Survey of India has done its bit in keeping the entire area very tourist-friendly, vesting it with a carefully designed wild look in keeping with the site and its pre-historic antiquity. The figurines of the early man and his family at work in their hearth perched under a boulder to the right, greets us at the entrance to the first shelter which is more or less a sort of passage to the others nestled within the thickets not far from each other.
The auditorium cave as this shelter resembles is a large tunnel leading to a cavernous chamber with three passageway exits: the whole cave gallery resembles a cross whose centre is marked by a huge rock called the ‘chief rock’. In one of the exits is an excavated portion where bones and stone implements were obviously found which have been shifted to the museum in Bhopal. The pictographs can be missed by an untrained visitor’s eye but for the ASI guides who make it a point to accompany the tourists and draw their attention to these finely lined figures drawn carefully on the ceiling/wall of the rock totally shielded from sunlight. There is more than one reason for this: the paintings are done in white colour for most part and in thin lines which nevertheless are weather-beaten. There are some painted in red and yellow but they appear to be even less visible on first look. As we train our eye to focus on the pictures, we start deciphering the figures without the help of the guide by the time we reach the fourth and fifth rock shelter. The zoo rock which has the maximum number of animal pictures with a huge boar attacking a hunter catches your attention. A rock shaped like a tortoise is a marvel of natural formation.
The pictographs are for most part uphold the hunting imagery – of animals like the bull, the wild ass (resembling a horse), the elephant, boar ,the hunters, bow and arrow, daggers which more of less resemble the Harappan or Mohenjo Daro pictographs which were “mistakenly identified as pictorial writing but so far remained undeciphered”, says historian and archaeologist Dr. Supriya Varma of Delhi University’s Centre for Historical Studies. “We view it as ritualistic mode to convey to the next generation an inference of the way of life lived by the ancestors. It is some kind of cognitive skills, because language as communication had developed 26,000 years ago. ”
But the Bhimbetka pictographs were much before the first civilisations developed across the globe. “We should not underestimate the creative abilities of these people just because they don’t figure in our connotation of ‘civilised’. Arts like dance and picture painting were in existence 25,000 years ago in certain caves of the world. In this area of MP, there are hundreds of such rock shelters which have been inhabited time and again by man right from what I would call the Mesolithic period (9000-10,000 BC). Hence there is a variation in the pictographs which obviously were additions to those made by the original inhabitants, like for instance the figure of a horse (evidence of horse 1500-1600 BC) or a marriage procession in one of the caves which contradicts the dating. Possibly these picture painting continued up to CE 1. Intermittently these rock shelters (especially the ones near Hoshangabad ) must have been occupied in the historic period (600-400 BC) by the Buddhist monks who again added their own paintings of the Buddha to the existing ones with or without erasing the earlier ones,” states Dr. Varma.
A surprisingly interesting fact is that though these rock shelters have been in existence ages ago, it was only in the 60s that they came into limelight when archaeologist Dr.Vishnu S. Wakamkar accidently chanced upon them from the train in which he was travelling. His professional enthusiasm made him alight immediately and he found himself amidst an art gallery of sorts. Excavations began and so began dating as the motifs kept changing like cooking in stone vessels and using stone tools to pottery as seasonal occupations, the historians had to reconstruct the lives of these peoples from hunting to agriculture and so on over a long span of time. The name Bhimbhetka is fabled to be after the Pandava prince Bhima known for his prowess but this anecdote finds no place in the facts of history. Whatever be the legend, these rock-shelters are silent narrators of lives lived with zeal, zest and sensitivity to surroundings. Who ever said that rocks are lifeless?
