Bhimbetka Notes

After visiting Sanchi, my next stop was Bhimbetka. Since I don’t own a car in Delhi, road trips aren’t a common feature of my life. So the two-hour drive from Sanchi to Bhimbetka was relished. The paddy fields, village roads leading to hamlets tucked away from the highway, India’s vaunted toll roads, Dusshera celebrations with the Devi transported on trucks and jobless virile youngsters dancing and prancing around to the booming devotional-pop music, motorcycles packed with three to four adults and the Vindhyas suddenly popping up in the horizon were memorable.

Coming to Bhimbetka, my initial assumption was that it would be a cave or two with some art work on the walls. Little did I know that they would turn out to be the most astonishing prehistory site in India and one of the most impressive heritage sites that I’ve seen in India.

The Bhimbetka Rock Shelters are a complex spread over a vast geographic area. What makes it unique compared to other prehistoric art sites of the world is that it’s the only one that boasts of continuous human habitation from 100,000 BC to 1000 AD! The floors and the walls of the caves are probably the oldest preserved human habitations of the world. The art pieces on the wall are primarily of animals (deer, bison, elephants) and scenes of celebrations, warfare and hunting,

A mental model that I follow is that all of human behaviour can be mapped to the subconscious instincts that are within us as a relic of our hunter-gatherer past. Envy, status-signalling, desire, prestige, bodybuilding, wealth etc can easily be explained by our primal instincts for domination, survival, safety and genetic propagation. So to be in the presence of a site that sheltered these communities from our prehistoric past was nothing but enchanting.

The other two comparable sites of prehistoric cave paintings are Altamira in Spain and Chauvet in France. The latter has a highly interactive website which also provides a virtual tour of the caves – another example that displays our own country’s limited state capacity when it comes to promoting, branding and marketing our heritage.