Madhya Pradesh
The Forest in the Middle of Everything
“In the middle of India there is a forest, and in the middle of the forest there is a silence, and in the middle of the silence, if you are lucky, there are stripes.”
Photo: Kandukuru Nagarjun from Bangalore, India / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
The Centre of the Map
Madhya Pradesh is the state my finger always landed on when, as a child, I spun myself dizzy and stabbed at the map of India, the enormous green middle, the state whose name simply means 'central province', as if the cartographers had exhausted their poetry elsewhere. It borders five states, touches no sea, and holds, I would learn, a compressed core sample of the entire country: the oldest human art in the subcontinent, the best-preserved Buddhist monument on Earth, temples that made the whole world blush and think, a town where a god holds a government post, and forests so deep that Kipling set The Jungle Book in them without ever visiting, the Seoni hills of his Mowgli stories are real, and they are here. I arrived by overnight train into Bhopal, city of lakes and hard history, with more marked pages in my notebook for this one state than for any two others.
Same size as yours. Put your hand near, not touching.' I did. It was.From the chapter
Ten Thousand Years Before Breakfast
I began with the deepest layer. An hour south of Bhopal, the sandstone hills of Bhimbetka rise out of teak forest, and under their overhangs (seven hundred and fifty rock shelters, a UNESCO World Heritage Site) human beings have been drawing for at least ten thousand years, by some layers possibly three times that. The paintings run in strata like the rock itself: red-ochre hunters and honey gatherers from the Mesolithic; processions of humped cattle as herding arrived; horses and shield-bearing warriors as history proper rode in; and, in one shelter, the famous scene travellers come for, a small human figure fleeing an enormous red beast, fear rendered perfectly by someone dead a hundred centuries. My guide, a forest department veteran, kept his commentary minimal and devastating. At the last shelter he pointed at a hand-print and said: 'Same size as yours. Put your hand near, not touching.' I did. It was. The whole architecture of time I carried (ancient, medieval, modern) quietly collapsed into two categories: people, and other people, all of them waving from the wall.
Forty minutes away, the layers jump forward but the silence holds.
The chapter continues in the book…
- AnticipationThe Centre of the Map
- ArrivalTen Thousand Years Before Breakfast
- ExplorationThe Frank Temples and the God with a Salute
- DiscoveryStripes
- The TablePoha at Dawn, Sarafa at Midnight
- FarewellThe Hand on the Wall
Madhya Pradesh, from the road
Read Chapter 14 in full
The complete Madhya Pradesh chapter — with when to go, getting around, what things cost, what to eat and how to travel responsibly — is in 28 Shades of India.