Experience
Two days at Hampi
ASHOKAMITRAN
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Hampi is so vast and spread out that you’ll need at least a week to do justice to this once-glorious city.
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Photo: T. Ramakrishnan
Spared destruction: The rath at the Vithala Temple in Hampi in Karnataka.
As a rule, never look into the guide book once a trip is over. For, to your horror, you will find you had failed to see far more things than you had seen. This can happen with a compact monument like the Qutub Minar, and so with Hampi you should not
feel frustrated.
Unimaginable destruction
Hampi is vast and has thousands of things to see, scattered over miles of very uneven terrain, with not so easily manageable pathways. What will overwhelm you is the fact that a glorious capital of a kingdom that flourished for centuries got destroyed after a single battle — the Battle of Rakshasatangadi. Invaders from distant lands have ransacked cities and burnt them but the almost local Bahmani chieftains to go on such extensive destruction is a little hard to imagine. They could have annexed the highly developed city with all its sophisticated urban conveniences including an aqua duct for the palace complex! One can see the king’s and queen’s quarters have been built according to Vaasthu specifications. All that is now left are the basements.
The famous Hampi Rath or the chariot, sculpted out of a single stone, fortunately stands in the Vittala complex in a reasonably unvandalised condition. But the main temple stands as a witness to mindless destruction. So is the huge Narasimha image and the temple around it. They call it now Ugra Narasimha or the ferocious Narasimha whereas He was actually Lakshmi Narasimha, a symbol of all-powerful serenity. In the midst of such organised destruction, certain things have escaped the vandals. The Elephant Stables, for instance. Also the Virupaksha Temple, where even today worship is offered.
With Hampi, one shouldn’t plan for an ambitious visit. But if one can stay on for a week, some justice can be done to this city in ruins.
A choice of cuisine
Like an army, a tourist also has to march on his or her stomach. In Hampi, there is cuisine of several European cultures! These restaurants and hotels stand on streets not wider than fifteen feet. Some are in lanes where a liberally grown individual will have to manage sideways. And there are dozens of massage parlours in these lanes. Almost all of them offer “facelift”, whatever it may mean.
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