Cutting etch: Tracing India’s most ancient rock art, and the efforts to save it
Created up to 20,000 years ago, petroglyphs and geoglyphs were made by humans scraping one piece of rock against another. Which ones are closest to you?
Some are so large and dramatic, looming right beside a highway or on the outskirts of a town, that they are often mistaken for recent doodles, some wayfarer’s version of “I was here”.
In a sense, that’s what they are. Only, these art works date to a time before the written word itself.
India, like most ancient civilisations, is home to hundreds of geoglyphs (giant shapes cut into rock) and petroglyphs (smaller engravings and carvings). These art works are typically 20,000 to 3,000 years old, with some of the largest clusters in Jammu & Kashmir (mainly Ladakh), Maharashtra (in the Konkan) and Haryana.
The petroglyphs range from mask-like symbols to footprints, handprints and zoomorphic shapes (resembling snow leopards, wild goats, partridges, rhinoceroses, elephants, tigers, lizards, sharks and more).
The geoglyphs are typically either abstract patterns created on the ground, by clearing away vegetation or arranging stones and soil in a pattern. Or abstract renderings of humans and animals (wild boar, tigers, deer, antlers, birds, reptiles).
We’ll get to the people documenting and publicising this ancient art — and their concerns that their work could endanger the art itself. (How long before someone adds to a collection with a message that says Tinu ♥ Sunny, they fret?).
But first, a bit of good news. In August, the Maharashtra government declared 1,500 such sites in Ratnagiri protected monuments. In 2022, meanwhile, Unesco (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) put some of these sites on its tentative list of world heritage ones.
The hope is that other states will follow Maharashtra’s example, in ways that will deter Tinu, Sunny and others.
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It is perhaps worth mentioning here that petroglyphs and geoglyphs are distinct from cave paintings. The ancient rock paintings, whether the ones in Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh or Lascaux in France, involve the use of pigments, charcoal and minerals for sharper outlines, added effects and colour.
Petroglyphs and geoglyphs are simply one rock scraped against another, by a human with an idea in their mind that they wanted immortalised.
“These marks, made by hands that are long one, are proof of lives lived, of thoughts dreamed. They are a reminder that we too are but visitors on this earth, and what we create — and protect — becomes our legacy,” says Ahtushi Deshpande, 55.
The travel writer and photographer has been researching petroglyphs in Ladakh for 10 years. Her efforts have culminated in a photobook, Speaking Stones: Rock Art of Ladakh, released earlier this year. Photographs from her collection have also been exhibited in cities ranging from Paris to Mumbai.
Some of the most interesting of these are the figures of humans, she says. Some have arms or hands raised, as if caught mid-action during a dance or ritual.
Others stand atop horses, camels or yaks.
The humans are sometimes simple stick figures; other times, they are more realistic, with broadened hips and fingers clearly delineated. Some have the inverted-triangle shape reminiscent, intriguingly, of Warli art.
There are also circular or square emotive mask-like symbols, some bearing what appear to be tears and others, with vacant staring eyes.
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Risbud, who saw his first geoglyph in the Konkan at 16, rediscovered these forms in adulthood and fell in love with them. He is now 51, an electronics engineer, and a geoglyph-hunter.
Over more than a decade, he and Dhananjay Marathe, a fellow engineer and geoglyph-hunter, have worked with local communities across Ratnagiri, Sindhudurg and Goa, to track down and document about 200 such sites so far.
Risbud’s favourite is a 6 metre x 3 metre work in Deud, Ratnagiri, that shows a single-horned rhinoceros, slightly animated, as if about to leap forward.
“There are stunning details in many of these geoglyphs,” Risbud says. “Especially with the zoomorphic designs, one can tell that the maker observed the creatures closely, capturing their expressions.”
After years of funding their mission themselves, the two men’s NGO, Nisargyatri Sanstha (the Travel with Nature Collective), received funding from the central government’s department of science and technology last year, to work with IIT-Madras on a digital database of the rock art they have documented.
“It’s exciting,” Risbud says. But his favourite part remains staring up at these giant patterns, he adds, and wondering: what kind of person did this; what were they thinking; what was their life like?
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In the Mangar Bani forest belt in Haryana, wildlife researcher and conservationist Sunil Harsana, 35, has been studying rock paintings, etchings and ancient tools in the region, while working on his Master’s degree in anthropology.
He is also a fellow with the Bengaluru-based organisation conservation NGO Coexistence Consortium, and has been documenting sites of ecological / historical importance with a view to protecting them from growing real-estate development and mining activity in the area.
Last year, in fact, the Supreme Court directed the state government to ensure that no damage came to sites of historical importance, in the Mangar Bani area, as a result of such activity.
These sites have not yet been declared protected areas, Harsana says.
The rock art is certainly of immense historical value, says Banani Bhattacharyya, archaeologist and deputy director of archaeology and museums with the Haryana government.
“Many of the marks and etchings we have found seem made either for ritualistic purposes or for some kind of game. At least some were possibly created in moments of leisure. Whatever their purpose, they establish that human habitation in this belt goes back at least 10,000 years.”
She cannot comment on protection status, she adds, but after the Supreme Court order, some sites have been identified and mining companies have been notified that they cannot be touched.
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Part of what makes this ancient rock art so intriguing is that, in a world of geotagged everything, many of these ancient relics remain undocumented. They sit outdoors, unprotected.
One may come upon them unexpectedly and have one’s life changed forever (and isn’t that what all art is meant to do?) or track them down assiduously and still be surprised by their number.
These unique conditions also make this art uniquely vulnerable. Even local communities and local governments have mistaken them for random scratchings of no great value.
Already, Deshpande says, she has seen some destroyed to make way for roads and bridges. She has photographs of a series of art work alongside which someone has spray-painted the words “Hassan Mechanic” and a phone number.
“I was devastated, in 2015, to see that a panel of snow leopards I had photographed had been destroyed during road-widening along the Zanskar river,” she says.
Heritage tourism is raising awareness, and helping local communities realise that such sites could have economic value. “People who once dismissed such works as ‘kharoch’ or scratches have begun to come to us and report them,” Risbud says.
But this has a flip side. In the continued absence of a security presence, and infrastructural interventions such as railings and lights, Tinu ♥ Sunny may eventually creep in among 20,000-year-old art.
And while such admissions of love may admittedly have archaeological significance a few millennia from now, that kind of thinking can only be a last resort.
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