FIELD TRIP WEEK: Hampi / Vijayanagara

Field Trip Week! Hampi / Vijayanagara with the grade 11 art students. A place unlike any other, a place to fill yourself so full of fantasy that you're still spilling over with it when you get home.

I have finally figured out how to hide my massive entries under a nice little cut, so the rest of this juggernaut is lurking under the link. Please do read on! An entry with lots of pictures is coming next; "Jenn's excessively long pictorial tour of Hampi." This entry is mostly text. If that's not your thing, then skip.

Every September, the Kodaikanal International School has a school-wide field trip week. Every child, from kindergarten to grade twelve, goes off to do good (in theory) throughout South India.

The evolution of the KIS Field Trip week: originally, field trips were here and there, scattered between classes, months, subjects, with teachers arranging them and finding the budgets where they could. November, IB (International Baccalaureate) art might go to Ajanta and Ellora. February, science might take a trip to a crocodile farm or to the Andaman Islands if they were lucky. And so on. Eventually, this plethora of un-coordinated field trips was considered to be too disruptive to the school schedule, especially when compounded with trips for athletics and music. So the school decided to declare a school-wide field trip week which would have a community service focus. Up until grade 11, each grade goes together to one location and their time is mostly community service-oriented. Community service, or “Social Experience” as KIS terms it, is a required component of the KIS education; depending on what year you’re in, you have to spend a different number of hours doing SoEx activities. Field trip week generally accounts for a lot of that. Example: Grade seven went to Nambikkai to help with a deaf/dumb community, doing such things as whitewashing fences, painting a mural on the wall, helping with gardening and general maintenance, and performing a choreographed sign-language dance to a Christian rock song. For grades eleven and twelve (the high school), there are 6 or 7 options of field trips, which are more tailored to the academic foci of the students and less towards SoEx (though each must have a SoEx component).

My field trip was one of those: The Hampi Art Trip. It’s been a fairly long-running field trip and brings a group of grade eleven IB art students to the ancient ruined city of Vijayanagara (“City of Victory”), located near the living town of Hampi. (I’m just going to refer to it as Hampi from now on, because that is much easier to type and pronounce than Vijayanagara). Hampi was the heart of the Hindu Vijayanagar empire until it was sacked by Muslims and left in ruins 500 years ago, and today it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Before the ruins hit you – hundreds of acres of rough-hewn granite slabs, meandering foundations obscured by weeds, delirious fantastic temples, weathered faces of gods and goddesses, stone roofs caved in by flame and siege – before the ruins can be taken in, the eye must first adjust to the gargantuan scale, the bizarre emptiness, the perplexing purposefulness of the Hampi landscape. Hampi is a landscape of granite boulders, hundreds of millions of years old, abstract shapes of stone older than you or I could imagine, not balanced by ancient giants – as it seems, on first glance – but balanced by the infinite patience of nature, of geology, of the tireless erosion of one grain of sand at a time. The process has gradually worn away all of the edges, leaving boulders leaning at precarious angles, stacked and tumbled and fitted together with such bizarre artistry that it seems it must have been intentional, must have been the work of some primeval architect who carefully balanced this behemoth, here, against a thin strip of stone and a relative pebble, barely holding up against the sweep of the void, the ghost of wind, the light seeds blown upwards from the scrub bushes below.

Then the great smoky cobra of the Tungabhadra River slides through, coils and convulses around the careful piles of stone, licks muddied tongues around tiny temples perched on overhangs, hiding in caves, and rises and falls temperamentally with upstream rains. Through Hampi it winds, muscular and angry with rapids in some sections, placid and nurturing in others, lapping the shore in time with the slap of dhobis beating wet clothes against the rocks, feeding the plastic pipes of Hampi Bazaar where once it fed the carven granite aqueducts of the Vijayanagars, running down low, shady channels to the thirsty banana groves. Eventually the river pours into the reservoir behind the Tungabhadra Dam – second largest in India, so large you can’t see the other side without binoculars.

Into the landscape of Hampi, rustling with snakes, hoopoes, mice, people have made their homes, planted their crops, built their temples and worshipped, for thousands of years. In the 14^th century, the Vijayanagars arrived and built their greatest city, and in 1565 they were overcome by a Muslim siege and succumbed to ruin. The central part of the city, where the most interesting sites remain, is about 25 square kilometers, while the entire area of the ancient city would have exceeded 600 square kilometers, the largest city in India at the time. The people took their building materials from the masses of granite all around them, splitting the huge boulders by chiseling out lines of holes, forcing in wooden pegs, and then wetting the pegs; when soaked, the wood expanded and split the boulders into slabs that could be used for construction. This stonework is now all that remains; the buildings of the townsfolk were made of less permanent materials, wood or palm or mud, which have all now rotted and washed away. The majority of the ruins, thus, are found in the central part of the city where the royal enclosures and major temples were located, all made of stone and many of them still standing. The long strip of Hampi Bazaar collects its stores along the same lines as the old bazaar, and the ancient stonework is still visible, mostly from the back, where the rough columns and slabs can be discerned, covered with ragged bright cloth or piles of garbage, occupied by the storekeepers’ families and a variety of animals.

We arrived in Hampi in the very early morning of the 25^th of September, having come in on the overnight train. (---ASIDE---> Taking the train in India merits a whole entry of its own, and perhaps I’ll get around to doing that sometime, but let me just say that it is a lot of fun, though I imagine I’d feel a bit nervous if I were by myself. The school sends field trips off in sleeper class, which means that you have a reserved sleeping berth, but no AC. The other classes are: unreserved, which is a madcap, pell-mell scramble to find space to sleep, involving people boosting themselves through the emergency exit windows as soon as the train slows enough to permit their acrobatics (the regular windows are barred), women thrusting their children up onto the luggage racks to sleep (actually, the luggage racks look to be the most comfortable seats in the house!) while others cram onto the hard wooden benches or stretch out on the floor. Then there are 2^nd AC and 3^rd AC, which are reserved sleeper classes with AC and bedding provided, and fewer people per compartment if you’re in 2^nd AC. 3^rd AC has the same number of people per compartment as normal sleeper. There used to be 1^st class, but no longer. Everyone in India travels by rail, the trains are always packed, and the fares are mind-blowingly cheap if you’re going unreserved; they have to be, if the average Indian is able to travel. I also find the overnight trips to be delightfully efficient, provided you can sleep well on trains; you go to sleep comfortably, wake up and you’re somewhere new! Fun! Excitement! <---ASIDE---)

The train pulled into the town of Hospet, a large settlement nearby to Hampi where many of the tourists stay. We were picked up by vehicles sent by our hotel, driven to a tasty breakfast of dosai, pouris, parothas, etc, and then taken to our hotel. The trip was 21 people altogether: 4 chaperones, 4 boys, and 13 girls, many of whom were in the category of “Bombay Girl.” Their type is not dissimilar to what is known on the East Coast as a “JAP,” or “Jewish American Princess.” I realize I’m throwing around terrible stereotypes here, but the Bombay Girl is a common feature of the KIS student body, and she deserves some definition: #1, Spoiled.

Actually, most of the KIS student body is spoiled. It’s a back-up school for rich kids. Their grades weren’t good enough to get into the good Indian high schools, so they paid their way into KIS, which in fact is NOT as academically superb as it’s cracked up to be, but has a reputation for getting kids into American and British schools (mostly mediocre schools; but who’s keeping track?). So they’re the kids who didn’t do their homework and counted on coasting into a career in Daddy’s chemicals business, or paying their way to an American school. Their attitude is of privilege, laziness, entitlement, MTV, etc. But back to the Bombay Girls.

#2, The fabulous Bombay accent. I love it. It’s a swinging, sassy, rhythmic, totally original accent full of attitude and character. The emphasis falls differently, bits of Bombay slang slip into the flow, they can go on at length about the most bizarre topics (“I’m going to space, yaar. No, seriously.”) #3, Attention to fashion, wearing tight designer jeans and little retro-logo t-shirts no matter what the weather. #4, their love of Bombay (to put it nicely), or their utter snobbishness towards people NOT from Bombay (to put it meanly.) Expanded: their utter snobbishness towards people not from a big city.

They’re also lovely girls, generous and unafraid, popping with attitude and sass, intelligent for the most part, cosmopolitan in a broader way than Western cosmopolites because their metropolis is flooded with desperate slums, their shopping excursions involve spirited haggling with stubborn vendors, their slippered feet tread past legless beggars and piles of garbage rooted through by cows.

Anyhow. This was the group that arrived at the hotel. Four chaperones: me, the head of the music department, BB the art teacher/hiking leader, and PM, a DELIGHTFUL old lady (67 years old) who is my new favourite person at KIS.

We settled into the hotel and then began our exploration of Hampi. BB has been going to Hampi for the past dozen years, and knows the area as well as many of the guides (and when she gets it wrong, she is blusteringly certain that she is right – but in general, she really does know). She is an extremely energetic personality, and led us on a packed itinerary that wasted no time, was planned to perfection, and introduced us to all of the major sites of Hampi over the course of four days. The first day, we drove around. The second and third days, we rented bicycles and zipped from site to site on them, a horde of high school students that descended, walked around, drew pictures, and then swarmed away to the next location. The kids did a lot of drawing; that’s the point of the trip, that they learn about the history of Hampi and do on-site sketching that later develops into an art project they complete back at school, reflecting their time there.

I spent about half my time drawing, and half of it scrambling up every boulder I could find. The setting was spectacularly inspiring for both activities; the rich light cast the sinuous twists of Kali and Vishnu into speckled ochre high relief and every temple had a background of boulders and lush vegetation, foaming green spouting from the hollows between rocks, carpeting the ground, climbing up temple walls. Anything you might want to draw was there; fantastic architecture, students holding conveniently still so that you might draw them as they drew their own pictures, complicated bas-reliefs depicting scenes from the Ramayana, pure gorgeous landscape. Interesting compositions to be found in all of the collections of boulders; the arrangements were reminiscent of a Morandi painting, the boulders clustered closely and with quiet personality the same way that Morandi arranged his bottles, huddled together and silent, staring out from the canvas, barely touching each other, barely balanced.

Boulders, though, called out to be climbed, and more often than not I would wander off with PM to look for interesting animals and plants (she is a walking encyclopedia of Indian flora and fauna; her garden in Kodai is apparently so magnificent that she was approached by Lonely Planet to have it written up. She refused, adamantly.) and find a pile of boulders or a tree to climb. Hampi’s reputation as some of India’s very best rock-climbing is well-deserved. The boulders were perfect for climbing; it felt great to dig my fingers into a thin ridge of granite and haul myself up to the windy tops, Hampi spread below me as perfectly fantastic and unbelievable as a CGI’ed ancient civilization in a big-budget Hollywood film.

That was the true magic of Hampi: its inexplicable power to come alive before your eyes. I’ve never been somewhere with such a strong atmosphere of the past, and the feeling deepened the longer I spent there, the spine-tingling resurrection of the bazaars and temples, the noise of the hawkers and the traffic of queens on palanquins, kings on elephants, the thousand sounds of civilization almost audible over the roar of the Tungabhadra. Walking deserted palace compounds at sunrise, you might believe that the people had yet to wake up and that the king was just now being roused for his morning exercises. The ruins of the Queen’s Bath could rush with water, the aqueduct could reform its broken stones and flow once more. How to explain it? The half-light of dawn, sunrise breaking hazily over the expanse of the city, and on top of Matanga hill I stood watching the empty corridors of Hampi Bazaar, the doves flitting in and out of the Virupaksha temple, the river winding past tiny sanctuaries and ancient trees, and I imagined drifting off the edge, spreading my dupatta like a parachute and toppling back in time, the sharp wind of flight churning back seconds, hours, centuries till the Vijayanagars returned and the bazaar sprang to its original life, more bustling and vibrant than tourist traffic could ever be.

A troupe of monkeys watched us on top of Matanga, waiting to see if we would abandon our backpacks so that they could ransack them for food. It was a reminder – that’s what was here when the first people arrived. Monkeys and boulders. Hanuman’s mystical kingdom.

The trip to Matanga hill was our last real taste of Hampi; after that morning, we packed and drove to a museum which was closed, then to another museum which was also closed (for different reasons), then to the Tungabhadra dam which was most certainly open for business, spilling an incredible volume of water through 10 open spillways out of 33. Then to a hotel in Hospet to make good use of their beautiful pool, and then back onto the train to return to Bangalore.

And then long weekend in Bangalore, with Lowri and Ben and Lowri’s friend Graham who was visiting from England – but that is a story for the next entry, because this is already outrageously long and I’m sure that nobody has made it to the end. If you did, please let me know, and I’ll email you nudie pictures of all the staff. Just kidding. Lots of love,

Jenn