Bhima Devi Blogs #3: Finding Rampur Jungi—A Bhima Devi Project Adventure

January 18,2018: Nearly a month into Bhima Devi Project, Preliminary Surveys

 It was nearly three years ago that I had first visited the site of Rampur Jungi with the unlikeliest crew: my maternal uncle at the helm of the wheel of my mother's blue Alto, my cousin, who was more interested in the phones we held than where we were going and two freshly recruited students of the SA Research Wing from the Department of Anthropology at the Panjab University. 

There was nothing remarkable about the journey. Pinjore, after all, is the least remarkable town in the world if you don't know what I do and even if you did, the whole affair ends there. 

Why, then, would this journey be remarkable? 

On the contrary, it was a rather unnecessary and most likely a futile visit the way I saw it —a visit to a random, obscure village near Pinjore, that was right on the border of Himachal and Haryana, and the promise it held for me that morning, was thinner than the guarantee of spotting a ghost in a so-called haunted house.

And yet, it turned out to be a day I ended up recording in my personal journal, a notebook that hardly ever gets filled in unless what has happened is even bigger and better than my ability to recount it orally. It ended up being a day where I learnt a lot, especially some lessons to live my life by from that moment on. 

One of these was that laughing together helps people bond faster than having a good conversation or showing off what one knows. Another was that it takes just one moment to turn absolute strangers with nothing in common into best of friends.

Not that I didn't know that already. But life has a strange way of making you forget what you know while Archaeology has a strange way of reminding you of what counts the most, what  you will leave behind...

And so, clueless that I was going to return that day high on life and filled with  lifelong love for my two unlikely companions, there I was—in the godforsaken village of Rampur Jungi, 22 minutes away from the site of Bhima Devi Temple with Divyansh Thakur and Priyanshu Mehta, the two new hands at SA, who had ended up pinning me to Pinjore for longer than I thought necessary.

Dramatis Personae à la my opinion in early days of 2018

(Disclaimer: The opinions stated below have long changed since and while what you may find loaded with sarcasm still holds true, most of the admiration is long replaced by too much familiarity with these two.)

Divyansh Thakur (as per Shriya Gautam in 2018):

Tall, fair, decent to look at with curly hair that flops towards the right. Quotes poetry—Faiz, Faraz, Ghalib, Meer— in the same breath as Social Darwinism, sings and is a veritable accomplished young man, something that the girls his age find quite becoming and makes yours truly laugh at his discomfort every now and then. You might remember him as the person who had caused us to start Bhima Devi Project.

Priyanshu Mehta (as per Shriya Gautam in 2018): 

Regular tiny little girl, mostly quiet as a mouse and hardworking as an ant (puns totally intended!) but sometimes her impish sense of humour and perfect comic timing is so deliciously wicked that she has made the most silent people scream in laughter with their eyes watering and hands clutching their tummies that hurt unbearably, all thanks to something she said at the right time. Best known to regular readers as the Short Girl obsessed with Measurements of a large site.

  

Why these two when it could have been anybody else?

Because what counted for me is that Priyanshu knows no procrastination (or at least didn't appear to back then) and Divyansh is dependable (still is, after all these years!). Moreover, there was no end to what I could learn from them, even though both of them were mere mewling infants when I was reading my first history books at Port Blair. But what made them the best was that I could allot both of them work and never be disappointed, and no matter who they distracted  with their looks or their jokes, they never lost focus—things that made them as good as a pair of human hands for me. 

And so, here I was in a sleepy village at the foothills of the Shiwaliks trying to find a site that had caused much grief, rift and strife not so long ago.

As per a newspaper clipping from the late 1980s-early 1990s, there was a Panchayatna Style temple in this obscure village, which the villagers had accidentally discovered while trying to construct a temple by the river. Alongside an assortment of sculptural remains, they had also supposedly found a few brass pots—an incident newspapers claimed the villagers had reported to local authorities. Promising that Archaeologists would follow, someone had taken away these sculptures and the said brass pots but the only Archaeological Team that ever arrived at all was our unlikely trio. Supposedly, the villagers had protested, demonstrated against the incident with a hunger strike, that also led to someone dying but to no avail. The entire episode was completely forgotten until our very own Divyansh Thakur had stumbled upon this newspaper clipping and a few others in the University's archives. So, here we were!

But where was the temple? 

That's what had been nagging me at the back of my head all morning. All we had was a three decade (if not more) old news item and Google telling us that we had arrived. But all there was in the village was a modern day rendition of a Panchayatna Style temple made of glazed white and orange tiles, a similar Gurdwara on the other end and not a single human being visible to the naked eye. 

"Maybe they remember..." I remarked as we passed by the clearly modern looking temple. "Why else would they make that quadrupled shikhara..."

We drove aimlessly through the meandering gullies until we spotted an old, fragile looking woman in a lemon yellow salwaar-kameez, her face a mosaic of wrinkles, who very kindly offered us tea and asked who we were looking for.

'A temple. An old one.'

'Oh! Do you want to meet the Baba?'

We exchanged a look. Did we want to meet the Baba?

Divyansh took the call. Apparently we did. And we were off!

In less than five minutes, we were at an old temple, with drastically dipping land levels and Priyanshu and I lost no time in looking around excitedly. 

Here was a tiny stone Shiva-Linga. There was another! 

Hang on...

Why on earth did the Lakshmi relief look petrified of the T-Rex-meets-Aligator like tiger of Durga and one seriously questionable relief of Kali? 

Barring the two tiny stone Shiva-Lingas, there was absolutely nothing in that temple that had escaped the shoddy restoration at the hands of a local joke for a sculptor. 

Our hearts sank! If this had been the temple, may be that's why no Archaeologists turned up. Maybe we were foolish. Maybe this was the waste of a perfectly mundane Thursday!

"Get the lad. Let's go," I said, feeling as if my insides were filled with lead but then we realised we were now dealing with another missing thing: Divyansh!

It seemed that he had sprung to action at once while Priyanshu and I had still been reeling under the shock of the local art and had hunted down the priest. So, trying to keep our spirits up by joking about how horrific the village art was and how good our own lad was at entrancing anything living, the Baba included, we just sat there, ignoring the gut wrenching feeling that we had come to the middle of nowhere as well as the heart-hammering intuition that this wasn't what we had come for! This wasn't our site. There HAD TO BE another!

"This isn't the site," Divyansh declared suddenly materialising out of thin air behind me like a ghost. (He was probably there all along but I was too lost to notice.)

"The Baba thinks we are journalists and wanted to overhype the site by claiming it to be older than it is. This isn't it but I promise, wherever it is, we aren't going back without it," he declared, hopping into the car.  Over the next half hour, as we drove through the village, Divyansh was, if anything, more spirited than ever, more determined to find the site and he did find it at long last.

"This?" Priyanshu's voice cracked like a whip as we parked next to the very modern temple we had driven past on entering the village. "Are you sure, Divyansh?"

"That's what every person I interviewed in the village told me," he replied, his face shining with hope.

"I don't think it has anything left even if this is our site," I replied dejectedly. "I am sorry, I don't have the heart to go in there."

"Me neither," Priyanshu replied in an equally hollow voice but just like you can't bog down Captain America with the news of Secret Nazi organisations, apparently, we discovered you can't possibly bog down Divyansh Thakur once he's high on adrenaline and whatever pumps through his veins when he is in exploration mode.

The next few minutes passed away as we sat with baited breaths, watching him enter the temple and disappear behind a pillar for a while. 

"If it's taken that long, maybe-" I was saying to Priyanshu when suddenly he rushed out and beckoned us frantically. Kicking our shoes in the car we rushed to the temple. 

"What is it?" we asked half excited, half afraid to let our excitement cloud our pragmatism.

"Come in, ladies," he smiled—the first genuine smile I had personally seen on his face—as he led us inside.

What I saw made me sink to my knees in gratitude, my faith taking the better of me for that rare moment even though I keep my personal religious sentiments outside of archaeology. 

Thank you, Lord, for not failing us! I remember thinking as I stared at a huge parapet covered with the remains of the original temple. The Lingas, the Yonis, the Vishnu Sukansa, a boar, a broken Vishnu Paricharaka, remains of the feet of a deity on a pedestal and to top it all—the original floorplan of the temple the original Sthapatis might have etched on a pillar before beginning—the kind we had discovered from sister sites of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. 

Not only had we found the temple, we had stumbled upon more than we had hoped for! 

Two hours of vigorous weight lifting, climbing, jumping, cleaning mud with brushes and leaf trowels later...

We returned to Pinjore at 2pm with renewed optimism, absolutely ecstatic. Suddenly, everything was clearer than water. We knew that the river had an important role in the locations of these temples and not just that, it had a lot to do with material of make, too. 

Priyanshu immediately got into action, making the first preliminary notes about the geology and geographical history, employing all that she knew about palaeochannels to her best advantage. Divyansh and I got to work with the discarded sculptures on the site, digging, cleaning and recording all we could.

At half past 5, we were done for the day and we felt so alive and happy, we literally danced onto the Mughal Gardens—a treat we allowed ourselves after an entire day spent lifting ruined columns and recording sculptures.

If you ask me today what the true highlight of the day was, I'll tell you I don't know. I am confused till date about whether our explorations stole the show or what we did next tops my list?

There, as we saw the gardens light up and the fountains exult in the evening, there was nothing else left to do for three ecstatic hearts than sing to our hearts' content.

What do Archaeologists high on discoveries sing? 

Everything from Mumford and Sons to Ghazals of Ghalib, Faiz and Meer, from songs of Kumar Sanu to nazms of Gulzar. 

"You don't really like any of us, do you?" Divyansh asked me incredulously when, as a joke, I nearly pushed him into the water near the Jal Mahal in the Gardens. "We are just work people to you."

"Well, I didn't really like you at all," I replied earnestly, throwing an arm each around both him and Priyanshu. "Until today."

Indeed what we found that day,—or rather built together—was something we see growing even stronger as years roll by from discovering to publication of it all.  Those who know us and have seen us together in person will tell you that calling it a workplace friendship would be a gross understatement because there's no word for it in any language as to what two students and their Instructor evolve into after they work on a site as equals, discover a place that was entirely theirs and then bond over research plans.

"We'll need Toposheets," Priyanshu said making a mental note out loud. "And all the geological data about Pinjore."

"We will need an analysis of the sandstone to verify these temples were made of locally available sandstone," added Divyansh. "And a copy of all the primary texts that people before us have claimed Pinjore is mentioned in."

"And we need  a detail of the trade routes of Ancient and Early Medieval India and which of those exist even today," I chipped in. Sighing, I turned to look at both of them in what I hope was an apologetic look. "Don't think we'll get any sleep tonight, guys..."

"Who wants to sleep? We are on to something, tonight," the other two replied enthusiastically.

It took us the next three and a half months to effectively get done all we discovered from Rampur Jungi that day. Not to mention, a very serendipitous breakfast of croissants and boiled eggs in a local B&B at Summertown, Oxford, where I spotted The Silk Roads: A New History of the World  by Peter Frankopan. 

"Can I borrow this?" I asked the receptionist.

"You can keep this if you want," the guy shrugged. "Our visitors leave books around all the time and others are free to take them if they like."

Heart racing I sped to my room and called Divyansh.

"You're actually calling me from Oxford?" he laughed in disbelief. 

"I am actually coming to your University at 5pm the day I land," I told him. "I have the book you need and I'll drop it off if you treat me to  some jet-lag killing chai."

"That's brilliant news! I have found someone to help me with Toposheets [read Mayank Singh here]," Priyanshu told me excitedly, when a similar call went to her. "Also, I may have the genealogy for the Gurjara-Pratihara rulers that we were hunting all along. There was also this inscription from Rajasthan that you might find interesting but where does the political context go?"

If you open the Journal now, you'll see where all of it went. What you probably didn't know was all of it came to us in a single day, a single stroke of luck that set the ball rolling again and if anything else, left us even more determined to see this through no matter what it took.