Buddhist Monuments Near the Lower Krishna River, India (Part 1 of 3)

For photos, see greatmirror.com

For a transcript, see buzzsprout.com/1970784

Transcript

Early in 2024, I went to India for about the 15th time.  “You’re kidding,” people said.  “Once or twice I get, maybe three times, but 15 is crazy.”  I’d reply that this time I was going to see some Buddhist sites in the lower Krishna Valley.  The person I was talking to would struggle a bit and finally say, “Interesting.”  Pause. Then,  “Are you a Buddhist?”  No, I replied, but I do like the idea of a religion without god. 

I could add that I always come home from India with an idea, but I’ve learned that saying this is a mistake, because people then ask for an example.  You see the problem: presenting in casual conversation an idea that you’ve found and are trying to keep hold of is like standing ankle-deep on an ocean beach steep enough that the retreating water washes away the sand under your feet.  Oops! You lose your balance or, in this case, your hold on the idea. Casual speech becomes your enemy.

Anyway, I arrived in January.  That’s the cold weather in North India, but this was Vijayawada, a town of a million people at the apex of the Krishna delta.  We’re in Southern India and on the east coast. The daily maximum temperature in January is about 90 degrees.  (That’s Fahrenheit.  Sorry if you do Celsius.)  Worse than that, the air quality was terrible.  From the window of the plane from Hyderabad I couldn’t even see the ground until we were a minute or less from landing.  Later, I looked across a busy street and watched as pollution drifted by like wisps of California fog.  Of course filthy air is one of many signs of India getting rich, so complaining about pollution invites the charge of hypocrisy. 

Academics generally trust statistics more than their own eyes and may balk at my calling dirty air a marker of economic development.  I balk back, because statistics, despite their value, mask the impoverishment that comes with wealth.  “What?” you say.  “That’s nonsense, We don’t become poor as we get rich.” 

But compare the size of the audience for Denzel Washington’s Equalizer movies with the size of his Macbeth audience.  I watched and enjoyed all three Equalizers but bailed on Macbeth while the witches were still stirring their pot. Oh God, I thought, not Black and White.  I think that qualifies as impoverished.  It gives new meaning to the phrase “for richer and for poorer.”   

I managed to rent a little car in Vijayawada from a brave soul who owned half a dozen of them.  He insisted on my taking a road test.  Not a bad idea, really.  The traffic in Vijayawada is terrible, despite some elevated roads that reduce congestion a bit.  I calmed myself by connecting the car radio to my phone and listening to a wonderful recording of Mozart’s piano sonatas.  I don’t remember who the pianist was, but she had to be a woman.  I don’t mean that Mozart is feminine, only that he’s joyful, and joy is an emotion generally inaccessible to men.  How some women are able to express it, I have no idea.

So you see what I mean when I say we get poorer as we get richer, get dragged over Mozart’s dead body toward a cultural denominator that makes some people inconceivably rich.  High culture bites the dust, but not just high culture.  All the weaving and fishing and singing skills of illiterate peasants bite the dust, too.  I’ll call it algorithmic convergence.  

Near Vijayawada I listened to a podcast in which Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell chatted for an hour with Bill Gates.  Talk about poor while rich.  Everything was data, statistics about income, health, nutrition, mortality, education.  It was like a restaurant where the cook’s only concern is that the food is nutritious.  

Gates was convinced that our lives get better as global poverty is reduced. In Latin that’s Q.E.D.  In English it’s “duh.”  I waited for Campbell or Stewart to ask what we would do with ourselves after we were all statistically perfected.  They didn’t, but I suppose Gates would have replied that there are always new challenges.  “Dead ahead, captain, unknown galaxy.”  Great, another challenge.  Then I imagine Bill Gates meeting Anna Magnani.  If she’s before your time, imagine instead Gates remembering that precious moment in 10th grade when the sexiest girl in school stood close to him for a minute.  

Ooh, don’t squirm, I’ll retreat to numbers.  Vijayawada in 2024 had 1,467,000 people or, in the metro, 2,097,000.  Since the late 19th century Vijayawada has been a railroad center, with a long box-girder bridge across the Krishna and a passenger station with 20 tracks.  Maybe more, I didn’t count.  It’s famous too for irrigation canals that fan out palmately across the delta.   When I arrived, however, the city’s leaders were busy dedicating a new statue.  It was made of some gold-colored metal and stood 125 feet high.   

The statue’s height was chosen to mark the 125th anniversary of Dr. Ambedkar’s birth–how’s that for analytical rigor?–but another city had the same idea, so the city fathers of Vijayawada in their wisdom put their statue on a 75-foot plinth.  It brings to mind the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado.  Remember those lethal fins?  Tail lights, too.  Still, if Vijayawada’s city fathers were serious about respecting Dr. Ambedkar, as they should be, they ought to have gone metric so he could have risen 125 meters. 

A clerk at one of the hotels where I stayed said I’d have a view from my room of “the Big Guy.” ‘ I looked at her and said, “What?  Did you just call Dr. Ambedkar the Big Guy?”  “Yes,” she admitted with a shy smile.   I hope she was mocking the taste of the city fathers.  She might not have been, but I am sure she would not have made that joke if the statue had been of an Indian billionaire.   Indians don’t joke about their billionaires.  Well, to be fair, Americans don’t joke about theirs, either.  Where’s my prayer rug when I need it?

India has literally thousands of statues of Dr. Ambedkar, usually more or less life-sized and often standing, as this one does, with his right arm extended.   Presumably he’s pointing to the Promised Land, not the old one of milk and honey but the new one, with chyrons carrying financial data across millions of television screens.

Dr. Ambedkar died in 1956, but I think he would have said he was interested not in numbers but in dignity, especially for India’s Untouchables, of whom he was one.  But how much dignity?  You may object and say that dignity comes in only one size, but that’s naive.  For example, Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell address their interviewees by first name.  Normally, that’s fine, but with Gates it was awkward.  He didn’t reprimand them, but you could almost feel him arch his back: who did these peons think they were?  Whatever we think in theory, in reality the dignity of a human being is generally proportional to their status, which is to say, nearly always, to their wealth.  Yes, you probably know people who treat rich and poor alike.  So do I, but not a lot of them.   You have to have had a really good childhood if you lack the fawning reflex.

The tourists who come to Vijayawada mostly come, as I did, for Amaravati, about 20 miles upstream on the right bank of the river.  If you’re looking for Amaravati on a map, which I think is unlikely but completely admirable, be careful.  The place I’m talking about is, as I say, about 20 miles upstream, but halfway there there’s another Amaravati.  It’s the aborted Andhra Pradesh state capital, begun a decade ago but left incomplete, with only a high court, a state legislature, and some unfinished, uninhabitable apartment buildings for civil servants.  No Brasilia here, no Chandigarh.  

My Amaravati, I’m tempted to call it the real one, was a major city two thousand years ago, with trading links west to Rome and east across Southeast Asia.  The city finally disappeared from the historic record in the fourteenth century, and little is known about it except that it possessed a great stupa. 

Stupa is a Sanskrit word for mound, but the people who built this stupa called it not a stupa but mahachaitya or great sanctuary.  I like that name, but if you’re a literal sort you’ll object that mounds don’t offer much sanctuary, especially in the rain.  You’re right, of course.  You won’t keep dry hugging  a hemisphere 90 feet in diameter.  

The Amaravati stupa is mostly gone now, and the material that filled it remains unknown–maybe earth, maybe brick, maybe a combination of the two–but the mound definitely rested on a low cylinder or drum clad with carved slabs of limestone and encircled by a carved stone railing or fence that delineated a processional path about 11 feet wide between the railing and the mound. At the cardinal points the railing was interrupted, allowing people to enter and process around the mound.   The stupa, in short, was an emotional sanctuary.

I think I first encountered Amaravati by accident in the British Museum.  The Museum’s Keeper of the Department of Oriental Antiquities–I would die for that job title–wrote a book about 20 years ago called simply Amaravati.   It opens with this sentence: “The Mahacaitya or Great Stupa at Amaravati was the glory of ancient Indian Buddhism, surpassing all other monuments of the age in its huge size and elaborate sculpture.”  Well, huge size and elaborate sculpture don’t automatically score points with me, but you can see that Robert Knox, the Keeper, was impressed.  So was I when I saw the Amravati room with its carved slabs and bits of railing covered with crowded but delicate images of people, plants, animals, and of the stupa itself. 

Debala Mitra, who in the 1980s became the first woman to head the Archaeological Survey of India, wrote a book called Buddhist Monuments.  In it, she writes that the sculptors of Amaravati were “intoxicated with a creative impulse” and “went on producing reliefs after reliefs, which are now world-famous for their superb expressiveness and exuberance of beauty.”  Words, words, words, and I don’t understand the phrase “exuberance of beauty,”  but, anyway, I remember walking past these stones and feeling some kind of energy.  I don’t know if you can call it charisma, and don’t ask me to explain the sensation.  Just go ask Bill Gates what happened in tenth grade when that girl stood next to him.   

I’ve gone back to the Museum at least twice since then and to my disgust found the room locked.  A sign said something like: “Budget shortfall.  Sorry for any inconvenience.”  Funny, the Brits cart off tons of stuff because they say Indians won’t care for it or study it scientifically.  And then it turns out the Brits are too broke to pay for guards, so you can only see the stuff through plate glass.  You might as well get Knox’s book.  It has lots of good photographs.  The museum’s website is another option.

Well, it’s true: Amaravati was wrecked when Europeans first saw it.  That was possibly in 1797 but more likely the next year, and that first white guy was a surveyor working for the East India Company.  Colin Mackenzie was his name–ask me again, and I’ll tell you the same–and he had been born about thirty years earlier on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.  In another 30 years he would die in Calcutta as Surveyor General of India.  Not a bad career and not bad at all making it to his sixties in India in those days. 

There’s a small painting of him in the British Library.  He stands very erect, lumbar vertebrae perfectly arched.  He’s whip thin and wears a bright red jacket with tails.  He’s shown with three learned Brahmans, dressed in white.  These were or perhaps just represent the men who helped Mackenzie make sense of what he saw as he travelled.   They’re a step behind Mackenzie.  

I think I’ve known men like Mackenzie: smart, energetic, impatient with what they regard as the balderdash of unmeasurable quantities.  He reminds me of highly successful British businessmen like James Dyson or Michael O’Leary.  On the other hand, Mackenzie left five percent of his estate to the Brahman who had been his most important teacher.  I take that as proof that Mackenzie wasn’t just another hyper-competitive master of the universe.

Mackenzie visited Amravati twice, briefly when he found it and again a few years before he died.  This second time, he stayed for months and brought assistants who made meticulous drawings of the place.  Here’s a bit of what he saw, in his own words, which I’ve lightly edited.  “To the southwards of the village, close to it, is a circular mound of about ninety feet in diameter, which had been cased round with bricks of a large size and slabs of white stone, sculptured, so far as I could see by their remains there; for the best stones were carried into the pagoda [he means Hindu temple] which Vasu Reddi was repairing.”

Vasu who?  Here’s Mackenzie explaining: “About 23 years ago, the Raja Vasu Reddi, zamindar of Chintapalle, proceeded on a religious tour to perform his devotions at the celebrated pagoda of Tirupati; on his return, he felt disposed to change his residence from Chintapalle and found a new city.  He pitched on the site of Amaravati as the best suited for the purpose …. He invited local banias [merchants] from Chintapalle… to all of whom he made suitable advances of money to enable them to erect habitations… from bricks found  in the several mounds ….”

That’s a bad sign, and it gets worse.  Mackenzie continues, “The Musalman people found a few fragments which possessed beautiful carvings which were removed to the raja’s new tank [or village reservoir], with which the flight of steps on the western side, to the number of twenty, was constructed…. In short, [I’m wrapping up this quote] these valuable stones of antiquity have been used in various buildings, both public and private; those applied to mosques have first been carefully divested of every carving by rubbing them on harder stones to prevent, as it is said, any pollution arising to Muhammadan faith from idolatrous substances.”  

Oh, my, the story brings to mind the Taliban in 2001 blowing up the statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan.  Mackenzie appears to acquiesce, but he also seems to regret the desecration of stones that he says were “far superior to any ancient or modern Hindu production.”  

Perhaps Mackenzie should have put a big fence around the ruins so that eventually the mahachaitya could have been put back together as fully as possible. Instead, he sent eleven slabs to Calcutta; of which nine were then sent to London.  

Forty years later, another British officer, Walter Eliot, sent many more Amaravati slabs to Madras, where they sat for 14 years before continuing to London, where they gathered dust until noticed in 1867 by Victorian England’s leading student of Indian architecture.  At the urging of that man, James Fergusson, the stones were then transferred to London’s India Museum, and when that museum closed they went to the British Museum. 

Meanwhile, another local officer had a go at the stupa.  He was Robert Sewell, and in a report from 1880 he justifies carting off everything.  He writes of a “terribly mutilated slab, fully exposed on the top of the mound… and speedily mutilated by the shepherd boys of the village, who broke off all the exquisitely sculptured and delicate faces and limbs of the figures–a fate which will inevitably overtake every marble left unguarded at the village.”  

A professional archaeologist arrived a few years later and seconded Sewell’s “take it all” strategy. The title page of his report modestly identifies him as James Burgess, LL.D., C.I.E., F.R.G.S., M.R.A.S., &c.   Literally, the page says “&c.” with an ampersand.  Anyway, Burgess reported that by the time he arrived, some 329 stones had been retrieved and sent away.  He himself found another 90 with sculptures or inscriptions, and he wrote that “had the time and means at my disposal allowed a systematic examination, still more might have been discovered,”  Indeed, more have been discovered.  Most have wound up at the government museum in Madras, now Chennai, or in the very small museum next to the mound.  All of which raises the question of why in the first month of the year of our Lord 2024 I bothered going to Amaravati.  

I guess I just wanted to see for myself.  It’s like the day I stopped at the spot where Dag Hammarskjold’s plane crashed in what is now Zambia.  It was there, and I was driving by.  Seeing it would convince me that it was real.

So, I arrived in what is now the small town of Amaravati–population about 15,000–on the same day that 700 miles to the north, in the town of Ayodhya, the prime minister of India was dedicating a temple on the site of a mosque that a mob of Hindu zealots had destroyed in 1992.  So much for India’s proudly secular constitution, but Prime Minister Nehru and Law Minister Ambedkar, both of whom had worked on that constitution, were long gone. 

Hundreds of people had gathered on Amaravati’s main street.  They didn’t smile when they saw me.  They came pretty close to glaring.  A couple of days later, in another town, I heard the Islamic call to prayer and thought, “He’s brave.”

I wiggled through the crowd and went down a side street to the archaeological museum, which consists of one large and one small room.  Within five minutes I was fuming because the ticket-seller and the guard made sure that nobody took photographs.  It wasn’t their fault, of course; some distant official with the Archaeological Survey of India had laid down the rule that nobody could take pictures because, because he could, and, as Genesis almost says, because he saw that it was satisfying.  Visitors were supposed to come, look, say they had seen the museum, then leave.  If they forgot what they had seen, which of course they would, no matter.  The point was to say they had been here, like Americans who stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon, spit, and get back in their trucks.

The only other visitors in the museum during my visit were a Scandinavian couple who impressed me by saying that they had just visited Palampet, a wonderful old temple that foreign visitors rarely see.  Of course they had a car and driver, which is cheating.

I asked the woman where the Amaravati stupa was.  She grabbed my elbow, pulled me outside and pointed down the road.  She warned me that there wasn’t much to see, and, boy, was she right.  I entered the gate, bought a ticket, and found myself in a few acres of well-kept lawn, which I take as proof that the site is managed by the Archaeological Survey of India. In the middle of the lawn there was no hemisphere.  Instead there was the base of a hemisphere, and it was covered with a lid of concrete, courtesy of a so-called “grooming” done by the Archaeological Survey in time for a visit of the Dalai Lama in 2006.  

It looked like a reservoir you could put on a hilltop in San Francisco.  After all, Vasu Reddi, hoping for treasure, had dug a tiered pit in the center of the stupa and then, figuring that all the digging shouldn’t be in vain, had converted the hole into the village reservoir or tank whose 20 steps he lined with stupa slabs.  The tank had been filled in by the British, and I suppose the steps were taken apart and sent to Madras or London.  I did see a few broken white columns, but very little that was carved, except for a few lotus-flower medallions leaning against the brickwork as if to say, “see, it’s not all gone.” 

There have been archaeologists in recent years who have argued that it isn’t too late for restoration, but this assumes that whoever is doing the work can get the carvings returned.  You know how that’s likely to go.  Think of the British Museum with its death grip on the Elgin Marbles.

Well, look on the bright side: I now knew for sure that there is no reason to visit the Amaravati stupa.  That’s knowledge, isn’t it?  I decided to try my luck the next day at Ghantasala, about 35 miles downstream from Vijayawada.   Google reckons those 35 miles at 1 hour and 40 minutes.  That implies a speed of about 20 miles an hour, which is definitely possible in India, but which seemed odd because most of the journey was on a fine, four-lane toll road.  I zipped along until I got off the toll road and found myself on six or eight miles of a very rough road hopping from village to village.  These roads are the best reason for driving yourself in India, but I did wonder now and then if I’d made a wrong turn.  There were no signs, and Lady Google sometimes loses her mind in village India and starts going in circles, like my Roomba at home.  

Occasionally I’d pass a very spiffy new mansion appearing out of nowhere and probably paid for by some family member who lived elsewhere but was sending money home.  There were lots of people on the streets, along with hungry stray dogs, small and with a preference for sleeping on a sunny bit of road.  I’m not sure whether I should think of the dogs as trusting or stupid, but drivers did avoid them.  Between the villages, the road was flanked by harvested fields of paddy, with straw piled up like intact stupas.   

Yet Ghantasala was another bust: a deflated balloon of modern brickwork put together decades after a government archaeologist named Alexander Rea excavated the site in 1880.  There was a good museum across the street but again photography was verboten.   I can hear someone telling me to get over it, but it’s not as if the camera on my phone was going to bother anyone, not when there were no other visitors except for one family.  The parents sent their daughter over to ask where I was from.  I told her and asked where she was from.  When I didn’t recognize that name she explained where it was.  Perhaps she was nine, and her English was excellent.  Another young Indian on the fast track.      

Rather than head back to Vijayawada, I drove an hour or so north to Machilipatnam, a town of 200,000 people.  It’s been the main settlement in the delta for centuries, but it won’t win any charm awards.

In the old days it was called Masulipatnam, and young men seeking their fortunes with the East India Company came here and died.  A district manual published by the Government of Madras in 1883 includes a section called Annals of Masulipatnam.  We read of companies of 100 men reduced to 15 fit for duty.  They weren’t the only ones dying.  We read of famines, with villagers dying of starvation.  There were tsunamis, too.  One apparently rolled inland 17 miles and when it rolled back to the sea did more damage than when it had rolled inland, I suppose because it retreated more quickly than it had advanced.

The British built a fort a couple of miles from town.   I went to see it and found the sturdy whitewashed walls intact but the roof gone.  There were no inscriptions, no plaques other than the standard blue-and–white sign of the Archaeological Survey.  No lawns here, no visitors either.  There was an old British prison next door, along with an old hospital.  The roofs were gone. 

I decided to visit the British cemetery, which was back in town and next to a church called St. Mary’s.  The cemetery was so badly overgrown that I didn’t explore it thoroughly.  Snakes bite, you know.  But Masulipatnam had been a Dutch settlement, too, and the Dutch had an amazing cemetery of their own.  I say amazing partly because it was immaculately weeded but also because the stones were works of art, with long inscriptions and beautiful ornamentation cut in rock so resistant to weathering that the carving was sharp as new.  

The annals I mentioned a minute ago offer some translations.  Here’s one:  “Under this slab are the dead corpses of Catherein Van Den Briel of Amsterdam and John Krufy of Tousanan, junior merchant in the service of the Honorable Company, a young woman and young man.  May they rest in peace.”  The couple died at 29 and 21 a few months apart from each other in 1678 and 9.  One curious detail: the Dutch cemetery is in a neighborhood called Valandupalem.  Did you hear that? Palem means village, so it’s Valandu Village.  Hear it now?  Valandu. Yes, it’s Holland. Holland Village. Valandupalem.

I enjoyed poking around Machilipatnam, but regarding Buddhist explorations I was now zero for two.  I decided to try again, this time at Ghantupalle, a place with caves about two hours north of Vijayawada. The government of Andhra Pradesh published some years ago a tourism-promotion pamphlet unfortunately titled The Nirvana Trail.  It calls Ghantupalle the state’s most beautiful Buddhist site.  That’s fair; Ghantupalle is an exposed cliff standing in isolation atop a heavily forested ridge.  

Wandering Indian monks long ago discovered that caves come in handy during the monsoon.  The most famous are probably the 30 or so at Ajanta that attract thousands of visitors weekly or even daily.   Not Ghantupalle.  I passed a half dozen young men doing some maintenance work.  They worried as they saw me puffing my way up stairs and more stairs from the parking lot.  They volunteered a helping hand, which was nice, but I declined.  There was nobody else around until I was leaving, when a couple arrived from Waco, Texas.  

I didn’t ask why they had come, but they were Indians. He was a neurologist, freshly transplanted from Wisconsin.  I thought about trotting out my story of getting a new driver’s license when I moved from Maine to Oklahoma in 1980.  The clerk at the department of motor vehicles looked at me and asked, “Why?”  There was something about her tone that led me to ask her why she had asked, but with a winning smile, she said only, “You’ll find out.”  Anyway, Texas is full of Indian doctors, so a new arrival wouldn’t feel marooned.  I did tell the doctor and his wife that the caves and stupas up ahead were very simple, unlike Ajanta.  I also told them to be sure to see one cave whose ceiling, unlike the others but like some of those at Ajanta, had stone rafters.  These were carved so the monks would feel as though they were back home in North India, where prayer halls were made of wood whose roofs needed support. 

I was zero for three when I arrived the next day at the Undavalli Caves.  Ironically, they were just a few miles upstream from Vijayawada and took no time to get to.  The caves sit maybe 50 feet above the rich farmland flanking the river.   It’s a nice view, but a busy road passes at the foot of the caves, and nobody has ever found a way to stop Indian drivers from honking.  I pray that India becomes the first country to rely entirely on autonomous vehicles.

The thing that people come to see at Undavalli is a four-tiered structure perhaps eight bays wide.  The bottom tier is excavated in a cliff.  The higher ones are excavated, too, but are fronted by a constructed or added facade. The bottom floor was presumably a Buddhist refuge, and so perhaps were parts of the upper floors, but the whole thing is now a Hindu temple.  A retired Indian officer took me under his arm and chanted several Vedic hymns.  I was impressed, but then he tried to teach me to hold my hands apart and feel the power passing between them.  It didn’t work, but I did like a statue of a reclining Vishnu, cut from bedrock and perhaps twenty feet from head to toe.

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The best bit–and I mean the thing I liked best since arriving in Vijayawada–was off to one side, where a more or less ignored path runs along the cliff wall.  There were other caves here, some no bigger than a pup tent but big enough to keep a monk dry.  And above a group of three such caves a decorative panel of animals had been carved into the rock.  It was about 15 feet long, and the animals were beautifully done: two elephants on either side of two perhaps mythical creatures.  I couldn’t identify them for sure.  Perhaps one was a lion.

Bear in mind, I live in a place where houses have lawns and foundation plantings as symmetrical as the headlights on a car. We like it that way.  I myself often wear monochrome T-shirts bought in packs of three–no logos, please, and no useless pocket–and here in Vijayawada I was wearing lightweight polyester pants.  Not slacks.  American men don’t wear slacks.  They don’t dine, either, unless they have their own cooks–sorry, I meant chefs–along with a private banker and a family office.  But that’s different: those guys even know how to use words like crudites and charcuterie.   It’s very impressive, but people around me in Oklahoma at Halloween and Christmas put up decorations they bought at Walmart and which probably came from China.  I do some of that myself.  And here at the Undavalli caves, and coming from people who never conceived of container ships full of pitifully cheap LED lights, was something beautiful.  If I rant about being poor while rich, the carver of these animals was rich while poor.