Rise Of An Empire

Once the centre of the greatest empire of the south, Hampi today stands in ruins—over 1,600 of them. The austere beauty of the landscape, marked by unique boulder formations, has been a crowd-puller for years.

- Satarupa Paul

The road to the past is a bumpy one. Figuratively speaking, there are the potholes of memories, the craters of blames and accusations, the heaps of nostalgia that one must navigate around to reach the recesses of what once was. Sometimes though, that bumpy ride to the past can be quite literal too, or so we discovered on our drive from Bengaluru. Our Innova that was cruising smoothly down the highway up until now, took a right turn and for the next 100 km or so gingerly edged over potholes and craters and heaps, while throwing us helterskelter in our seats, as we drove on towards the past—to Hampi. Or what once was part of the greatest ever kingdom of southern India—the Vijayanagara Empire, ruled for over 300 years by four different dynasties.

Rock of Ages

The landscape, as we neared Hampi, was unlike any we had encountered in our travels across India. Boulders of all sizes—some mammoth like little hillocks, some miniscule like skipping stones. Boulders of all shapes—some round and smooth as a newborn’s head, others flat as plates and saucers. And all of them precariously balancing on top of each other in what seemed to be a continual defiance of the laws of physics.

It isn’t just science though, that explains how this boulderstrewn landscape of Hampi came to be. One of the oldest exposed surfaces on earth, the geological origin dates these boulders back to 2,500 million years. Once part of gigantic granite monoliths, geologists ascertain that the present landscape was formed by volcanism, followed by erosion by the forces of nature over tens of millions of years.