Hassan appears abruptly on NH48, without an arch, without an announcement, with no landmark at all. Arriving from Bangalore, you turn right from the highway to go into town. The train delivers you into the same street, which is named the Bangalore-Mangalore Road. You cannot yet fly in—birds still command the airspace over land allotted for an airport. No one is missing an airport in Hassan. There is a wish for a direct train to Bangalore, about which if some people are vocal they are speaking in whispers.

Hassan is a quiet town. You must count out the recent aberration.

The street runs into the town square with the typical buildings of small-town India flanking it. For a town which is the headquarters of the district which covers the Hoysala heartland, there isn’t anywhere a serious attempt at architecture. But there is a strange, becoming air to the town, to the wide main street, and the pleasing, sprawling town-square to which a statue of the great Dr. Ambedkar points from the government offices, without actually meaning to.

In the line of sight of that illustrious man, a leisurely policeman sometimes guides traffic which mostly manages itself.

Bars line the street, some of which open at six in the morning after having closed at eleven last night. I have watched a show in a movie theater in their midst. There were enough mosquitoes for each person to have their own private swarm to torment them, but when the movie commenced and the speakers burst into peak-volume, no one cared about the mosquitoes: the star was Shriya, and with Rajanikanth’s voice at its desired depth, everyone put up with every suffering, ignored even the smell of sweat, and the moist heat and cool that blew from hefty fans on the walls.

Hassan is as agrarian now as in the time of the Hoysala—it was agriculture that powered the art and architecture of his golden age. Today’s farmers may be seen in town, in shops that sell farm implements, fertilizers, and tractors and tillers. The furrows on their faces seem to me the deep lines of fortitude, and I have admired their inner and exterior strength. They are often in Hotel Hassan Ashhok with executives from Pepsi and such, who are helping them to grow potatoes for chips, and I have marveled at their enterprise.

Over dinner last week, Dr. Nagaraj, soil scientist with Hassan’s Krishi Vignyana Kendra, spoke with me regarding the challenges before Hassan’s farmers. He had returned from a field trip where a farmer had narrated his story before his wife, while his mother tended a buffalo nearby. Last year, he’d pledged his wife’s thali, and his mother’s, to raise money to grow potato, and the crop failed. “What shall I do now—anna,” he had cried. Nagaraj argues that there is no solution for the farmer save a strong intervention by the government.

I don’t understand how, but they enjoy this risky business in Hassan. You can tell that in the district stadium, where in the morning people walk and jog to radio broadcasts on the best methods to grow ragi, sunflower, rice. When I was there last month, the topic was uddinabele. Last Thursday, I listened to the incredible medicinal benefits muttidare-muni holds in every cell, and was filled with remorse at having so relentlessly teased that angel-shrub all through my childhood. The young in the stadium are unto themselves, and I cannot tell if the elders listen, but several of those I pass speak of gains from this crop and losses on another, of buying a tiller or bolstering a bund, of loaning some pipes and losing two valves.

McAuliffe is General Manager of Allana Coffee, and lives on its campus south of Hassan. At 70, after decades of sifting and processing coffee, he is a revered expert. Right now, he is short of labor at his coffee curing plant, but where are all the young going? “The women to the factories; the men to construction work.” But manufacturing jobs are not so many: Himatsingke Seide have employed several hundred women in their new factory in the Hassan Growth Centre. The National Textile Corporation has established a textile SEZ before Himatsingke. But two is not a large number, and in the remaining vast area only a few medium-sized factories have surfaced, for cold storage, automobile servicing, granite processing, hollow-block manufacturing.

Increased construction activity is visible, though: A new “high-tech” bus stand, almost ready; a spruced up train station; new government colleges for engineering, medicine, and agriculture; new hospitals; expansion and diversification among existing educational institutions; a large campus for training for the transport corporation; an institution for biofuels; windmills over low hills in the distance; and fresh activity at ISRO MCF. All these, happening simultaneously, suggest imminent change.

Is growth finally coming to town? There’s a place in Hassan where you can go for answers.

The Hasanamba Temple is on a spacious quadrangle in the middle of a tight maze of small shops and old houses, some pretty and well preserved. The deity is Parvathi, manifest as a hutta in this temple, and in the mind’s eye of those gifted with such sight, she is smiling. So she is Hasanamba, the smiling Goddess, and this hometown of hers is Hassan, after her divine smile. Her darshan is allowed for a two-week period once yearly, around Deepavali. Tradition has it that while closing the temple after Deepavali, they leave before her some rice, flowers, and a lit lamp. Next year, when they open, the rice is hot and ready to eat, the lamp is burning, and on the flowers there’s morning dew. Some say that perhaps miracle of the rice happened only in the virtuous past.

The Hassanamba Temple’s twin is in the compound, whose deity is Siddeswara, carved on a rock face, into which ten centuries of worship have infused a divinity whose weight is in the air. The rock face is plastered with a good number of moist flowers, and when they dry they fall, each in its time. When I entered, an old man had squatted before the deity, was speaking to it. Would something he’d planned succeed? Twice the flower had fallen on Siddeswara’s left, and the man wouldn’t leave without an amen: “So many times you have blessed me; you have given me everything; what happened now?” I closed my eyes for my prayer, and afterward, anxiously avoided seeing what fell, and where—one fall would damn, or delight us both, simultaneously. I left; his monologue continued.

Without new industries arriving, Hassan will stay a mere bed for a night or a place for a meal for those in transit to Belur and Halebid, or the coffee belt, the ghats, or Shravanabelagola. Even emperor Chandragupta came by Hassan, but only for sanyasa. What is it in the air now that signals that Hassan is astir, and will draw people who will stoke great enterprise in it?

They may know at Cafe Coffee Day, who have advanced until the twenty-seventh kilometer to Hassan. When will they arrive in the town square?

Two minutes before arriving in Halebid a farm came up, its house painted in pink and green fluorescent colors completely foreign to this region, but our eyes were drawn beyond the startling walls of the house to a mound shaped like the smooth top of a giant sarcophagus fifty meters behind the house. The mound, we went in and saw, is indeed a grave, a burial performed by nature, of what would once have been a temple, which you can guess from the pieces of granite sticking out of the mound: capitals, pieces of friezes, broken lintel, sections of columns. Some pieces are carved all round, some on one or two faces, and all of them are of the class of the Hoysala.

The mound is overgrown with grass, prickly and hard now in this hot, dry season. There are short trees over it and around, and in their shade you can take relief offered by an occasional whisper of a breeze. What is the right action regarding the dead thing that is buried there? Exhume it and put together the members that have been smashed by man and crushed by nature? Put back into the garbha one of the many idols that are strewn everywhere in this capital of the Hoysala, and consecrate it, and begin prayers? And have the Nikon and the Canon and the Leica arrive with their owners to cock a look at this photogenic art of nine centuries ago? Or is it best that bygones be bygones, and so leave alone the grass and the trees and the teasing breeze and let them soothe the body and revive the soul of the rare visitor in this small, private property?

The owner thought we were from “the department” and wouldn’t change his reading even when we assured him that we weren’t, wishing not to worry him. But he wanted us to be from the department, with the hope that there lurked an omen in our visit. He has arranged a daughter’s marriage for later in the month.

We went to the quieter Jain temples behind the Hoysaleswara temple, where the carvings are fewer, and the austerity of the Jain religion prevails. Before Shanthinatha, an old lady with her saree and blouse rumpled, her hair mussed up, swayed as if in a trance, and sang with the great Meera’s fervor. Her song wasn’t melodious, yet it was pleasant. But she didn’t know the thirthankara before her was Shanthinatha. Another visitor told her whose statue this was, and also that the next temple is for Adinatha, and next to that, facing the main gate, for Parshwanatha. In all the time we were there no more than ten persons visited, and two of them arrived with us, and retired to a corner and the man laid his hand on the woman’s lap, and she cut his nails.

Prayers are offered daily to the three thirthankaras by the two Jain families in the village at the feet of the temple terrace. When they were new they’d have been terribly important, with Queen Shanthala their patron, and the completion of the Parshwanatha temple coinciding with a great victory for King Vishnuvardhana against a northern enemy.

The manicure done, the couple left along with us, only a few steps ahead.

The State has no doubt regarding the benefits that it can pick from the past. To add color and shine to itself, it has installed a huge hoarding before Halebid’s Hoysaleshwara Temple with pictures on it of the principal political actors in the ruling party, and of their favored guru, all arranged with due attention to protocol. The State recently celebrated the 500th anniversary of the ascension of the great Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara, whose portrait is alongside the other pictures, but quite apart from them. Krishnadeveraya’s dynasty assumed power some distance north, in Vijayanagara (Hampi), soon after the last Hoysala fell to the Turk. I tried to take a picture of the sweeping view of the Temple complex, but the hoarding hogged the foreground.

Down the street from the temple, a white lady had discovered a better opportunity. Under the noonday sun, in the summer’s heat, Halebid’s women had lined the entire embankment on the town’s side of the Dwarasamudra tank that the Hoysala built nine-hundred years ago. They were doing their daily chore of washing the clothes of all the ones at home. There were enough colors and depth and width to challenge all the cameras on the white lady’s person—she had three of them, I think. Her only problem was the harsh noon-light, but she seemed to know how to handle it, so intense was her focus. I wanted that picture, too, but I hadn’t the courage to raise my camera at women who had lifted their dress to the knee, and were quite wet. So I went a distance on the bund and took aim with my Leica X1 with its 24 mm fixed lens and got no color and no story in any of my many shots.

I turned left and a vision of the splendor of the place when it was a capital appeared to me under the blazing sun. There, across this lake, on the promontory, the thin veneer of trees dissolved to reveal the Hoysaleswara Temple and, behind it, the Jain temples, and next to the Jain temples, by the lake shore again, the Kedareshwara Temple. Behind the temples, near the Royal Bath, the Hoysala’s Grand Palace floated in rarefied air, but the man-made lake that lay before me began to glitter and I blinked and blinked and fell back to my time.

There isn’t an outlet that serves a decent cup of coffee in Malnad. The little shops that make it use instant-coffee powder; but if you are desperate for good coffee, knock on the door of the coffee-planter. His woman will serve it with a fluff of froth with a wee bit of powder on top, in a cup larger than for espresso, smaller than for cappuccino. Fine South Indian coffee, the very best cafe au lait in the world. The coffee planter is a friendly guy, and immensely hospitable. Go on, knock boldly. It is possible he’ll also treat you to some akki-rotti. The real problem is how to reciprocate on his scale in your turn.

That is how you get good coffee in Malnad, where almost all Indian coffee is grown. Of course, the planter would rather spend the evening with you, to share with you some good whisky.

But it has been a bad winter for him. It rained on consecutive days for a week in December and ruined a promising crop across the belt; weeds have sprung at the feet of coffee and the berries cannot be gleaned (on a decent scale) from the chaos on the ground; in the meantime the rain has confused the plants and they have sprouted white blossoms in odd patterns and on random patches of plants. The planters are woebegone in all the three coffee districts, Coorg and Hassan and Chikmagalur.

Last week I went to Angadi from Sakleshpur, arriving where the narrow road splits into three, at which point you know you have arrived even if you miss the unmissable large sign: there is a stone tablet at the base of a large dried tree on the edge of the cross, rooting the place to antiquity. If you have come looking for Angadi, your turn is left, and you go a hundred meters up in the shade of the line of trees that flank you, and you come upon the mounds that you’ve come for, which hold the relics from the time of the founding of the Hoysala dynasty, from ten centuries ago.

The first Hoysala with detailed records to his name was Nripakama. He ruled from Angadi. He began a mere hill chief, but he packed the audacity to attack the Chola, the Chalukya, and a powerful neighbor, all of whom defeated him. But he displayed such valor as to win respect in his region, and yet not ruffle the emperors of the north and the south. The defeats did not deter him. Soon he attacked Banavase, the capital of the Kadambas down south from him in the plains. He won. By 1047, the year of his death, he was lord of an area large enough to be called a kingdom and commanded an army of hardy people, and both fell to his son Vinayaditya to extend.

Vinayaditya ruled a long time, so his son and grandsons were martially active with him while he ruled. Vinayaditya’s son Ereyanga, together with Ereyanga’s son Vishnuvardhana, went far north and torched the city of Dhara for the Chalukya, whose feudatory the Hoysala had become. Ereyanga would scourge three more cities, all before he himself became king. By the time Vinayaditya died, father and son and grandson had established a good sized kingdom, the nucleus of the major empire that the kingdom was to become within the next one-hundred years. Vinayaditya moved the capital away from Angadi on these ghats to Dorasamudra in the plains, a short distance away.

Why did the Hoysala’s sword—and the torch—travel only so far? His nemesis would arrive from such a distance. Did our peninsula, sealed by mountains, box our heroes within it? Were they denied the big bold dreams the grand terrain of Central Asia gave the Turkic men?

In Angadi, the monuments are small, and attest that what happened here was only a beginning. There are rises all round, hemmed in by coffee plantations. On the first rise I saw a modern temple and turned back. In a short while I was before two rises on either side of me. The one on the right had three Hindu temples on it, on which men from Hampi are working to a plan to restore them in three years. The rise on the left had a Jain basdi on it, its restoration quite advanced, the thirthankaras already standing in its garbha. Perhaps there are big plans for this small temple, now in the charge of Dharmasthala: the plan for this temple also extends three years.

If you’ve come searching for Angadi, you have the story of Sala in mind. The men on this site didn’t know where Sala performed his feat. A schoolboy who now tagged along with me didn’t know either. I drove back down the street and continued further, to the school, on another rise, broad like a short wide table. They were teaching on a Saturday, and in the classroom which I passed the teacher asked what happened in a substance (I didn’t hear the name) if four electrons fused with a single electron. His class gave him a rousing answer, all in chorus. In the next room I saw a dozen computers, of HCL, new under plastic hoods, and thought, maybe now, after ten centuries, the mind of even the commoner in Malnad is no more boxed, not by sea, nor by mountain, and who among these young—with the world open and inviting—might soar to the heights of a Chandrashekar or an Amartya Sen?

The teachers didn’t know either, where Sala had performed his brave feat. But they were helpful. One went into the library and returned with the monumental Kannada Vishwakosha, and found for me the short entry on Angadi. We read it, but it didn’t tell where it happened. Where did Sala kill the tiger? They directed me back to the new temple, the one I’d first skipped.

It is new only on the outside. The deities in it are female, with round, mother’s faces. They are of mud, and are ten centuries old. Sometime in their life someone has glazed their faces into a smooth-china finish, any woman’s envy. The rakshasa’s head is at the feet of Vasanthaparameshwari in the center; next to her, Varahi is on her haunches, and she has a sow’s sweet face—the only such face on a goddess that I’ve seen.

They are vanadevate-yaru, goddesses of the forest. In their early life they sat in the open, with the jungle canopy their shelter, and this, when it was an open spot, according to the priest, was the gurukul of Sala, where his Jain guru threw him the staff, and the exhortation, Hoy! Sala!

With that staff Sala killed the tiger that had come upon them, and gave birth to a name, and a dynasty.

In my last post I told you that all the public walls of Bangalore are painted over with scenes of ruins of our historical monuments, and larger-than-hoarding depictions of our beasts and birds and beaches. I am sitting in the Cafe Coffee Day by the highway at Hirisave, a hundred and ten kilometers west of Bangalore, and I see that the exhortations in Bangalore to celebrate the past of Karnataka are succeeding, and Bangalore is emptying itself this Christmas weekend, and in the process local tourism is shaking off a sluggish year. I am on my way from Hassan to Bangalore, and though it was the other lane that was full, and my lane was free, I am cross, because the cars from the other lane were spilling to ours and surging into us and drove us off the road a few times. Two fresh accidents were proof of the risk, but the sight of them was affecting no one.

This cafe is normally two tables full, but when we came in today only one table was free, with the leftovers from the last party littered on it. Brown and chocolate cake were smeared on the couches and the cushions, and fliers lay about, selling New Year celebrations at the Serai in Chikmagalur. The floor was full of crumbs and I kicked around to tidy it a little, and saw that cake crumbs are stubborn—they stay put or they stick to the shoe.

The tourists who have filled this cafe and the highway are headed to the ghats, to rest there among the quiet coffee, and to trek into the forests, there to turn inward; none may miss a visit to the monuments built by the Hoysala dynasty over four centuries, beginning tenth century, AD.

The Hoysalas began as men of the hills, of the thick jungles that matted the hills. They were virile, industrious, fired by a vitality that their environs imparted to them—qualities which they put to use to prey on traders carrying merchandise to the plains from the sea, or offer the traders protection against other forest brigands. Their other profitable occupation was to swoop down to the plains on marauding excursions, and bring home pillaged grain and stolen women.

Then, as now, these plains were irrigated by small reservoirs. Every few minutes on the road on these plains you notice a reservoir, which have provided water for centuries, to peasants under the Hoysalas, under the Turks, under the Vijayanagar kings, under British rule, and now to peasants in our socialist democratic republic. The plains were created by clearing the plateau of trees, and at the time we are discussing now, the clearing covered areas of today’s districts of Hassan, Mysore, and Tumkur.

click to enlarge…

In time, the plainsmen began to employ the hill-folk for protection of plainsmen from plainsmen in dispute, or for protection from man-eating tigers and leopards. They began to civilize a little, and came under the influence of Jain preachers. In the meantime, they began also to feel the need for protection for themselves, on account of uncertainties spawned by the wars between the northern and southern and eastern kingdoms. The fittest among the brigand chiefs emerged their leader, and the brigand-turned-ruler began to collect taxes from the plains—the brigand had become king.

It was a favorable time for the king who’d just begun his career. There appeared a period of calm when the surrounding kingdoms did not pose much trouble, and lesser kings offered their daughters in marriage. In that time of calm he consolidated a kingdom, and, shortly after, became a feudatory of the Chalukyas who ruled north of him.

Thus did the brigand chiefs from the Western Ghats rise to kingship. Just then, in the mid-East, the golden age of Islam had commenced, and the Turks had directed their ambitions eastward to India, and had begun a march that would in four centuries bring them to the Hoysala. In those four centuries, the Hoysalas would extend their kingdom to cover much of the peninsula, wrest sovereignty from the Chalukyas, change their faith from Jainism to Vaishnavite Hinduism, reach glorious heights in art and architecture and literature.

The Turks would go over treacherous mountain-passes to the northern plains of India; they would conquer Delhi and turn southward and come over the Sahyadri mountains to the Deccan plateau, and subdue the feuding southern kingdoms. The last Hoysala would fall to the Turk.

Today, we have only the temples from that time, apart from a public bath, some basic structures, and many tall stone-tablets (virgals) that are the records of the time. The virgals are in temples and also in remote places in the plains and in the jungles, across the vast stretch of the old kingdom, where they stand alone, bearing their fading stories on them. The temples are unarguably superb achievements, not so much for scale as for craftsmanship. But there is not one palace that has survived, not one house of a nobleman, or merchant, or commoner. Was there a secretariat? There isn’t a sign of it. Only the temples exist.

That is where they are headed, all these tourists.
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Here’s the blog of a young backpacker who has often been to the places of the Hoysalas.

Also, Payaniga’s Belur photo.