Viksit Bharat rings loudly in our public discourse today. Yet, step a little away from the slogans and one encounters another India—older, quieter and fraying at the edges. Nowhere is this contradiction more arresting than in the shadow of some of our greatest monuments, where civilisational brilliance coexists with everyday decay.
The glory of Chalukyan temples, for one, stands in stark juxtaposition to the decline of the towns and villages around them. And yet, amid the ruin, hope persists—kept alive by those working patiently to restore our art, traditions and cultural memory.
Many Indias coexist in a baffling time warp—the glorious and the gross, the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the lowly, the sacred and the profane, the opulent and the poor. This contrast revealed itself with startling clarity during a recent visit to the awe-inspiring Badami rock-cut cave temples in North Karnataka.
The occasion was an evening of folk songs dedicated to Yellamma Devi, also known as Renuka Yellamma—a powerful folk goddess worshipped across Karnataka and parts of Telangana and Maharashtra. Interwoven with Hindu mythology and regional folklore, Yellamma is revered as a protector of the marginalised, a fertility goddess and a fierce-yet-compassionate force associated with healing. Her story is one of injustice and endurance: wronged and humiliated by her husband Jamadagni, a revered sage, she suffers indignity and gendered cruelty, yet rises in divine anger—wounded but never broken.
Across regions, multiple versions of her legend exist, many associated with transgender communities who worship her. Unlike the distant, temple-enshrined deities of classical Hinduism, Yellamma is raw, intimate and alive in the imagination of rural communities. Many rightly regard her a feminist goddess. She lives on through oral ballads, dance dramas, jatras and rituals passed down through centuries.
That evening’s ballads were performed by Shilpa Mudbi, who along with her husband gave up corporate careers to relocate to Kalaburagi and devote themselves to preserving folk arts. She performed with a small troupe of local artists at the restored Sudi stepwell in Gadag district—an 11th-century Kalyani Chalukya monument and a masterpiece of subterranean architecture with sophisticated water management systems, restored by the Deccan Heritage Foundation.
The lyrics tracing Yellamma’s life were sung in the chaste folk Kannada of the Gadag-Kalaburagi region. Shilpa’s voice—metallic, earthy and lilting—pierced the soul. Accompanying herself on a single-stringed gourd tambourine, reminiscent of wandering minstrels, she filled the ancient granite space with rhythm as the sun set.
As the ballad unfolded—birth, suffering, endurance—our emotions oscillated between turbulent delight and deep pathos. Each fall was followed by a rising; her stoic courage made our hearts swell. These folk narratives diverge markedly from the Mahabharata, yet feel closer to lived truth.
The Chalukya empire, which ruled 6th-8th centuries CE, was prosperous and powerful, reaching its zenith under King Pulakeshin II. Its dominion stretched from the Cauvery delta to the Narmada and into present-day Gujarat. The Badami cave temples, carved at the dawn of this era, are regarded as the mother of Deccan temple architecture, followed by Pattadakal—a Unesco World Heritage Site—and the free-standing temples of Aihole. Badami and Pattadakal served alternately as imperial capitals.
Standing before these temples, carved over 1,500 years ago into solid red rock, one is overwhelmed by their sculptural precision: imperious kings, chariots, elephants, fierce demons, innumerable gods and goddesses, and winged apsaras of captivating beauty. One cannot help but ask: what immortal hand or eye could frame such fearful symmetry? What chisel and imagination wrought such poetry in stone?
And then you step out.
Into villages abutting these monuments—narrow lanes lined with cow dung, open drains and huts crammed cheek by jowl. Plastic garbage amid the rubble of demolished mud houses replaced by tiny cement boxes. Stray cattle forage through the debris. Yet, cutting through this decay is another sound: the steady hum of handlooms.
We were led into the homes of weavers who have, for generations, woven the famed Ilkal saris using complex techniques, natural dyes and distinctive patterns. This knowledge, almost a form of inherited neural mapping, has passed from parent to child.
A woman sat at her loom in a small Kadapa-stoned hall of her mud house, skylights flooding the space with light. Her hands moved ceaselessly as she answered our questions. One cotton sari, she said, takes seven days to weave. In a nearby shop, it sells for about ₹3,000. She herself wore a polyester sari costing ₹100-150. Power-driven machines churning out synthetic yarn are steadily replacing looms. The tragedy feels inevitable.
Her poverty—meagre belongings, an emaciated daughter just returned from school—stung sharply. Yet her immersion in craft, her dignity and devotion, exposed the futility of our own Sisyphean urban lives, cocooned in digital abundance. Thomas Gray’s line came to mind: “Let not ambition mock their useful toil.”
Outside, women washed clothes on stone slabs by the roadside. Water, they said, arrived once every five days for two hours—this in a region fed by the Malaprabha, Ghataprabha and Krishna rivers, near whose confluence stands the Almatti dam. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink or wash with.
As sunset set the red cliffs ablaze and cattle trundled home with jingling bells, a deep melancholy settled in. I recalled Jnanpith laureate Masti Venkatesha Iyengar’s words on visiting the Hoysala temple at Belur amid a crumbling village: “O god, this temple embodies the apogee of art and prosperity. Why have you condemned us now to utter destitution?”
That evening, we gathered with those working quietly to resist this decline—art historians, conservationists and Indians labouring to restore stepwells, temples and handlooms. When asked why so few foreigners visit Badami, one remarked simply, “People say India is dirty. It’s true.”
Yet, the Badami temples kindled hope. The villages depress, but the men and women working—often unseen—with quiet optimism to revive heritage and livelihoods restore faith. Hope, after all, is the invisible fuel of life. As Dostoevsky wrote, “To live without hope is to cease to live.”
G R Gopinath | Founder, Air Deccan; former Captain, Indian Army
(Views are personal)