Let’s begin at the beginning. And so we begin in Malgund. At first, when I chanced on an article about the petroglyphs of Konkan, while surfing the net, I thought it was a hoax. But lo and behold, there was an article in the next day morning’s Times.
So, I contacted Dr Bhide from Malgund, who sent the number of Sudhir Risbud, an electrical engineer who had done a huge amount of legwork. But I was not able to contact him. So, then I contacted our friend from the agriculture faculty: Mr Malshe. It turned out that Malshe’s sister’s nephew, Rutwij Apte was the main coordinator for the Konkan petroglyphs project. In fact, he’s doing his PhD on the same. He turned out to be one most helpful guy.
He chalked out a program for seeing 6-7 sights in one day which could be approached by road, beginning from Ganpatipule. He warned that it would be one scorching sun high on the treeless plateaus and to carry enough water.
So first stop: off Ramroad fata (crossing) and a site which was supposed to be right next to an electrical transformer. But which crossing and which transformer? The road signages seem to have mysteriously disappeared after the rains. We reached on the plateau behind Ganpatipule on the road to Nivali. We stopped a local biker on the way who directed us to backtrack again to a small road going North to Bhagwati Nagar. Fortunately, at this crossing, a local waiting for his bus pointed us that we had just to go a short distance up the road for our transformer and the chire (laterite) enclosed site. Overall, a number of locals seem to be aware of these rock relief sites, but having said that you can miss them, even when you are right next to them. They are fairly shallow engravings in the flat rock of the plateau. So we approached the transformer on the left of the road with great apprehension. There was a rectangular single chira enclosure just in front of it. And Eureka! Four carvings: an alienoid human, a peacock, a wild cat and a deer. The carvings were at right angles to each other.
Someone had helpfully traced the outlines with chalk. Mr Prehistoric Man silently reached out to talk with us. In the distance, you could see the buildings of Ganpatipule on the plateau. As we retraced our way back, we stopped to thank the local who was still waiting patiently for his bus. He turned out to be the pujari of the temple nearby. His name was Santosh Lingayat. We left him as we headed east towards Chave Deood fata for the next set of engravings.
