Sanchi lies serene, tucked comfortably away from the madding urban surrounds, the hillock not overwhelmed by concretization… its sanctity safely cocooned in relics carved over centuries while the sanity of its message resists being pushed into oblivion… in histories embellished with violence of the empires and their subsequent repentance, the stone remains a stoic spectator, a glimpse of painstaking artistic efforts to help people transcend those base human temptations, even if to no avail…

‘Tis a UNESCO World Heritage Site, meaning the lawns are prim and the façade clean… there’s also the bemusement one feels looking at its sketch on currency, ringfenced inside the very same paraphernalia that the monument’s iconography seeks to renounce… the geometry revels in symmetry as a humid sun prepares to hop over the horizon… the crowds mill around, some nodding their heads pensively as the guide rattles about the history at futuristic speeds, while the rest wallow in the quintessential modern trope of selfies and reels, leaving just about a sliver of space to find solitude…

There’s flora and fauna, four tired lions that’ve watched over lands far and wide for millennia, seers and seductresses, indulgence and enlightenment, debauchery and denouncement… Sanchi is where the Jatakafirst found an expression, an opus on the long and winding moral road to spiritual awakening… again amusing to think that wars were waged to secure the Buddha’s remains around which the plateau was punctuated with these domes and Viharas… war begets peace isn’t recent thinking after all…

Capturing the past or foretelling the future, it’s hard to tell, looking at these sculptures… everything has changed, yet nothing has too… history à la Schrödinger, one muses, difficult to tell if the civilization spiralling in or out… for all the water that has flown under, and all that is about to inundate, Sanchi seems to sit at a locus – some deciphered, some yet to reveal, some ruined, some awaiting another politico-religious spiel…

Musing on stupas at Sanchi, Madhya Pradesh