Chambal ki rani

Caved in

With the remarkable Chhoti by her side, bharati motwani is able to navigate through Chambal’s dacoit-infested forests while she searches for caves etched with paintings that date back to the Upper Mesolithic era.

Chhoti is the junior bahu of a Rajput family, descendants of minor royals that had settled in the scrub-forested tracts of Chambal some 500 years ago. She’s a small slip of a woman in her forties, not very educated, and mostly wrapped out of sight in the folds of a printed nylon sari; retreating even further into it when in the acid presence of her mother-in-law. She lives in a few rooms of a crumbling old fortress surrounded by miles of uninhabited, inhospitable terrain. She lives with her old parents-in-law, and a husband who spends his days in a puja room practicing obscure meditations. Chhoti has no children and must compensate for that by being general slave and dogsbody about the fort.

I met her while travelling in the area, in search of prehistoric wall paintings in cave-sites along River Asan. This wild, dacoit-infested outpost in Central India offers no shelter to the traveller, so we were guests of Choti’s father-in-law, the old raja sahib. Data, as he is called by the few ragged villagers who live just below the ramparts, is a large man who speaks in a low, muffled growl that filters incomprehensibly through a mass of bushy white facial hair. Data rumbled into his moustache, and I gathered that, for want of any other guide, Chhoti had been assigned to lead us to the caves.

So we set off in our Toyota Qualis, with Chhoti and an old shepherd of the Gadariya tribe. Soon, we turned off the road, such as it was, to drive through the trackless badlands for about an hour and a half. On her shoulder, Chhoti carried a gun almost as tall as herself, in case we bumped into dacoits, not an unlikely occurrence in these parts.

In her other hand, she carried an umbrella and a steel tiffin-carrier of pickle, sabji and parathas that she had made at dawn. She still had hands to spare, to keep her pallu pulled firmly over her head. She guided us unerringly, weaving through the thorny scrub, finding markers where we could see nothing but hillocks and bushes. We drove till it grew too rocky to take the Qualis. We left it at a spot where, the Gadariya informed us, just two days before, dacoits had transacted a ransom settlement for a kidnapping. “They won’t kill you if you behave and pay up on time,” he reassured us.

Adventures afoot

From that point on, the way was steep and mountainous and we slip-slid on our bottoms down along a waterfall that emptied into the Asan. Chhoti negotiated the slippery algae-covered rocks in her plastic slippers, lifting her sari just a fraction to reveal bright silver anklets and scarlet toenails. Wielding gun, tiffin, and umbrella, the pallu slipped not an inch as she negotiated the steep, rocky ravine, sure-footed as a goat. After 45 minutes of this, we reached the caves where huge hives of killer bees hung from the rocks above.

Chhoti apologetically requested us to be very quiet, for sudden noise could provoke a potentially fatal bee-attack. Dacoits too often sheltered in these caves, and their campfires had blackened some of the cave paintings, she said, apologising again for their inconsiderateness. To make up for these shortcomings, she promptly laid out a picnic on the rocks, gathered some leaves and twigs, and miraculously materialised cups of hot tea.

We spent the next few hours photographing these undiscovered cave paintings, some of them dating to the Upper Mesolithic, the same antiquity as the rock art at Bhimbetka.

Towards late afternoon, we made our way back to the Qualis, but scarcely had we started driving that, completely without warning, the Qualis sank halfway up its wheels in slushy red mud — for it had rained the day before. The Chambal Valley is notorious for these hidden swamps, but it sent poor Chhoti into an agony of self-recrimination for not having spotted the slushy patch. She expertly broke off branches and sliced sheaves of elephant-grass with a knife she pulled out from somewhere, dexterously wedging them under the wheels. But the harder the Qualis strained, the deeper it furrowed itself, roiling up the mud and sending up sprays of slush. Soon, we were sunk up to the chassis.

So there we were, miles away from habitation, no cell-phone signal, in the middle of dacoit-infested country, and just an  hour of daylight between us and the hyenas who roamed the scrub in hungry packs. And just when it looked like it couldn’t get worse, it started to rain. We abandoned the Qualis and started to walk. Soon we were wading through thick, soupy mud in pouring rain, praying that we wouldn’t step on a viper, flushed out from its hole by the rain. Chhoti led the way, her chappals making sucking sounds every time she pulled them out of the slush.

But on her demure little head, the pallu shifted nary a whit. Soon it was night, and we walked in an exhausted stupor for what felt like hours, our diminishing torch-light barely picking out Chhoti’s floral-print sari as we followed her blindly. She navigated our direction by instinct and by the few stars that sometimes appeared through the clouds. At some point in the night, we hit the road, and after a while a tractor came by. We hitched a ride and rattled back towards the fort, hanging on by our finger-nails to keep from bouncing off. I swear, that through all of this, that pallu did not slip.