Serendipity at Somapura

The author traverses beyond the temple, though that region was full of waste, overgrown wild plants, and creepers.

My mother’s great-grandfather, Major General Richard Dobbs, spent more than thirty years in the Colonial administration... there was a village Dobbspet named after him... villagers showed us a large granite block, set into the earth near the road which they swore blind was my ancestor’s tomb.’ These few lines caught my attention as I was reading ‘A Raindrop in the Ocean: The Life of a Global Adventurer’ (2017) authored by Michael Dobbs-Higginson.

Though Dobbspet has been a transit point for my treks towards Shivagange, Pavagada and Nijagal, I had never explored this village. I scanned through scores of archived documents, including ‘Reminiscences of Life in Mysore, South Africa and Burmah’, an autobiography by Major General Stewart Richard Dobbs (1882).

Mentions of Dobbspet were found in the ‘Mysore and Coorg’ Gazetteer volume 2 by B L Rice (1876). He mentions the place as ‘Sompura or Dobbsept’ in 1897, and locate it thus: ‘the Bangalore Tumkur road runs through Nelamangala and Sompura, where it meets the road from Kolar via D Ballapur’. As part of the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS), a project that aimed to survey all of the Indian sub-continent, the area was given the benchmark BM50/57G,  at ‘the stone step at the East door of Travellers’ Bungalow at Dobbspet’, according to Col S G Burrard’s (1910) records. 

After joining the Mysore Commission in 1834 as an assistant under the Madras Residency, Dobbs soon became the Commissioner of the Chittledroog division (now Chitradurga). While the Chief Commissioner ‘did not see much use in making roads in a country where there was no wheel conveyance’, Dobbs was enthusiastic and confident that building roads would lead to the introduction of carts.

In his very first year as Commissioner, he traced a trunk road from ‘Toomkoor to Davangerry by Chittledroog’, a distance of 127 miles. He involved convicts in the road-making process and built 600 miles of roads. He abolished the plough tax and many absurd taxes like the haircut tax for pilgrims and the temple worship tax.

The journey 

With a desire to locate the Traveller’s Bungalow (TB), the GTS benchmark, the Tomb of Dobbs and other buildings, I alighted from the passenger train at Dobbspet station. Nearby, I observed three very small temples with ancient idols. 

When asked about the Traveller’s Bungalow and Dobbs’ tomb, many senior villagers expressed remorse that the structures were demolished during the widening of National and State Highways. They recalled the time when Dobbs’ relatives visited the village in the 1980s. The TB had been used as a government school where some of them had studied. The present KSRTC bus stand is built in that exact spot.

At the Maramma temple, the locals suggested I visit the Someshwara temple. A strange intuition made me traverse beyond the temple, though that region was full of waste, overgrown wild plants, and creepers. Between those creepers, I observed a stone beam and trudged through very slowly and carefully amidst thorny bushes and wetlands. 

It was a serendipitous moment for me. I spotted seven beautifully carved hero stones, inside a ruined mantapa. Their very existence was hitherto unknown even to the seniors I had spoken to. Because of the jungle-like overgrowth and the fear of getting bitten by snakes or other reptiles, no one had explored this side. 

At this site, there was once a temple honouring local heroes and women who gave up their lives through the practice of sati. What is unique is some of the heroes are depicted with a shield in one hand, a rare sight that I had only seen in a few hero stones at the Sampigehalli Beereshwara Swamy temple in Bengaluru.

Though I felt a bit sad after not finding any of the heritage structures, I returned happily, having seen the hero stones and what appeared to be an inscription on one of them. The excitement I felt as an ordinary person, though on a small scale, was similar to Captain John Smith’s feelings when he accidentally discovered the Ajanta Caves during a tiger hunting party in 1819.