The beginnings of imagination: the rock paintings of Kerala
In Kerala, I got to see my first rock paintings inside Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary. I wrote a short blog about it on my Wordpress, with a few pictures:
Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary is on the rain-shadow side of the Western Ghats in Kerala, further east from the rolling tea gardens of Munnar, and just beyond the ancient town of Marayoor. This entire region is a prehistoric treasure trove: in 1974, a Kerala state archaeologist S. Padmanabhan Thampi discovered a ‘cluster of ancient caves’ in this valley, noted for ‘rock paintings and burial chambers’ — dolmens or ‘muniyaras‘ in Malayalam. The findings were historic. The burial chambers dated back to nearly 100 BCE, while the rock paintings went back even further, to the Mesolithic Period (between 10,000 to 400 BCE). Archaeologist Nihildas N.’s PhD thesis suggests that the various megalithic sites and rock shelters in this part of Kerala cover a time period between 4,000 BCE-1,000 CE, with the paintings showing a gradual cultural evolution in form as well as in their depictions:
