Barabar Caves
Carved into a range of granite hills in the hot, barren backcountry of Bihar, in Northeast India, is a group of caves called the Barabar Caves. There are seven caves and they are small and modest; among India’s more than 1200 cave temples, especially the profusely sculpted and painted masterpieces at Ajanta and Ellora, the Barabar Caves are hardly worth mentioning, nevermind visiting. But they happen to be a bookend in the history of Indian architecture: with inscriptions from around 3rd century BC, they are the country’s earliest example of rock-cut architecture, indeed the oldest standing construction of any kind in India. But, while their antiquity certainly makes them worth seeing, I wanted to visit the caves for another reason: they are a major backdrop to EM Forster’s Passage to India.
Basically all of the drama and conflict in Forster’s novel are brought on by a visit to the caves. Dr. Aziz, an Indian man, invites Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore, the fiance and mother of a high-ranking British civil servant, on a picnic to the caves. This attempt at a rare Indian-British friendship ends in disaster. The older woman’s experience in one cave triggers a sort of anti-epiphany that ‘undermines her hold on life,’ leads to her nervous breakdown and eventually to her death. The younger woman flees from another cave traumatized, believing herself victim of an attempted rape. Dr. Aziz is blamed for the assault, causing his public disgrace.
From the moment Forster introduces the caves, it is clear that they will play a significant role in the story; his descriptions of Barabar (which he calls Marabar) are sweeping, expansive, bordering on grandiose. ‘They are like nothing else in the world,’ he writes, ‘a glimpse of them makes the breath catch… they rob infinity and eternity of their vastness.’ He ascribes them an eerie, even supernatural quality, that seems to confound the author himself. ‘Uncanny,’ ‘spiritual,’ he calls them. ‘…the [caves] are unfrequented, as if pilgrims, who generally seek the extraordinary, had here found too much of it.’ They may even be haunted: when British officials flip their car while driving on the road to Barabar, they blame the wreck on a ‘savage pig,’ a ‘ghost,’ a ‘specter.’ Above all, the caves are imbued with a vague sense of tension, disturbance and foreboding. In the novel’s opening pages, Dr. Aziz warns Mrs. Moore, the elder British lady, against walking alone at night: ‘Bad characters… and leopards may come over from the Marabar Hills. Snakes also.’
Which is why I couldn’t help but laugh when everyone I talked to in Gaya, the small town about 30 km to the south of the caves, listed similar vague threats about the caves. The manager of my hotel told me that going to see the Barabar Caves was ‘impossible.’ He said huffily that they were in Naxalite territory and therefore I should forget it. ‘Impossible,’ he said again. From the way he said Naxalite they might’ve been a ring of dark horsemen from Tolkein. In reality, they were a group of communists at odds with the state government’s laws on land reform. I knew that Bihar was one of the more unruly states in India – a British ex-pat I met called it ‘the Wild West.’ And people had told me about the Naxalites, but I didn’t believe they would ambush someone taking a few pictures of some abandoned caves. Furthermore, the manager and I had just argued over the price of a room. He seemed to be searching for a way to disappoint me.
I walked into town and asked the taxi foreman at the train station if he might be able to help. He was a short, rotund man, shaped not unlike the grapes he ate by the handful while he listened to my request. When I finished, he nodded and started making phone calls. No mention of Naxalites, which I figured was a good sign. Soon, a man in a gray taxi driver’s uniform came into his small, poorly lit office and the two of them had a conversation in Hindi, during which the driver continually shook his head ‘no.’ Finally, the foreman dismissed the man with a quick wave of his hand. When the driver stood up to leave, he sent his chair sliding across the concrete floor. The only word I had understood in the conversation was ‘Holi,’ the name of a festival that was about to begin in Gaya. With the driver gone, the foreman explained that unfortunately a trip to the caves was impossible for the time being. Drivers, he explained, refused to go near Barabar during Holi.
I had learned what little I knew about Holi from people on the train to Gaya. I knew it involved people painting each other’s faces with colored dye and that it was one of the only times of the year when it wasn’t taboo to drink alcohol. From what I had heard, during Holi, rural areas like those surrounding Gaya revert to a kind of anarchy. ‘In Holi,’ said a kid I met on the train in this sort of foreboding whisper, ‘people go mad.’ It’s hard to guage the meaning of the word ‘mad’ in India. On the one hand, India does not have a drinking culture and this boy could have been equating ‘mad’ with ‘drunk.’ On the other hand, pretty much any ‘madness’ I had witnessed at any point in my life paled in comparison with what I had seen over a month in India: Hindu ceremonies with people convulsing on the floor, speaking in tongues; transvestites challenging men to fistfights on the train; buses cruising at 50 mph with twenty or thirty men piled on the roof, holding onto the railings for dear life; policemen in the street beating men unconscious with wooden staffs. ‘Mad,’ it seemed, could mean anything in India. The taxi foreman explained that driving through the villages near Barabar was risking a cracked windshield, or a slashed tire. “During Holi, people in the villages…” he paused. “They are not thinking.” Forster’s caves are haunted by ‘bad characters,’ ‘leopards’ and ‘snakes.’ I had to contend with science fiction communists and drunk farmers in facepaint.
The next day, Andrew and I found the streets of Gaya full of purple, green, red, blue people. The dyes they used were vivid and people painted not only their faces, but their whole bodies. We were the only two Westerners in town and before long we were followed by a trail of multi-colored children. There is something priceless about a kid painted head-to-toe in turquoise gawking at a pair of white Westerners like we were the freaks. Occasionally, people popped out of sidestreets to smear our faces with paint and wish us ‘Happy Holi!’ Children splashed dye on passersby from the rooftops. Lots of laughing, whooping, singing, embracing. Every time a group of Indians kids doused us, they would watch our faces, wondering if we would get angry: ‘don’t be angry, please. It’s because of Holi!’ While the celebration in Gaya was very innocent, it wasn’t hard to see how this festival might get out of hand. In Gaya, they had doubled the police force to keep people under control. On the train down to meet up with me in Gaya, Andrew encountered packs of drunk teenagers jumping on trains at each station, yelling at passengers, pelting them with rocks or rotten vegetables or cow patties. An older man hit with a rock, bleeding from his head.
See more Holi pictures here.
When Holi had subsided, a driver agreed to take Andrew and I out to the caves. In Passage to India, Dr. Aziz and the British ladies travel to the caves by elephant; we took an SUV with a busted suspension. For all the drama of the our journey’s potential deterrents, the trip was uneventful. We left the disordered, paint-spattered streets of Gaya, followed a two-lane road north across mostly uninhabited grass plains. Long-trunked palm trees lined the road. It was on this road that the Jeep of British officials in Forster’s book was knocked over by a savage ghost pig. This was also, apparently, where the Naxalites roamed. Andrew and I watched out the windows for some kind of black magic bandits that would do justice to that name. All we saw were kids playing cricket on tracts of rust-colored dirt, men in dhotis carrying sacks of grain across flat fields, and the occasional obelisk-shaped brick kiln, with smoke stains circling the top lip. Eventually, we turned off the main drag, down an unmaintained road, nothing more than a long string of potholes. On either side unfolded stretches of scrubby, half-scorched fields. We drove through villages of crude thatched-roof huts on grids of dirt paths. Men walking through fields with hay bales on their backs. Old bearded gurus in rags with colored puja marks on their foreheads, staring at us from the shade of huts. Kids shitting in ditches by the side of the road. We could still see the colorful residue of Holi dye splattered on the outer walls of cottages. The villagers seemed peaceful, certainly not the type to ransack a passing taxi. Then again, maybe they were just tired after a Holi spent pillaging and marauding.
All at once, we saw a range of spiny rock hills silhouetted on the horizon. They looked alien, rising at sharp angles incongruous with the rest of the landscape, which was subdued, calm. These were the Barabar Hills.
Ten minutes later, we were at the foot of the hills, greeting Nudu, the smiling, heavy-browed Indian man who would be our guide. He could say ‘cave’ and ‘beautiful’ and not much else. Draped in loose white cloth and headwrap, Nudu set out ahead of us in the mid-morning sun, leading us up a stone stairway that snaked through the boulder-ridden landscape. Within a few minutes, we were outside of the first cave.
Five of the seven caves at Barabar were cut from one massive, granite mound. This half-buried gray rock was three hundred feet long, by thirty wide, by thirty high. The formation was so different from everything around it, its presence appeared to be a mistake. While the surrounding rock hills were jagged, jutting out at raw angles, with edges crude and serrated, the hill into which the caves were carved was rounded, smooth, worn, weathered, refined. It seemed more ancient than its neighbors, more wise, if one could apply that attribute to a rock. Forster calls this mound ‘the flesh of the sun’s flesh’ and ‘older than all spirit.’ The boulder looked to have spent an age at the bottom of an ocean. In fact, the rock’s smooth elongated shape recalled nothing other than an enormous gray whale, swept up and deposited among these hills by some prehistoric tidal wave.
Nudu lead us into the first cave. The entrance was an almost perfectly regular rectangle, about six by three feet. The opening, bare of any inscription or carving to the point where it almost seemed like another contour of the stone, opened into a chamber of pitch darkness. Nudu lit two candles and handed one to each of us. When our eyes adjusted, we saw a chamber perhaps thirty feet long, fifteen feet wide by twleve feet high. A hall with rounded, arched ceilings created essentially a half barrel shape. An altar of some sort sat at one end. We noticed that the pinkish granite walls had been polished to a high gleam. Forster writes: “There is little to see, and no eye to see it, until the visitor arrives for his five minutes, and strikes a match. Immediately another flame rises in the depths of the rock and moves towards the surface like an imprisoned spirit; the walls of the ciruclar chamber have been most marvellously polished. The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot, because one of them breathes air, the other stone.” Indeed, to stand before the wall holding a candle created an almost perfect reflection, as though in a mirror. Sitting in this first cave, all I could think about was the devotion required to make such an excavation from solid rock, to keep the dimensions so uniform, and to polish every surface to such a shine. Especially with whatever primitive tools they had over 2000 years ago.
According to James Fergusson and James Burgess, co-authors of the most comprehensive study on Indian cave temples to-date, a massive tome from the late 1800s that I had been lugging around for weeks in my backpack, these caves were constructed under the order of emperor Ashoka (264 BC – 255 BC). Ashoka the Great had been a ruler infamous for volatilty and ruthlessness, the type to execute subjects and family members without provocation. Then, after a particularly bloody battle, he had some kind of epiphany, converted to Buddhism, became a vegetarian and began traveling around India planting trees, and building monuments to Buddha. The Barabar caves were commisioned by Ashoka as retreats for Buddhist suddhas, or ascetic holy men, to come and meditate. 
Nudu led us out of the first cave and around to the other side of the granite mound. The door to the second cave was identical to that of the first: rectangular, sharp-edged, leading into an interior chamber, which was smaller, but of similar character and shape to the first cave. We ran our hands along the interior walls, smooth and polished like those of the first. Outside of the polished areas, we could see rake-like scratching left from the original excavation tools. When our eyes adjusted, Nudu pointed out a smaller, circular chamber connected to the main hall. As soon as we entered the small hollow, the sound of our footsteps reverberated along the walls, but not until Nudu made a sharp barking noise were we aware of the intensity of the echo.
In the novel, this echo brings on Mrs. Moore’s existential crisis. She describes it: ‘a terrifying echo… entirely devoid of distinction. Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls intil it is absorbed into the roof. Buom is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or ‘bou-oum’ or ‘ou-boum’ – utterly dull. Hope, politeness, or the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce ‘buom’.’ We stood in the small chamber for a good twenty minutes, testing the echo. To everything we said, the response was indeed deep and dull, a bellow, an elongated thump. We timed the length of a reverberation: nearly eight seconds (see the video on Flickr). Saddhu men meditating here would have been able to maintain a single om interminably. I thought of an arched chamber in Grand Central Station, where a whisper spoken into one corner will travel across the face of the domed ceiling and be heard perfectly by someone standing in the far corner. But the acoustics in the chamber at Grand Central created a delicate, subtle ring; here, at the Barabar Caves, the echo was almost brutish, overwhelming, drowning out any distinction in the sounds which created it. He goes on: ‘Pathos, piety, courage – they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value… If one had spoken vileness in that place or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same – ‘ou-buom’…’ In the monotony of these reverberating sounds, Mrs. Moore sees the triviality of religion: ‘”Let there be light,” “it is finished” only amounted to “buom.”’
The remaining caves were similar to the first two, though without the remarkable echo. The largest cave in the group, called Loma Kasha, had a simple façade carved with elephants and an inscription apparently praising Emperor Ashoka. Other than that. nothing extraordinary. After leaving the last cave, we tried and failed to have a number of conversations with Nudu – one about the inscriptions, one about meditation – but recieved only head wobbles in response. Eventually, we left the strange, smooth granite mound, made our way back down to the car and headed back to Gaya.
See the rest of the photos here.
