A wealth of impressive ancient monuments lie within a couple of hours’ journey from Bhopal. To the northeast, the third-century BC stupas at Sanchi are an easy day-trip. Its peaceful setting also makes an ideal base for visits to more stupas at Satdhara or Udaigiri’s rock-cut caves and the nearby Column of Heliodorus at Besnagar. South towards Hoshangabad and the Narmada Valley, the prehistoric cave paintings at Bhimbetka can be visited in a day by bus.
More about India
Find out more
From a distance, the smooth-sided hemispherical object that appears on a hillock overlooking the main train line at Sanchi, 46km northeast of Bhopal, has the surreal air of an upturned satellite dish. In fact, the giant stone mound stands as testimony to a much older means of communing with the cosmos. Quite apart from being India’s finest Buddhist monument, the Great Stupa is one of the earliest religious structures in the Subcontinent. It presides over a complex of ruined temples and monasteries that collectively provide a rich and unbroken record of the development of Buddhist art and architecture from the faith’s first emergence in central India during the third century BC, until it was eventually squeezed out by the resurgence of Brahmanism during the medieval era.
Unlike other famous Buddhist centres in eastern India and Nepal, Sanchi has no known connection with Buddha himself. It first became a place of pilgrimage when the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who married a woman from nearby Besnagar, erected a polished stone pillar and brick-and-mortar stupa here midway through the third century BC. The complex was enlarged by successive dynasties, but after the eclipse of Buddhism, Sanchi lay deserted and overgrown until its rediscovery in 1818 by General Taylor of the Bengal Cavalry. In the following years a swarm of heavy-handed treasure hunters invaded the site, yet the explorer Sir Alexander Cunningham was the only one to find anything more than rubble; in 1851, he unearthed two soapstone relic boxes, containing bone fragments and bearing the names of two of Buddha’s most noted followers, Sariputra and Maha-Mogalanasa. Historians equated the discovery with “finding the graves of Saints Peter and Paul”. The find transformed Sanchi, for centuries neglected, into a Buddhist place of pilgrimage once again.
By the 1880s, amateur archeologists had left the ruins in a sorry state. Deep gouges gaped from the sides of stupas 1 and 2, a couple of ceremonial gateways had completely collapsed and much of the masonry was plundered by local villagers. Restoration work made little impact until 1912, when the jungle was hacked away, the main stupas and temples rebuilt, lawns and trees planted and a museum erected to house what sculpture had not been shipped off to Delhi or London.
The ruins of ancient Besnagar, known locally as Khambaba, are in a tiny village down the main road from Vidisha. During the Mauryan and Shunga empires, between the third and first centuries BC, a thriving provincial capital overlooked the confluence of the Beas and Betwa rivers. The emperor Ashoka himself was once governor here and even married a local banker’s daughter. Now, a few mounds and some scattered pieces of masonry are all that remain. Yet one small monument makes the short detour worthwhile. The sixteen-sided stone pillar in an enclosed courtyard, known as the Column of Heliodorus, was erected in 113 BC by a Bactrian-Greek envoy from Taxila, the capital city of Gandhara (now the northwest frontier region of Pakistan), who converted to the local Vaishnavite cult during his long diplomatic posting here. The shaft, dedicated to Krishna’s father Vasudeva, was originally crowned with a statue of Vishnu’s vehicle Garuda.
A modest collection of ruined temples and fifth-century rock-cut caves stand just 6km west of Vidisha at Udaigiri. The caves, many decorated by Hindu and Jain mendicants, lie scattered around a long, thin outcrop of sandstone surrounded by wheat fields.
Once you’ve left Vidisha, a left turn just after crossing the Betwa River leads along a gently undulating tree lined avenue for 2–3km. As it approaches the hillside, the road takes a sharp left turn towards the village. Stop here, at the base of the near-vertical rock face, to climb a steep flight of steps to Cave 19, which has worn reliefs of gods and demons around the doorways, and a Jain cave temple on the northern edge of the ridge. Ask the chowkidar to unlock the doors for you.
The site’s pièce de résistance, a 4m-high image of the boar-headed hero Varaha, stands carved into Cave 5. Vishnu adopted this guise to rescue the earth-goddess, Prithvi, from the churning primordial ocean. Varaha’s left foot rests on a naga king wearing a hood of thirteen cobra heads, while the river goddesses Ganga and Yamuna hold water vessels on either side. In the background you can see Brahma and Agni, the Vedic fire-god. The scene is seen as an allegory of the emperor Chandra Gupta II’s conquest of northern India.
If you’re not pushed for time, it’s worth popping into Vidisha’s small museum for a quick look. The majority of its pieces, such as Kubera Yaksha, the 3m, pot-bellied male fertility figure in the hallway, are second-century Hindu artefacts unearthed at Besnagar.