Protecting the unprotected

The first victim of launching development projects, particularly all over Karnataka, unmistakably is the row of full-grown trees, planted by the region’s nameless Good Samaritans of yesteryears and nurtured by later generations, also of a few decades. More victims have joined the trees on their way into the pages of history and vanished in the memory of people. Lakes that were thoughtfully created and taken care of zealously for centuries, the result of rainwater harvesting, much talked about nowadays, have joined several species of the denizens of the forest that have witnessed extinction. Converting lake beds into residential layouts and construction of dwellings, commercial buildings and roads is the face of development and economic prosperity gobbling life-saving resources of water bodies and fertile land that was used to raise food crops. Next comes the lifestyle of the land’s people that has endured for eons yielding place to compulsions of modern lifestyle driven by technology that has proved to be a double-edged sword, first by raising pace of people’s life and later proving to be a curse, plastic menace hogging limelight in a negative sense.

The realisation of the extent of damage that lopsided development matching the demands of the expanding population, particularly in urban spaces, and excessive dependence on products of technology, such as motorised vehicles have wrought has dawned rather too late, leaving the people at large all at seas as it were, clueless about how to retrace the old order.

While the narratives in the history of the land are often seen as suspect with reference to facts, its customs, folklore, edicts, sculptures, words passing from one generation to the next, proverbs and idioms born out of life’s events in the past have sustained to this day as our legacy portraying the land’s culture, now morphed. The exercise to map and document unprotected monuments across the State, just disclosed in the media, to be taken up by the Department of Archaeology, Museums and Heritage, with the objective of tracing their history and antiquity, apart from conserving them for posterity, may throw better light on the life of the land’s people in a distant past. The pilot project of the exercise, carried out in Mysuru taluk, is learnt to have revealed the existence of about 650 sculptures, hero stones (Veeragallu), temples and kalyanis (ponds).

Karnataka reportedly hosts 844 protected monuments with significant architectural features but the unprotected ones are vulnerable to disappearance due to encroachments, land-grabbing and development pressures. Mapping the latter ones and documentation, an enormous exercise augurs well for their protection even at this late stage. Also, inputs from long time residents of respective regions into the project can contribute to the credence of the information from the project.