A natural cavern with a profusion of
ancient rock art, contemporary tribal paintings and even modern-day graffiti
has been discovered near Mavadaippu tribal village, about 7 km from the
Kadamparai hydel power station in Tamil Nadu's Coimbatore district.
K.T. Gandhirajan, art
historian and explorer, P. Manivannan, K. Natarajan and a group of students
from the Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai, made the discovery on May
17.
They also found about a
kilometre away from the site a number of dolmens, called "muni aria"
in Tamil, in four different locations in the backdrop of the Anamalai hills.
The dolmens are in square, rectangular and even round shapes. Some have
compartments inside.
According to Mr.
Gandhirajan, who is a post-graduate in Art History, "a spectacular feature
of the site is that the rock surface is an admixture of ancient rock art and
contemporary tribal paintings, showing continuity of tradition as it
were."
The paintings have been
done on a rock surface that is 40 feet long and 20 feet tall. He and other
experts put the date of the ancient rock paintings around 1500 B.C. These
paintings include a tiger with its mouth wide open, a deer with straight horns,
a porcupine, a wild boar, a peacock and elephants.
There are paintings of
marching men in anthropomorphic form within a circle.
Human figures aplenty
Below are also men in
marching form but not within a circle. There are scenes of an unidentified
animal chasing another, an elephant seizing a man with its trunk with another
man running after the elephant, etc.
Human figures are aplenty,
showing men fighting and dancing. A rare painting has a man in profile, with a
peculiar headgear. There is a glut of "mystic" designs and ancient
graffiti. A leit motif is the figure of a ladder made out of bamboo poles. Such
ladders are used even now to extract honey from beehives situated at heights
near the tribal villages. Mr. Gandhirajan said: "Constructing these
bamboo-ladders is an architecture itself. Building them is a secret. It is done
only at night. Non-community people will not be allowed to be present when
tribals build them. These ladders can be sometimes 200 feet tall." The
contemporary tribal paintings show a man wearing a tight coat that has
rectangular designs on it. He is seen with a raised right hand and his left
hand on the waist.
A drawing of a bus
indicates how the arrival of a bus there could be an exciting event. The
ancient rock art had been drawn using lime, white kaolin and even ash.
Recently, tribals had used
enamel to embellish some of these ancient paintings.
It was both on cue and by
accident that the group headed by Mr. Gandhirajan discovered this site. The
group had gone to Puliyankandi village near the Aliyar reservoir to conduct a
workshop for children belonging to local tribes on art and heritage and rock
art sites found nearby. When the children were asked whether they knew of cave
paintings, a girl told them that she had seen paintings of elephants on a
massive boulder near her village but she could not give the exact location.
Inquiries led the group to Valpaarai and then Mavadaippu, 45 km away. While
some of the dolmens that the group came across have fallen down, others are in
good shape. There are spacious dolmens with compartments inside. Tribals
believe that the dolmens with compartments were meant for chieftains of yore.
The centrepiece is a big dolmen that has a short "compound wall" running
around the wall is made of stones with packing.
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