Bastar The Lost Heritage

One thing I cannot do is sing. Yet there was music in the air as the last dregs of the city of Calcutta’s hutments thinned out and the Grand Trunk Road opened its welcoming arms to me, leading me into the most exciting assignment of my life - the assignment to adventure. The adventure involved driving into areas where no roads and motor vehicles had ever penetrated, crossing un-bridged rivers, anthropology and mythology, stumbling across ancient temples lost within the jungles, exploring jungles full of bears, bison, birds, deer, leopards, antelope, tigers and primitive tribal people, and meeting tribal women in their traditional costumes and well-groomed tribal men with their long shining hair and turbans, armed with spears, bows and arrows.

The melody I heard and felt was from my perfectly tuned, thoroughly reconditioned World War II US Army jeep that I was driving. In those distant days in 1959 there was hardly any traffic and five miles would pass before I came across another automobile. My jeep was a Willys-II, the best, most compact four-wheel drive off-road vehicle in the world and the U.S. Army’s final selection. Unfortunately Willys had a small factory, and so the US Government split with the agreement with Willys. The bulk production of jeeps was instead done by Ford, who had vast facilities for mass production. The jeeps by Willys and Ford were otherwise identical, yet it gave me great pride and pleasure to own an ‘original’.

I had to reach Raipur, a town by rail about one-third the distance between Calcutta and Bombay, in three nights. In those years, many bridges and shortcuts had not been made yet, and so the journey was much longer, rougher and dustier than it is today. At Raipur I had to pick up Mr. Ajit Mookerjee, the Director of the Indian Institute of Art in Industry, which had its office and galleries on Park Street in Calcutta. This Institute was patronised by His Highness, the Maharaja of Burdwan, and received financial support from the Governm ent, private companies and industries. Ajit was arriving by train and we would proceed by road, southward through the plains and then up through the numerous hairpin bends of the precipice to reach the north-east of the Deccan Plateau from where sprawled the vast jungle district called “Bastar”.