Sanchi

Sanchi's story begins with the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who in the 3rd century BC chose this low sandstone hill — then near the prosperous town of Vidisha, home of his wife Devi, a merchant's daughter who according to tradition was born at Sanchi — for a brick stupa over relics of the Buddha and a polished pillar bearing his edicts. It was a monastic centre rather than a place from the Buddha's own life, supported by donations from Vidisha's merchants and guilds, whose names are recorded in short inscriptions on the railings.

Over the following centuries the hill grew into a complex of stupas, monasteries and temples. In the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, under the Shunga dynasty and their successors, the original stupa was encased in stone and doubled in size, a stone railing was added, and the four gateways, or toranas, were carved with scenes from the Buddha's lives in which he appears only as a footprint, a wheel, a tree or an empty throne. Smaller stupas held relics of his disciples, and under the Guptas in the 5th century the little flat-roofed Temple 17 was built. Monasteries and temples continued to be added until about the 12th century.

As Buddhism declined in India the hill was abandoned, and the monuments stood forgotten and overgrown until a British officer, General Taylor, recorded them in 1818. Amateur digging followed, and Alexander Cunningham removed the relic caskets of Stupa 3 in 1851. Between 1912 and 1919 John Marshall of the Archaeological Survey of India restored the site to roughly its present form, and in 1989 it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Relics of Sariputta and Moggallana, handed back by Britain in 1947, were enshrined in 1952 in a new vihara on the hill built by the Maha Bodhi Society, which gave the site a renewed place in Buddhist pilgrimage.

Sanchi is a monument far more than it is a town, and its culture is shaped by that fact. For most of the year the hill belongs to archaeology — to students of early Indian art, who come for the gateways, and to tour groups from Bhopal — but it remains a living religious site. Monks and pilgrims from across the Buddhist world visit through the cool season, and at the annual Chethiyagiri Vihara festival in November the relics of the Buddha's two chief disciples are brought out of the modern vihara and shown to the crowds. The Maha Bodhi Society, which built the vihara, has long had a presence here.

The surrounding countryside is Hindu, Hindi-speaking and agricultural, part of the Malwa cultural region of Madhya Pradesh. Village festivals follow the farming year — Diwali after the monsoon harvest, Holi in spring — and Vidisha, the district town across the Betwa, has its own temples and mosques and a busier religious calendar. The relationship between the Buddhist hill and the Hindu plain around it is an old one; the Gupta rock shrines at nearby Udayagiri were carved while the monasteries on Sanchi hill were still in use.

Manners are those of small-town central India: conservative dress, modest behaviour between men and women in public, and a warm, curious welcome to foreign visitors who are still a novelty off the hill. On the monuments themselves, visitors are expected to walk around the stupas clockwise, as pilgrims do, and to treat the gateways as sacred art rather than climbing frames.

Sanchi is a nagar panchayat, a small town, with a population of 6,785 at the 2001 census. It consists of little more than a railway station, a bus stand, a bazaar street along the main road, a few guesthouses and the state tourism complex, with farmland and villages beyond. Most residents work in agriculture on the surrounding plateau or in the small service economy that the monuments support: guides, rickshaw drivers, tea-stall keepers, museum and site staff of the Archaeological Survey of India.

The day starts early. Farmers and traders are on the road to Vidisha before the heat; the first visitors reach the hill at opening time; chai stalls near the station do their main trade in the morning and again when the afternoon trains come through. By evening the hill is closed, the day-trippers have gone back to Bhopal, and the town's few restaurants serve simple vegetarian thalis to the handful of overnight guests. Power cuts are an ordinary part of rural life here, and the heat of May and June slows everything.

Vidisha, about 10 km away, is where people go for hospitals, higher education, shopping and work; it is many times Sanchi's size and tied to it by local trains and buses. Bhopal, the state capital, is within commuting range on the Vidisha line. The town's main current concern is the balance between the tourism that the World Heritage listing brings and the limited infrastructure — water, roads, accommodation — to serve it, together with the constant question of how to keep visitors from damaging the carved stone.

Sanchi has no cuisine of its own; it eats the food of the Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh, simply prepared. Breakfast is poha — flattened rice cooked with onion, turmeric, mustard seed and peanuts, served with a squeeze of lime — a dish for which Indore's version is especially known. Through the day the staple is the thali: dal, a seasonal vegetable, rice, roti and a little pickle, nearly always vegetarian in this town.

Snacks come from the chaat tradition of central India. Samosas and kachoris, fried pastries filled with spiced potato or lentils, are eaten with tamarind and mint chutneys; bhutte ka kees, grated corn cooked with spices, is a favourite of Indore's street food. Dal bafla, the Malwa cousin of Rajasthan's dal baati — wheat balls boiled, baked and dipped in ghee, eaten with dal — appears in the larger eating houses of Vidisha and Bhopal more than in Sanchi itself. Sweets include the milk-based pedas sold near temples and the syrup-soaked jalebis fried fresh each morning.

Drinking means tea above all: small glasses of sweet milky chai from stalls near the station and the hill road. Lassi and sugar-cane juice appear in the hot months. Alcohol is hard to find in the town and absent from the hill. Visitors who want wider choice — Bhopal's Mughal-influenced kebabs and biryani, or a proper restaurant meal — find it in the state capital, where the old city's eating streets are an attraction in themselves.