Despite being a ruined wonderland on par with Palmyra or Angkor Wat, Hampi's fate for centuries was that of being overlooked.
That changed from the late 1980s when millions of visitors began flocking to this rustic, yet accessible landscape. With the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, however, Hampi has once again receded into the background.
A tidy, two and three-laned highway, built in the last three years, weaves its way to the ancient town, cutting down travel time from Bengaluru to four hours. But the seat of the defunct Vijayanagara empire has never felt so removed from modern India as it has been in the era of the novel coronavirus.
For the last 20 years, the place has been a reliable destination of choice for tourists from around the world and India. However, the battalions of tourists which once crawled over its verdant, rocky landscapes have largely vanished. In their absence, the sprawling monuments are quiet, quasi-devoid of the cacophony of voices that was once a hallmark. Locals say that Hampi is poorer because of this.
Ironically, at the same time, the phenomenon of “revenge tourism” is real enough, even if the numbers of renegades are small. Dozens of cars bearing Maharashtra and Telangana licence plates are parked at hotels and at the monuments. A duo of middle-aged men pull up in an SUV at the Kamalapura lake during sunset. The car has Madhya Pradesh plates.
“You guys are travelling too?” he asks, before launching into a question about the availability of hotel rooms.
“We made this trip on the fly without much thought,” he adds, if in explanation.
Yet, even these impromptu, if not accidental tourists, are unable to infuse vibrancy into the local economy. K Basappa, vice-president of the Hampi Tour Guides Association explains that nine out of 10 tourists prefer to visit the monuments on their own, wrapping up their visits in 30 minutes to an hour. “Nobody is really here to take in the history of the place or spend money,” he says.
From the perspective of the locals, these rejections are all the more painful because they are made by those tourists still willing to brave Covid-19 to show up at the monuments.
Waiting in vain
None has been worse-hit by this than the scores of tour guides, rickshaw drivers and sugarcane juice sellers who wait in vain for customers, desperation written over their faces. Their plight is the same as those dependent on the tourist trade at locales across the world: economic austerity prompted by a decline in tourist footfall, exacerbated by the reduced financial conditions of the tourists themselves.
Band of young men, following their fathers and uncles into the “guiding” profession, trail after a smattering of tourists from Maharashtra, Telangana and Karnataka.
“Every day, we wait. Some of us haven’t had a commission or made a sale of guide materials in months. There is nothing else I know to do,” says a young man on the hill overlooking the Virupaksha Temple.
He is not alone. In a way, their inability to drum up work betrays how out-of-sync they are to the requirements of the globalised, modern tourist. Rickshaw drivers offer trips to tourists who have come by car. Boys try to sell guidebooks and postcards to visitors who have long gone digital. A boy of 11 attempts to sell sugarcane soda to visitors carting around bottles of Coca-Cola.
When all this desperate scramble for tourist money falls apart, it makes some mean-spirited and angry. The little sugarcane seller’s father, a short, surly man glowers at his son, wallowing in his inability to fetch customers as he himself had failed.
Tourist deficit
According to the Department of Tourism, greater numbers of tourists could potentially redress these problems, but at the moment, a tourist deficit is one affecting all inland locations. In Ballari district alone, 13.42 million people thronged 14 tourist locations in 2018-19, including the Tungabhadra dam and the Daroji Bear Sanctuary. These included 70,839 tourists from other countries. In the 2020-21 fiscal year, tourism numbers had dwindled to five million visitors, including 18,904 international tourists.
But from May 2021 onwards, there have been no international travellers at all and the number of domestic travellers is about one percent of pre-Covid numbers. With international tourists being the biggest draw for local and governmental revenue, the Tourism Department sends out instructions to the staff at monuments to ensure that foreigner travellers are strictly charged the “outsider” fare. This results in some maddening situations.
At the Vijaya Vittala Temple, which is flanked on all sides by rocky, vacant hillscapes, I and my travelling companion, a Bengalurean of Chinese extraction, are mistaken for internationals. Hassling begins over our domestic tickets until we can verify our “Indian” identities.
At the sprawling Royal Enclosure, my travelling companion is outrightly barred from entry and purchasing a domestic ticket because the ticketing staff refuse to acknowledge his Karnataka driver’s licence.
But these are quibbles compared to the grandeur of Hampi. On a wide dirt road leading to the magnificent, horned temple gateway of the Vittala Temple, flanked as it is by the granite-pillared remnants of a long-vanished marketplace, there is the exhilaration of discovery.
If this elation can be raised in the hearts of a casual, modern visitor, how must Colonel Colin MacKenzie, the Scottish soldier of the East India Company, who “rediscovered” the ruins in 1799, have felt?
Undoubtedly euphoria. Over two centuries later and even when desolate, Hampi has lost none of its power to elicit awe and wonder.