Rock markings in the heart of Delhi are clues to India’s pre-Ashokan past

Why should some small cup-like depressions and a maze of lines recently discovered on a rock in New Delhi matter? What do these markings mean and how can we decipher their date?

The large outcrop stands in the Central Ridge forest, not far from Sardar Patel Marg.

It was one that the writer and naturalist Pradip Krishen had visited innumerable times in past years, a big rock where he used to take his dogs for a walk and one whose patches of living stable biocrusts he had watched over the seasons as they turned from brown to green with the first rains.

The markings on the rock, though, had somehow escaped his attention. These he noticed for the first time when he went there some weeks ago with the activist Chetan Agrawal who had seen such cupules – so called because they are cup-like, round depressions – in the Haryana Aravalli hills on many occasions. The discovery is now in public domain and has been widely reported.

My purpose here is merely to explain why these are significant and deserve protection.

The cupules – as these photographs reveal – have been embedded in the rock in the form of small round depressions to make two sets of parallel lines. Ten such markings – five in each row – are visible in one instance while the second set is made up of twelve cupules arranged in parallel lines of six. A maze-like impression can also be seen on the rock.

The Central Ridge carvings are humanly created and I have seen this kind of cupule rock art in many parts of India. The challenge in every instance is to try to estimate their age.

One way of doing this is to look at associated human evidence. So, for instance, the cupules in a rock shelter in Daraki Chattan in the Chambal basin have been dated to the Palaeolithic because researchers found detached rocks with such markings in the lowest occupational level. It is imperative that the landscape around the Central Ridge rock be examined closely to see if there are stone tools or debitage or pottery that provides insights into the ancients who made these rock impressions.

The other possibility is to look for such markings in the same kind of formation and within a little distance of the Central Ridge.

In 1986, I was part of an exploration of prehistoric sites in the Delhi and Haryana Aravallis. Led by the archaeologist Dilip Chakrabarti, the exploration began with a visit to the minor rock edict of Emperor Ashoka at Srinivaspuri – the only in-situ message of the Mauryan ruler in Delhi.

The high outcrop in the middle of a residential colony today appears incongruous, but in the 1960s the area was still being developed. It was then that ancient writing on the rocks was discovered by a contractor who saved it by drawing the attention of the Archaeological Survey of India to it. A causal search in that area in 1986 revealed a stone microlith which suggested that the spot had been occupied much before Ashoka’s words were embedded into the rock there.

Some months ago, the prehistorians Malavika Chatterjee and Akash Srinivas of Ashoka University noticed a series of cupule marks – similar to those on the Central Ridge – on the very rock where Ashoka’s words were carved. These, as they pointed out, had also been mentioned by Harry Falk in his compendium on Ashokan inscriptions but what made their observations important was that they thought that some of these could be earlier than the emperor’s edict. So, when Pradip Krishen drew attention to the cupules on the Central Ridge, my first thought was to follow through on what they had suggested.

Neelam Singh of the Indian Institute of Heritage, who has a PhD on rock art and many publications to her credit, has now photographed and examined the cupules on the Ashokan rock. She has enhanced the photographs through DStretch, a tool that is used by rock art researchers to make markings embedded in rock more visible.

Her surmise is that there are some cupules in a linear pattern that have characters of the Ashokan Brahmi script on top of them which, as she puts it, “sets the chronology of these linear cupules to before the third century BCE”. If these are earlier than the Ashokan inscription, then they are likely to be prehistoric.

Whichever way one looks at it, within a few kilometres of the Delhi Central Ridge and in a geographical setting very similar to it, cupule marks were made on a big rock much before the words of an emperor in the third century BCE came to be inscribed there.

In the same way, well before Malcha Mahal in the 14th century came to grace the Central Delhi ridge, the land had been walked and used and marked by ancient people whose markings can still be seen. The sets of markings on the rocks in central and south Delhi are likely to have been made around the same time period.

Here, I have a suggestion for the Delhi Forest Department. Usually, forest departments treat the landscape with much respect because habitat protection leads to species protection, some of which are endangered.

Archaeological sites too, it needs to be remembered – like animals and flora – are an endangered species and protecting their surroundings will surely help in better protecting these sites. The rock on the Central Ridge falls within the jurisdiction of the forest department, and it is imperative that they take the initiative in safeguarding the landscape around it.

Nayanjot Lahiri is Professor of History at Ashoka University. The views expressed here are the personal views of the author.

Also read: Uprooting a forest for a park: The destructive ‘restoration’ of Delhi’s Central Ridge