Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka

On a forested ridge at the southern edge of the Vindhya Range, weathered sandstone outcrops form hundreds of overhangs, and on the walls of roughly four hundred of them people painted for thousands of years. Bhimbetka holds one of the longest records of human presence in South Asia: the shelters were occupied from more than 100,000 years ago, through the Acheulean and later Stone Age phases, and the oldest of the paintings are generally placed in the Mesolithic, around 10,000 BCE, with some scholars arguing for an even earlier start. Later layers continue into historic and medieval times, so a single rock face can carry images made thousands of years apart.

More than 750 shelters are spread across seven hills, with the largest clusters on Bhimbetka hill itself and on Lakha Juar. The earliest images are linear figures; later artists worked in red, white and yellow, and later still with hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal. The scenes show hunters with barbed spears and bows, communal dances, mothers with children, burials and battles, and a crowded bestiary of deer, antelope, wild cattle, rhinoceros, sloth bears, wolves, monkeys, fish, turtles and peafowl. One panel, nicknamed Zoo Rock, gathers elephants, barasingha, bison and deer; another shows a peacock beside a snake and the sun. In the later periods riders appear on horses and elephants. The largest cavity, called the Auditorium, opens in several directions like the arms of a cross, with a great boulder known as Chief's Rock at its centre.

The shelters were noted by a British official in 1888, but their importance was recognised only after the archaeologist V. S. Wakankar explored them from 1957 and later proposed a sequence of seven painting periods. Local tradition links the name to Bhima, one of the Pandava heroes of the Mahabharata. The site lies within the Ratapani Wildlife Sanctuary and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2003.

Getting there

Bhimbetka is in Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh, about 45 km southeast of Bhopal. The nearest town is Obaidullaganj, roughly 7 km away. The nearest airport is Raja Bhoj International Airport in Bhopal (BHO), about 48 km away.