Once Upon a Ridge: Landscape Heritage and Memory in the Rock Art of the Eastern Vindhyas, Uttar Pradesh

Ajay Pratap

Eastern Vindhyan rock art is situated within a complex geography of urban and rural, plain and hilly, agricultural and forested, alluvial and rocky landscapes, as well as the region's multiple ethnicities. In this paper, we discuss the rock art of Mirzapur and Sonbhadra Vindhyas as a corpus of shared heritage and memory, as evidenced particularly in the development of historically later art styles and narratives within them. We discuss Vindhyan rock art sites and complexes as redoubtable memory-scapes for their ability to attract and inspire even later types of historical memory. To decolonise the subject, we also trace the continuity of rock art pigment, painting, and iconic traditions, especially in Buddhist frescos and murals in nearby and distant locations. While the spatial translation of continuity in visual narratives is from rural to urban, on a chronological axis, that the oldest story forms inspired Buddhist and other medieval art is scarcely in doubt.