Elephanta Island and Caves

“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” -Confucius

One would think that a visit to Elephanta Island and Caves would perhaps bring you to find, well, elephants! But nope. This Unesco World Heritage site, a speck in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Mumbai, is home to a series of Hindu and Buddhist caves, with impressive stone carvings estimated to have originated between the 5th and 8th centuries. When the island was surrendered to the Portugese in the 1500s, there was a huge cut-rock elephant as part of the statuary - hence the name. The elephant carving was removed however, and after a storied trek where it was dumped in Mumbai Harbour, then recovered and displayed at various places in Mumbai, it eventually landed on permanent display in Mumbai's Jijamata Udyaan zoo. But the island and caves have historically been a regular Hindu place of worship; the Portugese, however, saw fit to largely destroy the impressive stone carvings with their target practice. So the ruins are what remain today, and they are still quite a sight to behold. 

You get to the island by taking a boat from the storied Gateway of India - a monumental gateway arch built during the British Raj in Mumbai, and Mumbai's top tourist attraction. It has a darker side as well - the Gateway has faced three different terrorist attacks in the the past ten years. Once on the island, you have the option of riding a very tiny train that has to be physically pushed by the conductor to get moving along its wavering tracks. The train takes you the length of a boardwalk, where you then have to ascend 120 steps to the top of the mountain to get to the caves. You can pay some very nice men to carry you to the top if you'd like - they seat you in a chair that has been threaded with bamboo poles, and two of the guys will get you to the top on their shoulders without you so much as breaking a sweat. I opted to break a sweat.

As mentioned, the caves are a wonderful sight to see. But there was another sight on that mountain that will leave more of an indelible impression on me than the ancient carvings, as impressive as they are. We came upon a group of stone workers, who were moving hewn rocks up a hillside from a quarry down below. The group of workers - men and women, mostly barefoot - were moving these rocks (which, after picking one up, I estimate to be about 40 pounds each), in an assembly-line fashion: they'd carry them a short distance on their heads, pass them off to the next person, who would move it on up the line. And they repeated this over and over and over again. That was their working day - moving rocks from point A to point B, in the beating sun, methodically, purposefully, continually. It was one of those humbling India moments for certain.