Almost 500 feet above the hamlet of Mavigarh, stands a temple to a mystic and local folk hero whose antecedents are shrouded in the haze of ancient folklore.
Nobody quite knows when and why the savant with long tresses (latadhari) inhabited a cave high up on the hilltop, from where he looked down upon the vast green expanse that was once a forest and is now a pasture for Mavi cattle herders.
To commerate his presence, or rather, absence, the herders turned the cave into a shrine, compelete with an altar plastered with ceramic bathroom tiles. Then they carved him into a horse-mounted idol complete with footprints on marble. And so, eversince, Latadhari baba stands on the hilltop alone, as guardian angel of the hamlet of the herders.
Yet, the baba is not alone. This wild leopard country is home to other eminences as well. Unseen. Unheard. Unknown. There presence carved on every rock. Their footprints etched on red sandstone boulder after boulder. From an undated past.
Tej Mavi, hobby archaeologist, and local hero, walked us there... to an open stoneage arena, barely half-a-mile behind Latadhari's shrine on the table top ridge through rock strewn tracks, on which, perhaps, horse drawn chariots raced once upon a time. For, this mountaintop Kot, fort in English, was once a seat of imperial power.
Long before Prithviraj Chauhan lost the valley of Mehrauli in the distance to Muhammad Ghori, the Tomar dynasty ruled over this densely forested wild patch of hilly countyrside. Kot holds many secrets to the founding of what is now the national capital territory of Delhi, under the last Tomar overlord Anangpal II, particularly the mystery of the Mehrauli-Qutb complex. We will walk you there in good time. Not this time, though.
For now, Mavi walked us deeper and farther into the past, leaving the Tomars by the trackside, to where history walks well past history... into the paleolithic age.
Presently, we chanced upon a few microlithic handtools shaped out of marble and quartz, the kind you use to chisel boulders into shape or etch figures into stone. Or even, perhaps, to skin animal hide. And then, there, we spotted a heavy rock chiselled into a giant handheld axe-hammer to kill, anything from a leopard to, may be, a tiger, or even one man by his own lookalike, another.
Before long we arrived at another sandstone boulder, etched with human hand and footprints. They reminded us of the footprints at Latadhari baba's shrine, carved not so long ago on marble. In commemoration of the absence, of the presence.
At home, for us Hindus, it is common ritual to take handprints of new born babies on cloth or paper, when they arrive. When we carry our elders on the bier for cremation, we preserve their footprints in red dye as a memorial to the departed.
Trained to dig deeper, Mavi would not speculate what these handprints and footprints on the rockfield of Kot were about to tell us. In their silence. So, I turned to my nephews, Aditya and Parakram, to make an informed guess. They speculated aloud on the uncertainty of time.
But the footprints do tell a story. Almost two centuries ago, at the height of the British colonial enterprise in India, the first East India Company archaeologists had discovered a pair of giant human footprints carved on stone in the Mehrauli-Qutb Complex, about 25 km due north from here in Kot, where the horse-shoe Aravalli ridge encircling Delhi descends into a trough at the southern fringe of the city. Stray accounts of that discovery and inherited oral history recalled that carving as Vishnupad (Vishnu's feet) that was once reportedly worshipped at a massive stone temple demolished 800 years ago to make space for the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, north India's first repurposed masjid by the invading Mamluk-Turk slaves under Ghori's command. Soon, the Vishnupad went missing, only to resurface in the ruins of Humayun's tomb further north, by the Yamuna, at the turn of the 1857 Revolt, that saw the last Mughal taken captive there, and deported to Rangoon in lifelong exile. And yet again, the Vishnupad went missing, never to resurface again. Officials at the Archaeological Survey of India haven't figured out where the footprints might have disappeared. But I believe I have the clue. For, it reappers every now and then, in full public gaze, in new avatar.
When you connect the dots from Kot to Mehrauli to Humayun's tomb, the footprints sure seem to have walked a great distance of recorded human history, mutating with every emerging cult, and every new tribe of believers. Yet, nothing beats their primordial origin at Kot, where the footprints appear as etchings of infant feet. Many of them clustered here on a boulder. Many others clustered there on another. Tejveer Mavi has counted and measured them all. Even the spacings between one set of feet and another. Ditto with the handprints as well.
Two years ago, I had chanced upon Kot, after a casual conversation with the Haryana government archaeologist, Banani Bhattacharyya. Sadly, her recommended local guide, led me nowhere in his forced walk through the bush, without a clue what the footprints were all about. Tej has since taken Archaeological Survey of India, star-digger, of the Sinauli 'Mahabharata' site, Sanjay Manjul on a tour of Kot. Still, nobody quite knows what these footprints wish to tell us.
Survey done, the archaelogists are yet to officially map the location, and declare it a protected zone for want of clarity on who first discovered the site, Mavi or his arch rival, Sunil who claimed to have first ventured into this unknown. Mavi says, being a local, he got here first, during the forced qurantine brought upon us by Covid. Sunil, who reportedly followed in his foosteps, first informed the archaeological office (for Sunil's side of the find, click the link at the bottom of this post). Mavi also claims to have discovered a total of 25 paleolithic sites since he first ventured into the unknown. Sunil is no longer to be heard.
We leave aside the politics of who first got to Kot. Certainly the caveman did. We are here now to dig for answers to why did he do so.
What are these footprints here really about? I asked Tejveer once again, before turning to my nephews. Dead silence prevailed.
These are markers to commemorate the dead. I broke the silence, during pauses between the leopard's growl behind the surrounding bush. Dead children. All.
The children turned to me in wonder. In silence.
Here children were killed as offerings to the gods, I went on. This uniiverse is a complete food chain, the Upanishads had proclaimed almost three millennia ago. Small wonder then, some priest would have cracked open the skulls of stoneage children, making delicious meal for the gods. This was certainly a spot for human sacrifice, I proclaimed, with sanctimonius authority. My gut told me so. My nephews dropped their jaws.
You have heard the story of Bakr Eid, I said. This is what Ramadan is all about. The sacrifice of Ishmael by Ibrahim on the rock before Allah got himself the goat. You have heard of the sacrifice of Jesus, at the Last Supper, and our communion with his blood and flesh, now made digestible with bread and wine. And you have also read how Abraham sharpened his knife to sacrifice Isaac on the rock (the original Jewish version of Ishmael's Arabic tale). Read this now.
Kot predates them all.
You get to read of 'naramedha' in the Veda, alongside 'asvamedha' -- two of the biggest ancient offerings to the gods in the Vedic ritual calendar.
Archaeologists have since discovered naramedha pits at later Vedic sites, most significantly at Kausambi by the Yamuna close to Prayag, certainly of much later millennial provenance than Kot. Medieval archaelogical sites, among them the famous Vaishnava terracotta temple town of Bishnupur in Bengal too house human sacrificial pits, unpublicised, yet within easy visual reach of the tourists. It's just that nobody talks of that in public anymore, with pacifism and veganism dominating the contemporary Hindu narrative. Yet, in the shadowy ancient past of Hinduism's unadulterated communion with nature, nara~medha was the ultimate human offering to nara~yan (Vishnu) the preserver and nourisher of the Universe, only to be outperformed by the ultimate God's own own offering of himself unto himself in the brilliant invocation of the Purusa~sukta chant in the Rg Veda.
Vegetarianism crept in much later in the Indic civilisational narrative following the entrenchment of Jain and Buddhist doctrines on non-violence, transforming Vedik Brahmanism in the colours of Baudhik Shramanism in the first millennium CE. That was when the nara~medha offerings to Nara~yana, splitting open the human skull was replaced by splitting the nar(a)~ial (the headlike coconut) in adulation of the divine.
Kot predates the Veda, the Buddha, and everybody else who followed. It had no reason for pacifist niceties when Man was still the Brute. This meant fewer reasons for public probity, The first draft of history was yet to be written then. Which means, the red hot stones of Kot may well have been the first draft of our civilisation. At least, here, in India.
We found more tell-tale signs of man's offerings and worship all over the boulders. Etchings of fish, animal paws, horse hooves. Imprints of unknown species. Here, blood was poured into ritual cup holes dug into every boulder in combinations of six, nine, twelve, fourteen, twenty four, and thirty six, each number a combination of ritual offerings detailed in later Vedic protocols.
Yonder, we found the mother of all cups, dug into a bowl, possibly to empty the skull's content in the worship of the divine. No one can tell for sure what this was meant for.
Onward still, in the rocky outcrop we hit upon another boulder, where man had dug his biggest pit yet, in the shape of the vagina. This must be the world's first yoni celebrating the raw virgin energy of Shakti, I wondered aloud. Not far from here, in the shadow of the Qutb, is Delhi's most significant shrine to feminine power at Mehrauli's Yogamaya temple. We have been there in the past on my FB wall. Back in 2023.
Nothing else could predate this fertility pit from our hoary past, I wondered. Young Ady, his eyes fixed on the spot, stared in silence. So did Victor, our vanquisher of the odds.
Tej Mavi, our 21st century Indiana Jones of India stood silent as well. Eyes transfixed on the yoni. In deep contemplation.
This was our moment of discovery. Our Holy Grail, after a two-year wait. The biggest secret from the back of the beyond. Of Delhi. It is here to stay forever.
All that Kot needs now is validitation from the Archaeological Survey of India.
Stay tuned.
© Shubhrangshu Roy
9 March, 2025
For an earlier version from a previous visit, click here.
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