Travel & History

Travel and History isn’t a domain about visiting museums. It follows a dual movement, outward into place and backward into time. It explores travel as encounter, with ideas, people, histories, myths, folklore, and ecosystems embedded in geography. It explores travel as a tool to reveal the memory a place sustains. 

Knowledge doesn’t just live in books. There is an ancient way of passing it on. Śruti, that which is heard, carries the sacred and the cosmic through precise oral transmission across generations. Smṛti, that which is remembered, carries what humans made of it, the epics, the laws, the local legends adapted to time and place. These are the two foundational sources of sacred knowledge in Hindu tradition, concepts as old as the Vedic tradition itself, formally categorized and hierarchically ordered in the Dharmasūtras, c. 600 to 300 BCE. Every landscape carries its own layer of Smṛti. Sthala Kathas are the sacred legends of specific sites, preserved in the Tirtha Mahatmyas of the Skanda Purana. They pass on the mythology embedded in particular geography, why a deity appeared by a particular river or what a mountain witnessed. Sthanik Kathas are the broader community knowledge, village lore, how a place got its name, the stories that never made it into written texts but lived in local dialect for centuries. Our ancestors had an urge to leave their trace through the sands of time, much like the early humans who left impressions deep in caves just to say: I was here. Pilgrimage to me has always sounded like a field trip in a history class. 

Different people perceive travel differently. One mind can see travel as leisure, a way to unwind, and another can experience the literal history a place has witnessed, merely by seeing a river flow. Then there’s a third category that swings between the two. A weekend staycation in the hills brings solace away from the city, but a visit to the ghost town in Dhanushkodi can turn into an adventurous ride in a time machine. 

One can visit Hanle, Ladakh to experience the wonder of the night sky in the clearest skies in the world and simply come back. But what if travel also becomes delving into wonder, delight and inquiry even while being on the road itself? A stop somewhere on the smooth roads beside the blue waters of the Indus within a desert can happen to be an invitation to experience the rise and fall of civilisations next to it. 

While driving on a mountain road, the mind can focus on getting there or snap out of the limbo of ticking off a task and truly be present in the journey to realise it was never about the destination. There’s a beauty in staying present. Appreciating the beauty in the geography of the place is only peeling one layer of experience that travel offers. Every landscape also carries the weight of everything that unfolded on those grounds since the beginning of time. In that sense, every inch of land is a time capsule waiting to reveal itself if and only if you stop to open it. If and only if you stop to truly see. 

Citations: Dharmasūtras, c. 600 to 300 BCE. Patrick Olivelle, Dharmasūtras: The Law Codes of Ancient India, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1999. Sthala Kathas preserved in Tirtha Mahatmyas of the Skanda Purana, c. 7th century CE onward. Sthanik Katha as oral community tradition transmitted in vernacular dialects, uncited by nature.