Talkadu

From the north to the south, a little ahead of Bangalore en-route to Mysore is a place most likely to be missed by many and not featured anywhere. We discovered this gem when our driver told us about it and all of us curious cats jumped on to the adventure ride instantly. A place sure to shock you and make you think if such things actually existed ever in history.

Talkadu is off the main road a few kms inside and very hard to locate then without someone who knew where it was. It was an archeological excavation site then and work was still in progress so it wasn’t open to tourists. But who can stop snooping noses like us who are suckers for adventure. The land was rocky and as we walked suddenly there was sand under our feet from nowhere. The guide told us the legend behind Talkadu. The story says that Raja Wadiar was a lazy and indulgent king. He had very little interest in ruling and had given his empire to his wife to handle and before dying asked her to never give it up to the British. Now while the British came to attack, the queen ran with as much as she could gather and cursed the kingdom would turn into sand and the British would never be able to rule it. The legend also says that since Raja Wadiar never had a heir of his own there are said o be hidden treasures around Talkadu if someone finds will be given the Wadiar kingdom.

It is hard to believe the legend but one is forced to after you see the amount of fine beach sand in the middle of nowhere. Only a few temples and courts were exacavated by then and I was completely thrilled about this trip into history. I was actually walking over the entire kingdom that was some 15 ft under sand waiting to be excavated and tell its story. The temples were carved in stone like most other old time monuments but the one interesting piece was the four corners of a temple that had rings dangling that were carved out of one single stone. The strangest is the two rings had no joints and were one single moving piece of stone. One dangled from the corner and the other intertwined in the one stationary ring. There was pottery from that time and the astonishing part was it was painted from both sides! Inside and outside!!! Now every class had different kind of paintings so one could differentiate between the pottery and utensils. The pots were regular mud brown from outside and had blue and ceramic paints inside apparently helped keep water cool for long.

I managed to steal a few invaluable pieces of that pottery which had I retained would have cost millions! But since they were jinxed I had to throw them away as I returned home. We were also actually standing on top of a mint where coins were made and I saw one that was still stuck in the mud that had some Greek face and had something engraved in a language that hailed from the era unknown to me! I loved it and had mentally been teleported to a time zone where I was experiencing how the life must have been then. Talkadu a must see on my list! It will not cost much since there is nothing to consume a day so you are free to carry on with your trip to Mysore.