On the Eastern seaboard of India there lies the industrial rural village of Mamallampuram. I was trekking down the cast of India not long ago when I encountered a brutally hot stretch of sand and shrub land. The only oasis was a hump of granite that rose from the coast and took stance against the endless stretch of sand. I made it past the emaciated bovine guards that stood munching cud on the edge of town and entered a historical labyrinth of limestone, marble, and stone dust. For the last 1200 years Mamallampuram has been a stone carving village. Through out the entirety of its existence Mamallampuram has been fought over by the various Hindu and Buddhist rulers of India. As each new ruler would come to power they would take the inhabitants of Mamallampuram and put them to work to construct great superstructures and testaments to their respective faiths.
Mamallampuram is a tiny village of shacks and mud homes that provide a palisade for the ghost empire inside. At the inner core of the village there lies a massive city hewn from slabs of granite that could swallow city blocks. Everywhere that one of these rocks loomed up from the earth the citizens of Mamallampuram carved temples and buildings straight from the side of the stone and erected monuments to their industry from the very bellies of the behemoths they dwelled with. Stone moves in the blood of the people here. Each man of this town is a stone worker and has been since birth. His father was a stone worker and his father before and so on for the last millennium. With century after century of each dawn bringing a new day to learn each nuance of the stone they work with and each craft to master it the men of Mamallampuram have become a class apart in realm of stone craft. For hundreds of years they have been sought after by all of India’s populace to craft for them works to challenge time itself. For they do more than just mould stone with precision and speed, the denizens of Mamallampuram breathe life into each piece and sculpt it with the skill of generations.
It was wandering through the vacant corridors of this timeless city that I met Rajaram, a young student who bears the burden of being the newest member of an elite stone crafting group that has prospered in this area since the first kings of India requested the talent of these men for Temples to worship in. I was broke and in condition to march once more through the daunting stretch of sand that coiled around Mamallampuram. He gave me a place to stay and I had the honor of eating with his family; though they had little to spare.
The vast majority of Mamallampuram’s income is from tourism these days what with a recent decline in the Indian governments need for stone monuments. However the recent Tsunami has caused a drastic decline in visitors to their region. Times being hard Rajaram and his family all bore their hardships with great pride and a deep love for the work they do.


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