Hampe and the art of destruction

Familiarity breeds morbid creativity. Evidently, this seems to be true as to my trysts with Hampe, to where I wrapped up my 10th visit recently.

One of the profound ideas that came through was about the consistent perversion in the pattern of pillage. Since destroying a whole city must have been quite some work, I'd assume that the tasks were allocated to teams of specialists.

** The Gopura Specialist

This specimen was a firebrand gun-head. His ballistic propensities mostly and majorly inclined towards the applications of cannon fire directed towards the gOpuras in specific. Kaboom!

(HatTip: It's false that Babur was the first to employ Artillery in Indian warfare. Thanks to their trade links with the Arabs and the Portuguese, the South Indian empires had been in posession of forms of artillery even prior to the times of Babur)

** The Gopura Specialist II

It must've come to realization quickly that the battery fire could only make coarse impact on the gOpuras. I suspect this did not appeal to the tastefullness of the demolition-cadres.

Here steps in the gOpura iconoclast. At heart, he's a rasika who doesn't mind the extra hard work to achieve the perfection in results. I suspect his work involved climbing up to the gOpuras and personally delegating to the task of decapitating figures and figurines carved on them. Painstaking work indeed!

** Elephant Trunk Specialist

This guy probably possessed some pathological hate for these harmless pachyderms carved in stone. For the sheer volume of the the cut-off trunks on the elephant figures in the temples, I suggest that this guy must've been kept quite busy.

** Amputation Specialist

If the aforementioned guy specialised in Gopura-specific decapitations, this guy was by far more generic. By the looks, his affinities seem to have taken towards multi-handed figures while female figurines with breasts come a close second.

** Explosion Engineer II

Specifically, blow the roof out of the garbhagrha's innermost immediate enclosure. This person's skillset consisted of well-gained knowledge to achieve the best belly-burst results for any structure.

** Structural Engineer

Well, this guy did his job so well that the only remains we see of his work are just the foundations. Perfection to the ground up!