In KM Panikkar’s footsteps in Dunhuang

Seven decades after India’s first ambassador to China, Sardar Kavalam Madhava (K M) Panikkar visited the ancient Silk Road town of Dunhuang (which he spelt as Tunghuang), I had the opportunity to follow suit. From the list of places on the itinerary of a cultural exchange programme initiated by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, nothing excited me more than this ancient town and its world-famous Mogao Caves.

Everything I initially knew about Dunhuang and the caves was thanks to Panikkar’s book titled 'In Two Chinas: Memoirs of a Diplomat'. He visited the town just a few years after the communists won the Civil War and established the People’s Republic of China.

The Indian ambassador travelled through the Gobi Desert by road in a convoy that consisted of weapon carriers, jeeps and trucks. The authorities had given them an escort of 30 men of the People’s Liberation Army. The convoy carried “beds, blankets, provisions, cooks and servants,” he wrote.

In the early 1950s, there was a clear danger in visiting the town. “The desert was said to be infested with gangs of bandits, who operate from inaccessible mountains which in some parts come quite near the road,” Panikkar wrote. “The Chinese Government had therefore ordered that special precautionary measures should be taken for the safety of the party and when our convoy stopped anywhere, even for a minute, the army personnel immediately rushed to the most advantageous posts with their machine-guns.”

In those days there was no rail or flight link from Lanzhou, the capital of the Gansu province, to Dunhuang, but in late October 2024, we had the luxury of a short flight to the town. The view from the plane of the snow-covered mountains of Gansu was breathtaking to say the least, but as we approached Dunhuang, the crew asked all passengers to shut the window shades, as there were some sensitive installations near the town.

The road to the town from the airport is lined with poplars whose leaves turn a golden yellow in the autumn. Located at an oasis in the northwest of China, Dunhuang is sparsely populated but witnesses a large footfall of domestic and foreign tourists in the warmer months.

The modernisation of the town and the prevalence of high-quality roads to the caves make the travel experience seamless, but when Panikkar visited, Dunhuang was nothing like it is now.

He wrote: “A road from An Si goes to the Tunghuang village from where the caves lie at a distance of two miles. There is only a rough track to the side of the mountain and up to the very last minute no evidence of human occupation or any activity. When we reached the hill, there was a gap like a side entrance from which a river must have once emerged, for it was clearly a river bed. Once you enter the gap, the sight that greets you is something for which for you have not been prepared. You see before you, a small valley, apparently surrounded on all sides by hills, a garden enclosed by nature. It has two gaps, both invisible from outside, unless one comes very near to the site; one through which, the river now dry, entered the valley, and the other through which it emerged into the desert to disappear into the parched sands. One side of the valley is green with recently-planted poplars and a tiny rivulet runs by it. Behind the poplars lies the range where Buddhist monks, over 1,400 years ago built their caves for retirement and meditation and embellished them with paintings, which are amongst the supreme expressions of mural art, comparable only to the cave paintings of Ajanta, Bagh and Sigiriya.”

The caves and paintings that we saw had been maintained well. Our group was fortunate enough to get a personalised lecture tour of the most important caves, including some closed to the public, by Lu Shuaiyang, a renowned scholar of the Dunhuang Academy. We also went to a cave that had a painting of Shiva and Ganesha.

Ambassador Panikkar took note of the strong Indian influence at Dunhuang: “In some places stray Apsara figures of Indian mythology could be seen painted on the mountain itself, whose proportions clearly testify to their being part of a larger design. Inside the 460 caves beginning with the time of the Wei Dynasty, and ending with the Yuans, covering a period of 700 years, there can be found an immense artistic effort, a veritable treasure house of painting, decoration and design. The idea of the rock-cut temple itself is derived from India. Apart from this, and the figures and legends of Buddhism, which form the subject-matter of the art of Tunghuang, many of the striking features of these caves are borrowed from India.”

The Indian heritage and legacy are very much celebrated in present-day Dunhuang. The Apsara, beautiful celestial beings, are a symbol of the town, and song and dance programmes feature young women dressed as these beings.

Standing outside the caves in the glorious late-afternoon light and admiring the main temple, as well as the blue skies and the golden poplar leaves, I kept Ambassador Panikkar in my thoughts, feeling grateful for his wide body of written work. It was even more surreal to be in an oasis at the heart of the Ancient Silk Route, a place that permanently serves as a bridge between the great Indian and Chinese civilisations.
(Ajay Kamalakaran is a multilingual writer, primarily based in Mumbai)