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Anjanadri Hill, Hampi, Karnataka The sentence at the base of the hill At the base of Anjanadri Hill, a permanent interpretive plaque begins with a remarkable sentence: “According to folklore, Anjaneya was born here, in a kingdom called Kishkinda.” The interpretive plaque at the base of Anjanadri Hill The opening sentence on the plaque, highlighted The wording matters. The plaque does not present an archaeological proof of Hanuman’s birth. It records the place tradition carefully and explicitly: according to folklore , this hill is Anjaneya’s birthplace, and the surrounding kingdom is Kishkinda. That distinction makes the sign more useful, not less. It tells us exactly what kind of evidence it preserves: an official, permanent record of the tradition attached to this landscape. Watch the S1/E5 field reel: Watch S1/E5 on your preferred platform Instagram → YouTube Shorts → Facebook → TikTok → The evening before I arrived at Evolve, Hampi, the evening before the climb. The sun...

Watch S1/E4 on your preferred platform Instagram → YouTube Shorts → Facebook → Anjanadri Hill, Hampi, Karnataka · April 2025 The squirrels still chat at Kishkinda I first noticed them on the climb I was climbing the front route of Anjanadri Hill: 575 steep steps toward the place traditionally identified as Hanuman’s birthplace. It was an April morning. The rock was already warming in the sun. Below the steps, the Tungabhadra and the green fields of Kishkinda stretched between the hills. That was when I began noticing the squirrels. They moved through the trees beside the route, close to the people climbing. They did not behave like animals startled by every human movement. They seemed completely accustomed to us. At first, I simply filmed them. Watch Video 1 — The squirrels as I first noticed them: They seemed to notice that I was watching The longer I watched, the less one-sided the encounter felt. The squirrels remained busy—running along branches, stopping, looking and ...

Watch S1/E3 on your preferred platform Instagram → YouTube Shorts → Facebook → TikTok → Rishimukha Flashback — S1/E3: Kishkinda — The Monkey Kingdom Anjanadri Hill, Hampi, Karnataka · April 2025 I did not know what I had filmed This was my first trip to Hampi as a researcher. I had questions, but no real field method yet. I filmed almost everything: the climb, the temple, the sunrise, the landscape, people praying—and the monkeys around Anjanadri Hill. At the summit, after climbing 575 steps in the April heat, I filmed three short sequences without thinking much about them. They seemed like ordinary moments: a family sitting above the steps, young monkeys playing below, an adult monkey doing a backflip. Weeks later, back home in the United States, I watched the clips one after another. Then I watched them again. Only in sequence did the story become visible. An older pair sat above the steps with one young monkey. Below them, another baby played with adult monkeys. When the ba...

Watch S1/E2 on your preferred platform Instagram → YouTube Shorts → Facebook → TikTok → Hanuman’s birthplace has a back route. Did you know? Most visitors reach the temple at the top of Anjanadri Hill, near Hampi, by climbing 575 steep steps. During the December tourist season, the main route was packed with tourists. But our ASI guide knew another way. The back route to Anjanadri Hill He took us on a back route, a second set of steps that was almost completely empty. Then the steps ended in rocks that we had to cross. From there, we had to cross a crevice and climb over the rocks. In places, it felt like a small adventure course. Even a monkey was navigating the same route. The monkey and the tourist I was amazed to find a tourist waiting patiently for a monkey to get off his shoulder. The monkey was happily sitting on him for several minutes. This is Nambikke: knowledge learned by living with a place. The monkeys are not simply part of the scenery. They live on the hill, mov...

Rishimukha Flashback · S1/E1 Jatayu, Rishimukha and Rama's Two Trails Returning with Akul to connect a hill near Jatinga-Rameshwara, the Rishimukha cave, a journey photograph, and the route map from our S3/E5 investigation. Episode Summary Three ASI guides pointed toward a hill near Jatinga-Rameshwara and shared the local account that Jatayu fell there after confronting Ravana. That conversation stayed with me. I had last visited Rishimukha in April 2025, alone. On this return visit, Akul came with me so we could revisit the landscape and examine how the stories connect. We crossed the familiar log bridge, watched two ducks playing beside it, entered the cave associated in local tradition with Sugriva and Hanuman, and found a printed photograph that presented locations connected with Rama's journey. We then compared it with the two routes discussed in our S3/E5 podcast: Rama's proposed southward journey along the Kav...

We end where we began. Not at a new site, but with a question we skipped past entirely back in Episode 1: why is this hill called Brahmagiri at all? Across six episodes we climbed Jatinga-Rameshwara, traced a dried river, mapped two trails toward Rama, and uncovered a marketplace hiding inside what looked like empty farmland. We never once asked the most basic question about the very first site in this series — its name. This is Episode 7 of Series 3 — the finale — The Brahmagiri Revelation. The Story Brahmagiri — Brahma plus Giri, the hill of Brahma. But tradition in this region ties the name less to the god directly and more to a Brahmarishi: Saptarishi Gautama . Local tradition holds that Sage Gautama and his wife Ahalya lived here, performing intense sadhana — meditation — in caves on this very hill, including caves near a site known as Gorakhnath Gufa . If that's true, it connects Brahmagiri to one of the more well-known episodes of the Ramayana: Ahalya, cursed by...

Since Episode 1, we've been asking the same question: why would an emperor carve his message into a hilltop in the middle of nowhere? This episode is where we finally got an answer. It came almost in passing, in a recorded conversation with an ASI guide at Jatinga-Rameshwara — a few sentences that reframe everything we'd seen at Brahmagiri, Siddapura, and this hill itself. This is Episode 6 of Series 3 — The Marketplace on the Hill. The Story We'd recorded a conversation with our ASI guide while standing beside a structure we'd assumed was simply another protected monument. He told us, plainly: this is a Bauddha stupa . When we asked — "a Buddha stupa?" — he corrected us, gently but precisely: Bauddha , not Buddha. It's the classical term, and we've used his word throughout this series rather than the modern English one, out of respect for how he chose to say it. Then came the detail that changed the whole shape of this investigation. Peopl...