There are creatures you never encounter in the wild, and yet you feel you have seen them more intimately than any fleeting glimpse of fur or feather in a forest.

You meet them in stone, sculpted into perplexing proportions that challenge our perceptions of anatomical possibilities and taxonomies.

In Hampe, you find them emerging from pillars, caught as if in mid-motion, forever about to leap or bite or coil or unfurl. The Yalis. Or Vyalas or Shardulas as they are also referred to as. That is what we
call them, but we seem to know so little about them.

A lion’s jaw stretched beyond proportion, an elephant’s trunk curling where it should not, a crocodile’s snout erupting out of a body that refuses biological coherence. But the longer you stand before them, the more they can unsettle you. Not because they are unreal, but because they feel like a truth you do not yet know how to grasp.

Each Yali — whether it is a Gaja-Yali or an Ashwa-Yali or a Simha-Yali or a Nara-Yali — is perhaps an invitation to a conversation. Maybe it creates tension in the eye at first, but only to replace it with a lasting thrill.

Not a random hybrid of wildlife, but a deliberate gathering beyond a sculptor’s indulgence. You might witness a quick succession of thoughts visiting you: strength from the lion, memory from the elephant, speed from the horse. Sometimes, a reptilian glory that refuses domestication. They are not just animals but perhaps statements about power, survival and what it means to endure as empires rise and fall and rise and fall.

If you are someone exploring the intersection of nature and culture, seeing Yalis within the language of ecology can open a whole new world. Perhaps it is all right not to resist the temptation to call them “more-than-apex predators.” Not because such a being actually exists on Earth, but because the idea of one reveals how wild the human imagination could be in conjuring creatures that symbolise many more different meanings than each wild creature could for human-things to make sense to us.

In a forest where no creature holds absolute power, not even apex predators that so powerfully pull hoards of humans to visit the wild. The relationships between predator and prey are always subject to changing seasons, their abilities to adapt, and from the human perspective – chance.

And yet, when you are beholding a Yali, you are meeting a creature that transcends all those understandings we have had about the wild until now. It is a body that allows multiple ecosystems to exist within it.

Why did we humans need this, in the middle of a thriving empire whose glory continues to haunt through its ruined remains?

Perhaps the Yali is not an escape from ecological reality at all, but an intensified version of it. Perhaps it is a way of acknowledging — in the context of culture — that no single animal, whether wild or not, is sufficient to contain the idea of power. If the forest itself is complex, so is a massive human empire. And power is perhaps always an ensemble of many things just like the Yali.

This is when the Yali begins to be less of a myth and more of a memory.

Not the memory of one animal at a time, but of mingled encounters. Seemingly fragmented, at first, but gradually, accumulated and retold as a story. A Yali is sometimes a glimpse of a boar disappearing into a dark undergrowth. It is the unfailing intelligence of an elephant herd. It is both the initial terror and the following majesty of a big cat glimpsed, seen long enough to alter your sense of your own body – that out-of-the-body experience so many of us feel when we see a feline predator! These are experiences that remain whole and break apart in cycles until they culminate into coherence.

This, precisely, is the power of storytelling.

Now, anthropologically, this is where you might find yourself most drawn in – Yalis are synthesised from observation becoming imagination, and imagination becoming a structure in stone. The Yali is not just carved, it is a legible language being given form, in architecture. Yalis are creatures made to guard thresholds that matter.

If thresholds are where life intensifies in ecology — the meeting of forest and pasture-land, river and land, human settlements and wild terrain — then these are creatures of clearly-defined boundaries. They are beyond an amalgamation of animals but whole places of encounters and conflict and adaptation.

The Yali, then, stands precisely in the liminal spaces of Hampe’s temples. They exist at entrances. On pillars that are part of thresholds, edges. It is a guardian, but not the simplistic warding-off-evil power. Perhaps it is a reminder that crossing into any space — spiritually holy or ecologically sacred — requires an acknowledgement of forces bigger than oneself.

Maybe this is how thresholds become spaces of transcendence.

Because for us humans, transcendence itself is a journey from individual knowledge to collective wisdom.

In some carvings, the Yali is shown overpowering an elephant. In others, it is ridden by a human figure as though it has been mastered. These contradictions do not nullify each other but seem to coexist to tell a titillatingly complex story. Just as our own relationship with nature is.

If you, too, are someone who spends time in the uneasy but urgent spaces between wildlife and human worlds, you might return to these stone creatures with more intense attention than ever before. You cannot reduce them to being only relics of belief, but as flexible frameworks of human imagination and our relentless need to make sense of things.

If you have been asking questions about the Yali so far, maybe the Yali itself will ask you a question the next time you visit one, without demanding for answers, of course:

What does it mean to represent nature, when life is but a whole web of things and nature itself resists singularity?

Perhaps this is also why they linger in your psyche, by refusing to be reduced to architectural ornamentation. They look like they are watching us more intently than we can watch them. Not as inanimate beings but as witnesses to our own ongoing attempts to understand the worlds we inhabit physically and the ones we create in the realms of lore.

This is how something wonderfully complex can also embody humility. And it spills over to your emotional being.

Sourabha Rao

Sourabha Rao is a professional writer, poet, translator, former freelance columnist and voiceover artist, with literary proficiency in English and Kannada. She deeply cares about producing stories primarily on nature and wildlife, social issues, history and art. She strives to write truthfully and creatively in an earnest attempt to create content that educates and entertains, has impact, and mobilises positive social change. She has written op-eds and photo-stories for leading Kannada and English newspapers, and has collaborated with filmmakers in wildlife conservation and water conservation. Sourabha lives in Bengaluru, while a big chunk of her heart has stayed back in Mysuru, her forever-muse.

A Meditation on the Yalis of Hampe

Sourabha Rao