Polo Forest's Forgotten Temples

Polo Forest in Gujarat is one of those places that does not announce itself. There is no grand gate, no ticket window with a laminated map, just a road that thins out past Vijaynagar until the teak closes overhead and the temperature drops a few degrees. I nearly drove past the first set of ruins entirely, because a fifteenth-century temple half-swallowed by roots does not look, from a moving car, like anything at all.

Then I stopped, walked in through the trees, and found a carved doorway standing on its own in a clearing, holding up nothing but sky. That was the moment the place got hold of me.

A city the forest took back

Polo Forest in Gujarat sits in the Aravalli hills of Sabarkantha district, near the Rajasthan border, and the ruins scattered through it are the remains of a medieval settlement variously dated between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. There are Hindu and Jain temples here, a stepwell or two, and the broken bones of what was once a proper town, all of it now folded into second-growth forest.

Local telling has it that the settlement was abandoned, then reclaimed by the trees, and standing among the stones it is easy to believe. Fig roots grip the plinths. A shikhara tower ends abruptly in mid-air where its upper courses have long since fallen. Nobody has restored these buildings into something tidy, which is exactly what makes them worth the trip; you are seeing them roughly as the last person who left saw them, minus a few centuries.

Fifteenth-century stonework standing quietly in the teak forest near Vijaynagar.

Walking between the stones

The temples are spread out, so seeing them means walking, and the walking is half the pleasure. Paths cut through dry deciduous forest that comes alive after the monsoon, streams crossing the trail, langurs complaining from the canopy, the odd flash of a paradise flycatcher. A local guide is worth hiring, partly to find the less obvious ruins and partly because the forest is genuinely easy to get turned around in.

A carved doorway stands alone in a clearing, holding up nothing but sky.

I spent an afternoon going temple to temple with a guide from Vijaynagar who knew each one by a nickname rather than a name. He pointed out the Jain carvings, the worn images on the Shiva shrines, the places where villagers still leave a flower or a smear of vermilion. These are ruins, but they are not entirely dead; they are simply visited quietly, by people who never treated them as a monument in the first place.

The Polo Festival, if your timing is lucky

Once a year, usually around the cooler months, the Gujarat tourism department stages the Polo Festival here, a weekend of tented camping, folk music, cycling and guided heritage walks meant to draw visitors to a corner of the state that most itineraries skip. It is a good on-ramp if you want infrastructure and company. But if you can, come on an ordinary weekday too, when the tents are gone and the only sound in the clearings is water and birds and your own footsteps on old stone.

If you go

• Base yourself in Vijaynagar or nearby Idar; the forest is about a three-hour drive north of Ahmedabad.
• Come between November and February, or just after the monsoon when the streams run and the forest is green.
• Hire a local guide to find the scattered temples and stepwells, and to avoid losing the trail.
• Carry water, sturdy shoes and a torch; there are no shops or cafes among the ruins.
• Check the dates of the annual Polo Festival if you want organised camping, or skip it for solitude.

Polo Forest rewards the traveller who is happy to be a little lost. There is no headline monument, no obvious payoff photograph, just a slow accumulation of doorways and towers and the strange calm of buildings that have made their peace with the trees. I came for a curiosity and left with the feeling that I had walked through somebody's abandoned home, respectfully, and been allowed to leave again. Few places in Gujarat feel so completely their own.