Go Bananas in the Monkey Kingdom near Hampi

An hour’s drive from Hampi is a miracle village called Anegundi. It falls within the core zone of the Hampi World Heritage Site, declared by UNESCO in 1986. Anegundi is also referred to as the legendary Kishkinda, a forest home to monkeys, as mentioned in the Epic Ramayana.

The heritage site also resides on a 3,000 million years old plateau – believed to be one of the oldest on earth. Apart from these mythical and historical facts, there’s another side to Anegundi, and that is it’s people. The Kishkinda Trust founded by Shama Pawar, has churned out several projects which are meant to help the local community in areas of conservation and business incubation — one of the ventures being the production of various handicrafts from Banana Fibre.

Banana is a popular crop in this region, and the fibre extracted from the trunk of the banana plant along with Shorba grass, river grass and other locally available fibres — once processed– can be used to make some really amazing and colorful handicrafts. Here’s a glimpse of the multitude of products that you would never have imagined could be made out of banana fibre:

‏@premasankar “Jai Hanuman.” saw so many of His statues and visited his supposedly birth place today & of course saw lot of monkeys. #Hampi #Anegundi #karnataka

@thealternative Buy local produce, always. These beautiful bags are made from banana fibre in #Anegundi. #Untravel

@Padhaarocom Vaali Gufa in #Anegundi, a town just 5 kms away from #Hampi is truly an unexplored place.

All the pictures were curated with permission from The Kishkinda Trust.

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