When the Golden Quadrilateral project upgraded the old National Highway 4 between Bangalore and Pune into a multi-lane toll corridor, hundreds of winding single-lane town bypasses were left behind. Decades later, these abandoned road sections exist as quiet time capsules of mid-century Indian road travel.
1. The Granite Milestones
Along the original bypassed alignments, one still encounters massive arched granite milestone stones. The older specimens feature distances hand-carved in miles, subsequently overlaid with post-1960 metric kilometer measurements in black enamel.
They stand under ancient banyan canopies planted by princely state highway works a century ago. Unlike modern reflective sheet-metal signage that rusts and bends, these granite blocks endure as permanent monuments to the travelers who passed before.
“Expressways move traffic; old highways connect geography.”
2. The Vanishing Highway Dhaba
On the modern six-lane expressway, dining is outsourced to sterile food plazas with uniform retail franchises. On the bypassed loops, you still find small family dhabas where a single kerosene lamp illuminates iron tavas cooking hot rotis, coarse dal tadka, and fiery onion salads.
These roads require slower travel, but they preserve the texture of the subcontinent that the high-speed corridors deliberately bypass.