There was a slight chill in the morning air, so a group of young men and a girl stood warming themselves around a small fire lit by the side of their homes. The tiny dwellings were built from loosely laid chunks of dark-grey basalt. Sheets of corrugated steel lay across the loose walls, weighed down with more stone, topping off the most cramped space I had ever seen or known others call home. I met the gaze of an old man as he crouched in a small horseshoe enclosure just big enough for him to wash the dust from his umber skin. His eyes questioned me, yet he seemed to do this as though he, not I, was the prying intruder. More pairs of eyes turn towards me, staring at my strangeness; curious eyes, wandering why and how I had come to be among them. Was I lost? Yet this stranger seemed to watch and walk with purpose. Who was he?

I was an alien in a micro-world seldom visited by other Indians, let alone other nationalities. Yet this other-world, my world - of unattainable wealth no more within reach for these people than the lava stained surface of the moon that hung above - was flaunted here courtesy of several television aerials, some atop poles and others perched on the flat tin roofs trailing cables that carried the electronic proof of one's next incarnation. I pondered how this daily fix was eroding the need or the motivation to sustain the gods, but why should India be any different than the rest of the world?

A thin coating of pale, yellow-grey dust covered much of this Hindu settlement creating a monotone cast over everything. Trees, cacti, even a lone climbing passionflower, all lay faded under this thin powdery veil. Some of the sari-clad women shone like living gems against this faded canvas. Others, as dusty as the land, toiled, like animated statues; only their eyes sparkled.

A few meters beyond this permanent encampment rose a large mound of pulverised basalt with the sprawling tentacle-like conveyors of a stone crusher standing guard, motionless and silent. One of dozens to be found near the village of Wagholi - north-east of Pune, in the state of Maharashtra - the crusher was not only the source of the dust but the reason why anyone was living here at all, and the reason why I too, had sought out this extraordinary place.

I was in the heart of the Deccan Traps, where from the ground beneath my feet, to the flat-toped hills - rising like stacked terraces in the distant haze - all was made from unimaginably vast floods of basalt lava, spilled layer upon layer, across ancient India. To appreciate these highlands fully, a traveller must not only journey here today, but back through time as well, for the Deccan is a landscape with a remarkable and violent past.

The rutted track that threaded away from the small settlement undulated over the thin soil that tenuously masked the lava beneath. On either side the ground was riddled with quarries. Gaping scars bitten into a ten-metre flow of lava - ideal for crushing into aggregate. Mixed with pitch or cement this stone provided the raw materials to create a new landscape, which is India today. The entire infrastructure of the subcontinent is, in effect, being recast, pulled into the twenty-first century by the nation's collective aspiration to be something different than they were. Men, women and children all live here in tenuous miniature communities, completely dependant on the stone for their livelihoods.

A gentle wind lifted plumes of grey dust from several distant crushers. The trails of stony-ash seemed a feeble parody of the fearful vista you would have seen here sixty-five million years earlier. The world was a very different place then, at a time when India was still a giant island, a slab of continental crust being conveyed towards latter-day Tibet by the convective motions of Earth's interior. But this was no island paradise; it was in fact a veritable Dante's inferno, a sterile hell of fire and brimstone at a pivotal point in the history of life on Earth.

Dinosaurs had dominated the planet for tens of million of years, methodically evolving and expanding into every available environment. In the air and sea and throughout the continents, these creatures ruled supreme. Their fossil remains bear testament to this throughout the world, bones and teeth petrified within the solidified mud, sand and clay that now form so much of our rocky landscape. But only up to a point, specifically a point in time, when something disastrous happened to the terrible lizards. They died, all of them. The asteroid that punctured the shallow sea near Chicxulub in the Mexican Yucatan was, without doubt, largely responsible for the extinction of most Cretaceous species. But was it the only culprit or was there some wider backdrop, a stage already set for change not by a rock falling from the heavens, but by molten rock from the heart of India?

I walked towards Wagholi's largest quarry, past obsolete pits, dappled with pools of jade water: utility and bathrooms rolled into one. A man had just finished rinsing a film of dust from his scarlet tractor, and was doing the same to himself. Others crouched nearby washing clothes and cookware, as a pied-kingfisher hung overhead in the warming air, scrutinising the water for its next meal. Local goat-herders used these unnatural watering holes too; driving their flocks here with sticks in hand and gaunt dogs at their side. Interconnecting ripples of daily life as frequent and humdrum as raindrops on a pond - this scene was being played out in thousands of quarries throughout the Deccan. Collectively though, this ripping out of the land's rocky flesh, to serve the modernising face of India, was but a scratch. Originally, the whole region was a vast rolling plateau: a million cubic kilometres of lava built from the bottom up in just half a million years; a wink-of-an-eye in the grand, geological scheme of things. About half of this outpouring has long since disappeared, carried away by the dendritic maze of monsoon-fed streams and rivers that rise in the Western Ghats. The Ghod, Krishna, Bhima, Godavari, and the Kadwa along with a thousand other rivers like them, all rise here, within geographical spitting-distance of the Arabian Sea. Amazingly, most turn away and flow eastwards over the sub-continent's entire width, energising the plains with enriching minerals, on their long journey to the Indian Ocean.

Clouds of choking dust erupted from the boar-holes, smothering the men as they calmly worked their drills. With no protection at all, they perched on narrow ledges, forcing rod after rod of steel, down into the lava. Holes for the shattering power of dynamite. With no ear protection, no dust masks or eye guards, and nothing in the way of protective clothing - this was total exposure to one of world's most hazardous occupations. It was a sepia scene: the rock, and the men with their cloth-covered heads and dust caked clothes, appearing before me like an animated photo from a bygone age. Another man slouched comfortably in the cabin of a truck, feeding the drills with compressed air along rubberised tubes that trailed up the quarry face, into blinding swirls of powder. I wondered how anyone could tolerate, or for that matter, survive such working conditions? In the tin and copper mines of Devon and Cornwall similar drills were euphemistically referred to as widow-makers. But that was during the industrial revolution, at a time when individuals' well-being usually came a poor second to profit. Had we learnt so little since then? I tried to rationalise that it was their job and that perhaps it was better to risk silicosis than hunger. Minutes before I had passed two infants sitting lethargically by a rattling crusher inches deep in fine basalt dust that rained down on them in eye-stinging wisps, painting their skin grey. Maybe it was as much a problem of education: this dust kills you know! Perhaps they did know, but either way it seemed absurd.

It has been said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and maybe this is so. Or perhaps it is said by those who know that knowledge is also about power and empowerment. I couldn't help thinking how powerless these remarkable people were to do anything other than live and work and probably die here without ever leaving the place. How utterly absurd it must have seemed, for me to come here out of a fixation with things volcanic and yet how utterly in keeping my pilgrimage was too. For India is replete with absurdities and impossible juxtapositions of poverty and wealth existing cheek by jowl, things that are beyond explanation - they just are. What better place to worship these great floods than in the very bowls of the stuff, but what use is it to know how and where and when? The Deccan is good stone to quarry and build with, and I know how to do this or that and it puts food in my mouth and in the mouths of my children - for this is my living. It was never actually spoken, rather it was much more a sense; a feeling of an underlying story, an unspoken resignation in a smile, a purposeful look, a pose of pride.

The prehistoric birth of the Deccan Traps was a protracted and violent affair. A time when glowing liquid rock forced its way up through the crust and spilled over the land, shaping and reshaping its facade time and again. But as with recent volcanic events - such as the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines - it was the accompanying dust and gas flung high into the atmosphere that may have had the most far-reaching effect on the ecology of the day. In Iceland in 1783 a 27 kilometre rift called the Laki fissure burst into life sending curtains of fire 1400 meters into the air. By the end of this eight-month-long event, 14 cubic kilometres of basalt had been added to the island. Yet it was the effects of the gases released that eventually led to famine and the deaths of a quarter of Iceland's population. That year a sulphurous, acidic fog spread across Europe reaching places as far afield as Italy and even Syria. Acid rained from the dimmed sky along with summer snow, and the following winter was one of the coldest on record. Such episodes seem dramatic enough and indeed they are, but to travel through the Deccan is to travel back through the ages to events immense in comparison.

A cooling breeze washed over me as I wandered aimlessly amongst seas of yellowed grass strewn with small islands of exposed basalt. The ground was flecked with nodules of banded agate and frenetic veines of quartz marking the rock like scribble on a blackboard. Distant chimes of cattle bells played in the air, against a natural adagio of whispering vegetation, bird song, and the hum of insects. It was wonderfully peaceful after the chaotic - in-your-face - throb of urban India. If volcanoes were once regarded as gateways to hell by some cultures then this place was a welcome contradiction. The plateau hill overlooking Aurangabad was typical of most in the Deccan - steep-sided with giant, weathered steps - each one a separate flood of lava. My walk had begun by a line of caves, honed into the basalt over a thousand years before. A petrological potpourri of Buddhist imagery chiselled into sacred places of prayer and offering. Only traces of the painted plaster that once covered the figures and decorative columns remains, hidden amongst the gloom. A few men proudly attend these ageing monuments, sweeping the floors clean and guiding visitors like mobile torches, using aluminium sheets to reflect the daylight into the dark, acrid atmosphere of history and stirring bats.

Blades of amber honeycomb dangled from the high lava crags, trailing invisible corridors of bees, threading to surrounding trees and cactus, meadowlands and springs. The hills were awash with hidden life, but only the human population was conspicuous now.

I tried to imagine how these viscous, yet inexorable flows, must have appeared so long ago. A burning and suffocating liquid-scape, of darkening rope-coiled crusts seething with escaping gases. Vulcan - Roman god of the underworld , whose name became synonymous with these fire mountains - must have been working overtime at his forge, for the flow would have seemed endless. Eventually the cooling lava turned to dark stone enshrouding frozen pockets of trapped gas that in time became saturated with mineral rich water, creating miniature Aladdin's caves, lined with crystals of quartz, calcite and zeolites. Natural treasures that are now being reaped by those who have learned that as much can be earned in a day gathering mineral specimens, as could be earned in a month gathering the basalt itself.

Below the caves, a pitted terrain of meandering gullies and dells unfolded into the distance: an unnatural scene gouged out by Aurangabad's local brick-makers. It seemed an apt circular story: the solidified lava having been eroded to soil over millions of years only to be mixed with ash and water, sun-dried and solidified once again in smouldering monolithic piles, laced with layered kindling and coal. Making bricks is nearly as back-breaking as quarrying stone and just as commonplace with hundreds of sites throughout the region. Each supports a little huddle of families who live, breathe and sleep amongst jumbled labyrinths of drying and fired blocks, with little hope of ever living in a house built of them. People who silently greet me with typical Indian warmth, beautiful faces with searching eyes, curious and proud. One man - his face as etched and weathered as his surroundings - shows me how he makes a brick. Dextrously kneed a dough-like ball of earth - a sprinkling of coal-ash and slam into an open toped wooden mould - flatten off by hand then invert the mould - and down onto the ground - a tap - and up comes the mould leaving a fresh, wet brick complete with diamond imprint, one more among tens of thousands drying in the smoky haze of dusk. Stripped branches pinned smouldering stacks of reddened bricks, supporting the slumping piles, as the vitrifying embers burnt away within. There seemed to be children everywhere, but maybe that was as much a point of view - a situation created by this stranger with a camera, honey to young smiling, wide eyed, soot-stained bees. Like most other children, full of wonder and mischief, eager to grow up into an ever-quickening world of change. India is now having to face the greatest challenge to its survival since the creation of the Deccan: overpopulation.

India is an ever deepening montage of history, a land awash with mythology and adventures - events coloured by the words of a billion telling voices charged with conflict and passion, love and damp, blood-stained earth. A social stratification as extensive and interconnected as the layered rocks on which this grand story is still being played out. It is a human failing to think of ourselves and our achievements as definitive proof of our superiority and dominance over nature, and each other. But it is a charade, for this command upon the land and rocks is fleeting. We are a single breath in the history of life, a state that can as easily be snuffed out by a fountain of lava as by a virus or even an asteroid from the gods. And yet, it is the precariousness of our existence and of those around us, which defines who we are. For the majority of Indians, survival is their priority even though most believe that life is preordained and set according to previous actions in past lives. Be it quarrying and shattering the rock into gravel and dust, or gathering its weathered remains and firing them back into artificial stone. All are a part of the same puzzle, which can never be complete or understood, though it may please us to try.

The Deccan Traps is a magical place of hidden secrets, buried within rocks - which may once have inflicted so much death - yet now are depended upon by so many for life. Perhaps the greatest irony is that humanity was born out of catastrophe. As history teaches us, such events can as quickly end an era as begin one. Ultimately, I had no more control over my destiny than any of the people I had met here amongst the rocks and soil, digging windows into our past.