Saturday 9th December 2006: Chittor

No long rants today. As anticipated, I’m in the venerable old fort town of Chittor, or Chittorgarh – the garh means house or fort, and the ‘Chittor’ component apparently stems from Chitrangar Maurya who is supposed to have founded the fort, back in the murky, undocumented past. In the cold light of substantiated fact, it seems to be accepted that there has been a fort at Chittor since the time of the Mauryas, which could well mean BCE, but certainly none of the present fort, save perhaps a temple tank here and a crumbling ruin there, dates from this sort of antiquity.

 Chittorgarh

   It is not my intention to write a historical study here, although somebody ought to do some serious research into the subject, as Chittor’s history is confused, largely anecdotal and, being Rajasthan, heavily romanticised. I must say, though, that exploring the fort after having read Maharana was a real pleasure. It was wonderful to traipse around the fantastic ruins of Maharana Kumbha’s palace while knowing that Kumbha was a sort of Rajasthani Lorenzo da Medici back in the 15th Century, and that maybe one of the higher up rooms in the palace was the site of nurse Panna’s great sacrifice. According to legend, a dastardly pretender to the throne, Bunbirs, had reached Chittor intending to slaughter the baby heir, Udai. Udai’s nurse, in a display of extraordinary loyalty to the princely family, replaced Udai with her own baby (conveniently the same age) so that Udai escaped death, and later in his career founded Udaipur. Bunbirs’ sole material contribution to posterity, on the other hand, seems to be an incomplete inner fort wall. It was also wonderful to know the significance of the Jaya Stambha (Tower of Victory) built by Kumbha after defeating, and later magnanimously releasing, a Muslim adversary (the Sultan of Malwa? There seems to be some disagreement as to his identity). It is supposedly an “architectural dictionary” of Hinduism, which also includes references to India’s other religions. It is an impressive structure and has beautiful views over the fort, but all I could decipher on the dictionary front were a few of Vishnu’s avatars. [16]

 Jaya Stambha

Detail from the Samideshwar Temple

   There are lots of temples in the fort, Hindu and Jain, many intricately carved and some surprisingly erotic in nature such as the Samideshwar temple, famously restored by Maharana Mokal Singh (Kumbha’s father) in 1427, which features a plethora of nubile dancing girls, from whom time’s cruel hands (as Kailash would say) have snatched limbs, heads, breasts and hands.
   One thing that is particularly striking – and this is something I have noticed time and time again in India in various ways – is that the fort, while technically “dead” since Akbar sacked it in 1567, it is in many respects still living. People still live inside the fort, and I don’t think this is just people in the tourist business as there are signs of agriculture. Moreover, many of the temples are still pilgrimage sites and have attracted the kitsch trappings of modern Hinduism – stalls selling snacks and coconuts and garish memorabilia, iconography and Shiva-knows what else. One temple is now associated with the mystic poet-musician Meerabai. She was a devotee of Krishna and married Rana Sanga’s son who died before his father, leaving Meerabai as a maltreated widow who was forced swallow poison (possibly connected with the second sack of Chittor at the hands of Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat and his Portuguese forces) but miraculously survived. Her temple has attracted a cult following. At the entrance to the temple was a sign outlining the various services offered to Meerabai devotees, exhorting them to give generously. There was some brash, almost African-sounding music coming from inside the temple – apparently Meerabai’s music – to which an old woman was half-heartedly banging some tinkling cymbals together while next to her a boy, maybe her grandson, was doing his homework. There is also a Jain dharamsala, where I was fed some delicious halwa and puris.
   Another thing that makes the fort special is its location, high on a hill above the city. There are consequently glorious views – the old town a jumble of small square houses, white, blue and green, and the modern part sprawling out in all directions. What amazes me in this kind of situation is the degree to which noise, like traffic, shouting and canned music, travels up to you as you look down on the sources, but then disappears immediately you move away from the edge.
   Moving back into the interior of the fort, and well back into the 2nd millennium AD, I visited the reconstructed water palace of Padmini, the beautiful Sri Lankan bride of Ratan Singh, who presided over Chittor during the first of its three sieges, in this case at the hands of Ala-ud-din Khalji, Sultan of Delhi in 1303. So taken was the Sultan by Padmini’s beauty, argues Brian Masters, that he offered to lift the siege in exchange for possession of her body. Ratan received the suggestion with righteous Rajput indignation, but eventually agreed to allow Ala-ud-din to look at her from a nearby vantage point through an elaborate set-up involving a mirror. This gentleman’s agreement turned out to be a ruse on the Sultan’s part, and he used the opportunity to seize Ratan as a captive. The terms of release were simple: hand over Padmini. The story now assumes opera-plot complexity - Padmini agrees to submit to Sultan Ala-ud-din but insists on being accompanied by her retinue of purdah-screened woman, and as Ratan bids his spouse a final, tearful farewell, the purdah curtains open to reveal an army of Rajput soldiers. A desperate battle ensues, with an initial victory to the Rajputs. Ala-ud-din retreats, humiliated, but darkly plotting to renew the attack. Ratan, naturally, is plagued by awful visions and sends each of his sons out to fight to the death, believing this to be the only way of preserving his supremacy over Chittor. The final scene is a heroic jauhar (mass suicide) of Rajput men and women who realised that it was, realistically, only a matter of time before Ala-ud-din would conquer Chittor. The women threw themselves and their children onto a vast funeral pyre and their husbands smeared themselves with their wives’ ashes and went out on one last reckless assault on the enemy. Ala-ud-din’s army won  hands down, but the Sultan received the ultimate humiliation of inheriting a ghost town and of being unable to increase his harem by even one iota. Nevertheless, he added Chittor to his empire, and it was only in 1326 that Rajputs, under Maharana Hamir Singh, were able to wrestle it out of his control.
   I left off my explorations at the water palace and so I will break off now. I’m looking forward to continuing tomorrow. One small postscript: I wrote the preceding pages over two cups of deliciously sweet Indian coffee in “Dhoom”, the shack-like restaurant next to my hotel. I’ve now come back to my room to be reminded how grotty it is. Somebody in a room nearby has a “March of the Toreadors” ringtone, which will seriously impinge on my mental well-being if it is allowed to continue much longer. But I don’t mind it all, because it represents freedom, independence, exploration!

Footnotes

[16] Vishnu, the preserver, came down to earth not once, but numerous times, whenever mankind was in trouble. There are ten principal avatars (incarnations) including a fish, a tortoise, a man-lion, the epic hero Rama and Krishna, the greatest of all. Some Hindus include the Buddha as one of the ten incarnations, and all are agreed that the tenth, Kalki, is yet to come.

Next Post - Sunday 10th December 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Saturday 10th December 2011)