Monday 26th February 2007: Junagadh

After a day and a half in Junagadh, I can say without reservation that on first impressions it is one of the loveliest places I have been to on this trip. Of course, I cannot judge it on the same plane as Udaipur and neither can I quite rank it with Jodhpur, but for sheer charm, beauty, friendliness and historic interest, I can easily put it right near the top of the list. I arrived yesterday, from Diu, and checked into my hotel, the Madhuvanti, which, while as budget as the others I have stayed in (Rs 150 per night) is far pleasanter, with a clean, spacious, marble-floored room that looks out onto an open courtyard. The staff are a breath of delightful fresh air after the morose staff of the Jay Shankar in Diu town. I had lunch in a cheap thali joint across the road from the hotel and made the acquaintance of the owner’s son, Shyam, who took me for a ride on his motorbike up to a nearby damn where we fed fish with peanuts. We spoke mainly in Hindi but got on well enough nonetheless, and he invited me to come out with his friends that evening.

Junagadh

   I spent the afternoon wandering around the central, older part of the town, which has lots of beautiful buildings dating from the time when Junagadh was ruled by a series of Nawabs – breakaway Muslim rulers from the Mughal Empire – as an independent Princely State. The streets have the same timeless feel as Bhavnagar and people are even friendlier – everybody seems desperate to know “What is your name?”, “Which place from you?”, “You countries?” and beckon you over from afar for a chat. A large part of the town is Muslim-dominated and it was here, in a little room behind an egg stall, that I saw a boy murdering chickens. This was grotesquely fascinating rather than horrifying, and certainly not enough to turn me away from the path of carnivory. After a very spicy paneer chilly and butter naan for supper, I joined Shyam and his friends. We set off on bikes to a spot slightly out of town where they smoked, and I entertained them as best I could. It reminded me a very little of nights by Fateh Sagar – although we were sans lake, sans chai and, naturally, sans Shiv, Prakash, Vishal et al. – and made me rather nostalgic for Udaipur. But, evening chill aside, it was good harmless fun (aside from the passive smoking) and we’ve arranged to meet for “hard drinks” tomorrow night. I regard drinking contraband as an essential part of the “Gujarat Experience”!
   Today I’ve been mainly alone and rather guidebookish and cultural. Now I’m faced with a choice: do I try to summarise what I’ve learnt about Junagadhi history, or drop it in, piecemeal, as I go along? As I am not a historian, and this is no historical essay, I feel I have no right but to opt for the latter. My first visit was to Uperkot Fort, which, according to the Lonely Planet, is believed to have been originally built by Chandragupta Maurya in 319BC but then extended many times. The Maurya Empire certainly extended to this part of Gujarat, so there is no immediate reason to disparage this theory. In its current state the fort is an exotic place, because either side of the outer walls is a jungle-like growth, making it seem millennia old, although these walls, in the generic North Indian castellated style, are probably not more than 500 – 800 years old at a guess.

Uperkot Fort

   I spent a leisurely morning wandering round the fort, which proved rewarding. There is a defunct Jama Masjid built out of Hindu temple materials, with Hindu-style pillars, Islamic-style pointed arches and three octagonal roof openings. It was built in the 15th Century, during which time I suppose Junagadh was part of the Ahmedabad Sultanate. Another set of relics from this time are some Turkish cannons. They are chiefly interesting because they were left on Diu by the defeated Turkish army whom Bahadur Shah of Gujarat hired in 1538 to fight off the Portuguese (whom he himself had employed three years earlier when he sacked Chittor!) How they ended up here I am not altogether sure.
   The gems of the Uperkot collection for me were the two magnificent step wells. Navghan Kuvo, the first I visited, was named after Ra’ Navghan, the Hindu ruler of Junagadh from 1025-44 [26]. It is suspected – and I should admit here that most of my knowledge comes from the Gujarat Tourist Department boards outside each monument – it is suspected that Ra’ Navghan only added the forecourt to a much earlier structure. Whatever the truth of this, or otherwise, the well itself is terrifyingly deep, maybe 80m or so, and is surrounded by a dark stone staircase, leading right down to the dank, garbage-filled bottom. Down there, I reflected wryly, if nervously, that it would be a perfect place for thieves to lurk, perhaps in cahoots with the nimbu paani seller at the top, who could advance slowly down after an unsuspecting tourist, leaving him trapped, many metres underground! Less unnerving, but with a drama of its own, is Adi Chadi, a well reached by a straight diagonal staircase sandwiched in a narrow gorge. It is much lighter at the bottom and may be even older than Navghan Kuvo.

Navghan Kuvo

    One relic of the Maurya/Buddhist period is the complex of second century caves, although at Rs 100 for foreigner entry, I decided to give them a miss. Outside the fort I did visit the Ashokan edicts, which are one of Junagadh’s prize draws. The great Emperor Ashoka, who ruled the Maurya empire at its peak in the 3rd Century BC, is said to have converted to Buddhism as a reaction to the shock he felt after realising the full carnage he had unleashed while fighting the Kalingas in Orissa. To celebrate
his new moral outlook he erected stupas and rock-carved edicts all over his empire and Junagadh has a large boulder sprinkled with inscriptions in Pali [27], first noted by James Tod (of Udaipur fame) in 1822 and translated several years later by James Prinsep.
   These edicts mainly deal with morality, which (amongst other virtues) covers vegetarianism, respect to one’s parents, generosity to friends and kindness to Brahmins. Ashoka, who refers to himself as Devanampuja Das Raja, also mentions that he makes “morality tours”, not “pleasure tours” (I guess my trip to India is a bit of both) and that he desires fame only as a means of spreading morality (10th edict). In the 13th edict he describes the slaughter of the Kalingas. The Pali script is not joined up and looks faintly child-like. There are also some Sanskrit inscriptions by later Mauryas, including Skandagupta (5th Century AD) who is mainly preoccupied with lake management and the appointment of a governor for the region. He comes across as rather self-congratulatory.
    A world away from this are the mausolea of the Nawabs. These Nawabs belonged to an Afghan community called the Babi. At some point (I assume in the late 16th Century, judging by Ahmedabadi history) the Mughals would have taken control of the region from the Ahmedabad Sultanate, although there seems to be no obvious architectural legacy from this time. As the empire disintegrated in the 18th Century, the vassal administrators took advantage, and in 1748 Mohammad Bahadur Sher Khan declared himself the first Nawab of Junagadh. There is one collection of tombs, rather tasteful, in which the earlier Nawabs are buried. Like so many things in India, these “dead monuments” still support living tradition and there appear to be several functioning dargahs (Sufi shrines) here. The sixth, seventh and eighth Nawabs are all buried in an Indo-Islamic-Gothic monstrosity of pillars and bubbling domes, started by the sixth Nawab (Mahobat Khanji II) in 1878 and completed by the seventh (Bahadur Khanji II) in 1892. It is a perfect expression of decadence in architecture. Next to this is the almost-as-opulent tomb of a former Prime Minister of Junagadh State, Sheik Bahauddin (in power 1891-96). He apparently built a Bahauddin College in Junagadh, although I haven’t seen it.

"Decadence in architecture": the Nawab Khanjis' Mausoleum

   A visit to the Durbar Hall museum put some flesh on the lives of the Nawabs. Here, the original Durbar Hall has been recreated with the usual extravagances – chandeliers from all over Europe, silver paan-boxes and portraits galore. The last Nawab, Mahobat Khanji III (ruled 1911-47) tried to bring Junagadh into Pakistan, but was outvoted by the Hindu majority in his state. I assume his descendents (if indeed there are any alive today) still live in Pakistan [28]. Interestingly, much of the rest of Saurashtra was ruled by different Rajput clans before Independence. A number of these Princely States were ruled by branches of the Jhalla clan, who lorded it over Devigarh!
  Like Anand, and I believe most towns in Gujarat, Junagadh has a Swaminarayan temple. It is colourful, with a marble floor and outside I saw a saddhu on a mobile phone – this is modern India, after all! There is a modest Indo-Saracenic pile of a Swaminarayan college on the outskirts of town which I passed on a pleasant sunset walk, before paneer fried rice for supper at a Hotel Sagar.

Footnotes:

[26] I later found out that Ra’ Navghan was part of the Chudasama dynasty that ruled “Sorath”, a kingdom that included Junagadh, Porbandar and the surrounding area, between 875 and 1472, although in the latter stages as a vassal of the Ahmedabad Sultanate.

[27] Pali is an Indo-Aryan prakrit (vernacular language) that has survived principally as the literary language of the earliest Buddhist writings. Its relation to living languages of the first centuries BC is not entirely clear.

[28] I have subsequently read that the last dewan (Prime Minister) of Junagadh, Shah Nawaz Bhutto, left for Sindh in Pakistan after setting in motion the troubled accession of Junagadh into independent India. His son was the much more famous Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, one time President and also Prime Minister of Pakistan, founder of the Pakistan People’s Party and father of Benazir Bhutto.