India
Page 7
The Durbar Hall is imposing and grand and dwarfed by two huge chandeliers, each weighing three and half tonnes. They were considered to be the largest chandeliers in the world when this palace was in its heyday. The story goes that ten elephants were taken on to the roof by means of a 500 metre long earth ramp to test the strength of the building before the chandeliers were hung. Quite a lot of the glass throughout was made in Murano famous for its Venetian glass. It is all in good condition and the huge reception rooms are impressive but, for me, not amazing because they resembled so many European, Italian Baroque or British palaces. One of the eye-catching treasures is an electrically driven silver train with cut glass wagons which served guests as it moved around on miniature silver rails on the huge dining table. This I had heard of from my father and other people, it brought a whole new dimension to ‘passing the port’ or more likely the whisky in India. There is also a silver set of bedroom furniture and Venetian glass was used for cradles and fountains in the courtyard; a Venetian cut glass swing which is used by the Scindia family to celebrate Lord Krishna’s birthday must be unique. The Prince of Wales visited Gwalior in 1875 with an entourage of a thousand, which must have been a logistical nightmare for the family retainers and servants. The grand staircase taking one up to the Durbar Hall has Venetian glass banisters and a huge red glass chandelier. Venice must have made a huge impression on the designer of Jai Vilas.
It is an interesting museum and palace with odd corners that are fascinating and others that are just resting places for dusty relics of a bygone age. Because our museums and ancient houses in the UK are so well maintained and project the past so well I want that for their equivalent in India, but they must want it too and perhaps at the moment people have yet to have a comprehensive ‘feel good’ factor before they have a true respect for the past.
As we were going round, a large party of teenage school children entered and behaved in the customary way of all school parties, unless they are very controlled. They appeared to be interested in why we found it all so worthy of interest, but then some of the teenage boys spoke slightly disrespectfully and jostled me and Vakil exploded, so did I because I know a cheeky child when I see one, and in India never tolerate any nonsense; so I answered them crisply in Hindi, which provoked shocked silence. Usually, I have no gender challenges and, particularly now that I am in middle age, but, sadly, there are plenty who try to denigrate the female in India, particularly western women or girls. Some of this behaviour has been the response to foolish westerners wearing totally unsuitable clothing and their inappropriate behaviour. Indian youth at a certain level seem to have formed the opinion that all European women are loose with no morals and easy prey for ‘eve teasing’. For this reason if anybody tries anything impertinent with me I react very severely whatever their age or circumstances. Apparently, American films with blatant sex grittily displayed are the reason. I am not so sure; to me it is an easy excuse. India is still looking at and reflecting on the fact that huge numbers of women are poorly treated and given no respect and exploited both within their homes and certainly in the outside world. Domestic violence is a huge issue as is female child exploitation and slavery of little girls. These are ugly issues with which this huge country must come to terms and change their culture. Atrocities against women, especially under-aged girls will never end unless women themselves really want it to. Behind every flagrant violation there is always another woman in the background abetting the violation. Women’s organisations and a free press and all sorts of courageous people do speak up about these issues, but the Indian Government must take drastic steps and demonstrate to all levels of their society that they will not be seen as a modern respected country whilst there is any denigration of the female sex or barbaric customs like slavery. Political lip service is contemptible and most Indians see through that as it is. Mala Sen attacked this huge ugly problem in her book Death by Fire which talks of dowry death, female infanticide and widow burning or sati. It was very courageous of her to tackle such a controversial subject, but as her first book, India’s Bandit Queen, the true story of Phoolan Devi, was also controversial, one realises she has the determination and commitment to stand up and be counted amongst her own countrymen and women. There are many such women throughout India but I assure you it must take enormous strength of character, particularly if the person continues to live in India and face the male hostility around her. All the progress made by India in various spheres will fade away and become meaningless whilst slavery is condoned in any form; how can India’s political leaders even think of buying luxury aircraft to swan around the world to promote a supposed democracy when there is still a traffic in flesh of under-age females.
What I find so maddening about it is that the women perpetuate this lack of respect at certain levels of society by their indulgence of their male children. Since time immemorial, indulgent Indian mothers have lavished unquestioning love and devotion on baby boys growing into little boys into teenage youth and then spoilt young men. It would be quite understandable to say ‘well this is how it was’ but I know it is not dharma, i.e., duty, respect for convention, therefore this should change. The societies and countries where women are suppressed or humiliated or prevented from achieving are the societies in which currently democracy, a respect for the truth and a realistic approach to modernisation are extinguished, presumably because the men in those cultures feel threatened. Most of those countries have not developed well and once their various revenues are exhausted will have very little with which to satisfy their countrymen. What does it say for all those men? I am bemused because, of course, we all know that Sri Lanka followed by India were countries to have two of the first female prime ministers, the others being Israel and then Great Britain. Since then, women have largely taken their rightful place in the politics of their various nations. There is one further point related to this and then I will leave it; India has so many goddesses in the Hindu pantheon, the Ganges is Mother Ganga, India is thought of as a mother land, and the deity who bestows good fortune is after all a goddess, plus of course the deity responsible for death is a goddess!
Graham and I enjoyed ourselves and my photographs have come out very well. Vakil had so much to offer us that we had to eliminate some options. However, I also recommend the Sarod Ghar which is the beautiful ancestral home of the Bagnash family which is architecturally elegant, full of sculptural detail and well maintained. The family flourishes and the museum traces the rich musical legacy for which modern Gwalior is famous. This is a Muslim heritage and can trace its origins to the fame of Tansen who was the favourite musician of the Moghul Emperor Akbar, and the formation of the first formal school of Indian music was established in the palace of Man Singh. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Scindia family continued the tradition of royal patronage of the arts and music. The Bagnash family were very talented and a new instrument was born called the sarod. The sarod is a wooden plucked instrument and, as one wanders round the museum, recordings of sarod music give one a sense of the wealth of Indian classical music and its complexities.
The Scindia Chhatris are a short distance away and another form of egotistical memorial to the family’s wealth and importance. Somehow, these chhatris reminded one of the Medici chapel and mausoleum in Florence. Since the beginning of time mankind has sought to secure his place in history by building mausoleums and these are not different. The carvings depict the regal lifestyle of a king and the little stone elephants beautifully carved with intricate detail surround the platform presumably to symbolise the power and wealth of the maharaja, but then there are panels depicting the life of the God Krishna surrounded by his many beauties and, of course, marble life-sized effigies of the maharajah and his three wives.
If you are interested it is possible to drive to Shivpuri, which was the former summer capital of the Scindias, 114 km south west of Gwalior where there are some more royal chhatris. Apparently, it is quite atmospheric in the evening when devotional music is pla
yed. I, however, did not consider it worth a day’s visit and consulted Vakil who had been scheduled to take us there. He was so glad that I had this feeling because, of course, he has to do what he is told unless the client changes the itinerary. He feels that Shivpuri is overrated and was delighted that we had other more constructive plans, though sadly he would not be part of them as those destinations were quite far away from Gwalior. It could be that Shivpuri will have an injection of life with renovation and perhaps the little local national park will be reviewed and more species translocated to it but, currently, a whole day wasted would vex the average traveller, yet lots of guide books and tour companies persist in including it. I, however, knew about Sonagiri and Datia, and these are two places of which I will speak once we have thoroughly explored Gwalior. In Britain most of the travel companies are not knowledgeable about these two significant historic sites that can be visited one after the other as they are almost adjacent to each other.
Gwalior Fort is quite simply stunning and immense. However you approach Gwalior whether it be by air, rail or road, the ancient fortress dominates the scene as it has done for the past 1500 years. Rising sharply from the flat, arid plain is a 300 foot rocky escarpment of a very strong sandstone formation, and almost growing out of the surface and hardly distinguishable from the rock itself is the Fortress of Gwalior. It must have stood for hundreds of years like a great sentinel at the crossroads of India dominating a divide between the fertile plains of the north and the scrub lands of central India. All through Rajasthan, there are similar citadels and fortresses but this is huge, one and three quarter miles long, i.e., three km long from north to south, and 600 to 2,800 feet, i.e., 200 metres to 900 metres wide, the fort encompasses six palaces, three temples and several water tanks as well as a private boys’ school and a new Sikh gurudwara.
Driving up a steep road through the gorge of the Urwahi valley, one passes a line of rock-cut Jain statues along the way. These are huge and actually better seen from a distance. The son et lumière which takes place at night is very effective and the narrative traces the history and culture of the fort accompanied by Indian music and, in the coloured lights, the whole place is romanticised making modern Gwalior a nonentity in the dark.
The earliest historical mention of the fort is found in an inscription on a temple of the sun built on the cliff top by Matricheta in the 15th year of the Huna conqueror Mihirakila, circa 525 AD. Legend has it that Suraj Sen a Rajput chieftain from Kotwal about 25 miles, i.e., 40 km, north of Gwalior, who suffered from leprosy, was out hunting one day and became separated from his followers. Climbing to the summit of the cliff on which the fortress now stands to try and locate his men, he met an old man called Gwalipa, who gave the thirsty chief a drink from the tank (water hole) near his hut. To the astonishment of the chieftain he was immediately cured of his disease and in return asked the sage to name a reward. He was instructed to enlarge and beautify the tank and to build a fortress on the hill. Suraj Sen immediately fulfilled the wise man’s request and called the fort Gwaliawar, i.e., a boon or gift given by Gwalia or Gwalipa the wise man. The old man apparently was so flattered that he in turn renamed Suraj Sen Surajpal prophesying that his line should rule over the region until a prince should succeed whose name did not end in ‘Pal’.
Gwalior Fort
Three hundred and fifty years later, Gwalior was part of the kingdom of Kanauj, then under the powerful Pratihara King Mihira Bhoja who ruled over the greater part of India in that time. There are two inscriptions on the Chaturbhuj temple dated 875 and 876 to corroborate this. Gwalior continued to be ruled by Rajput dynasties, one of which the Kachhawahas, ruled over Gwalior for nearly two centuries and brought peace with the building of temples on the fort itself and in the neighbouring countryside. In 1232, Gwalior passed from the possession of another line of Pratiharas to Muslim rulers who had besieged the fort and vanquished the Rajputs. The royal ladies committed jauhar, the act of self-immolation rather than fall into the hands of Iltutmish’s advancing army. To put it in context, Muhammad Ghuri had invaded India successfully but was assassinated in 1206, and though his kingdom did not survive in Afghanistan, his Indian provinces and the forts and palaces like that at Gwalior remained more or less intact in the hands of his Turkish general Qutb-ud-din Aibak. This ex-slave, who founded the Delhi Sultanate or The Slave Dynasty, was the first major Muslim ruler of the subcontinent. Gwalior remained in the possession of the Muslim rulers of Delhi from 1232 to 1398 but, during the confusion which followed yet another invasion of India by Timur (Tamerlane), the Tughluq dynasty came to an end and Gwalior reverted to Rajput rule.
Rajput rule flourished throughout the fifteenth and some of the sixteenth centuries. It was during this time that most of the rock-cut Jain sculptures on the path leading up to the plateau were carved. The Tomar ruler Raja Man Sing who lived from 1486 to 1516 is especially remembered for his love of music and architecture. Shortly after Man Singh’s death the fort was vanquished by Ibrahim Lodi and then it passed to the Moghuls when they succeeded the Lodi dynasty in Delhi. Under the Moghuls, it was regularly used as a prison and one of its prisoners was the younger brother of the Emperor Aurangzeb who had this particular brother killed by slow poisoning; he took sibling rivalry to new heights if one considered he killed his eldest brother and presented his head on a platter to his father Shah Jahan, whom he had imprisoned in the Red Fort at Agra.
Stone Statue outside Gwalior Fort
In the mid eighteenth century the Marathas conquered the fort and the stronghold passed from victor to victor and the connection with the Scindia family starts from 1777. Rather surprisingly the British captured the fort in 1780 but handed it back to Chhatrapati Singh of Gohad. The Scindias retook the fort in 1783 only to have the British bombard and capture the fort again in 1804; however, it was restored to the Scindia family in 1805.
The Man Singh palace known as the Man Mandir is the finest of the six palaces and considered a remarkable and interesting example of a Hindu palace of an early age. The vast eastern front which measures approximately 100 metres in length and about 30 metres in height is relieved at regular intervals by six round towers crowned with domed cupolas. The southern face of Man Singh’s palace is about 50 metres long and 20 metres high with three graceful towers. The entire palace wall is inlaid with enamelled tiles of blue, green and yellow, forming bands of mosaic, and depicts figures of men, ducks, elephants, tigers and plantain trees. On such a massive structure, it just gives a touch of delicacy and attention to detail. The main building is two storeys high, but there are three underground floors of apartments in the eastern section. It was here, in these gloomy, though amazingly well ventilated dungeons, which to my unease were full of squeaking bats, that the various prisoners were kept chained to massive pillars. Aurangzeb’s brother Murad met a slow death by poppy poisoning, which saps the vitality and finally drives the victim mad.
I felt rather claustrophobic, partly, I suspect, because of the lingering chest infection, but I urged Graham and Vakil to take as long as they liked and I went and sat on a rampart and looked at all that was going on around me. A young boy approached me in a nice manner and we began a conversation, partly in Hindi and partly in English. Pawan was a delight, eager but not pushy. He is fatherless and he sells postcards at the fort in the afternoon to help the family but attends school in the mornings. We bought some of his postcards just to help; he would not have just accepted the money alone. Vakil obviously has a soft spot for him and talked of him with affection. It is when one meets young folk like that one yearns to help in a more substantial way; well we do through recognised charities sponsor children, grandparents and whole families, but an encounter like that touches the heart and the impulsive response is to give, but then where does one stop? Graham and I do not have infinite resources like most of us.
The palace next in order of merit is the Gujari Mahal standing at the foot of the fort rock, but within the lower fortifications. After entering the Badal Mahal gate,
turn to the right and pass through two more gates and one comes face to face with Gujari Mahal. This was built by Raja Man Singh for his favourite queen, Mriganayana, a Gujari by caste. The legend goes that Man Singh was out hunting one day some miles from Gwalior when he encountered the beautiful, but low-born, Mriganayana and asked her to marry him. She would only consent on condition that he brought the waters that flowed by her beloved village to the palace he wished her to occupy. Nothing daunted, Man Singh built an underground channel which conveyed the stream, famous for its purity and curative properties, to the Gujari Mahal, which takes its name from Mriganayana’s caste.
The Gujari Mahal is now the Museum. It has a plain exterior and is relieved by domed turrets. The configuration of the rooms is ideal because there are double-storey galleries that open into a courtyard which must have been life-saving in the intense heat of summer. It is well worth a visit because of all the antiquities housed in it and on the roof. The other two Hindu palaces and the two Muslim palaces are of little interest. There are numerous old temples on the fort but the major ones are the Gwalipa, Chaturbhuj, Larger and Smaller Sas Bahu, Mata Devi, the Jain temple and the Teli-ka Mandir.
The Sas Bahu Temples occupy a prominent position on the eastern face of the hill. Sas Bahu means mother in law and daughter in law, and is a popular name given to two similar objects such as temples, wells, etc., standing side by side. These are Hindu temples, not Jain as was widely thought. The larger one is dedicated to Vishnu. The doorway leading into the shrine is elaborately carved. Overhead, are the three principal Gods of the Hindu trimurthi, Brahma, the creator, at the left, Vishnu, the preserver, in the middle and Siva, the destroyer, on the right. Vishnu occupies the central position being the deity to whom the temple was dedicated. The smaller temple is also a shrine to Vishnu and, though quite small, is a very good example of the ornate style of temple architecture of the mediaeval age.