The Heat and Dust Project

by Saurav Jha

  The weight of our arguments and our heavy rucksacks seem to have the desired effect. The man shuffles towards us unhappily and unlocks the doors. As he opens the guest ledger and advances it towards us, he says: ‘I thought you were a couple of those foreigners, you see. Last week two ran away without paying me.’

  As it turns out, Junagadh isn’t on the backpacking circuit and establishments here don’t particularly fancy hippyish travellers like, say, in some circuits in Rajasthan. Our petition in Hindi convinces them that we aren’t like ‘those foreigners’ – the ganja and dreadlocks variety – and a room is quickly made available.

  It is on the second storey, to be accessed by a spiral stairway from the courtyard, and worth all the trouble. It has marble floors that give an instant clean, light feel though on close inspection, D finds the curtains are dirty and the plaster is peeling. It has three mattresses in all, one double and two singles, with the one by the window giving a view of the Girnar range. The mattresses are laid on concrete plinths rather than on wooden beds. Predictably, we crash out on them and go to sleep.

  15 January 2010, 11:45 a.m.

  After we wake up and drink tea (it takes a very long time to come), we have occasion to investigate the premises. If the black-and-white courtyard outside is promising now, one can imagine how it must be in the evening when stars appear in the sky. The windows of the room open on to a bustling street. There is a tea shop and a snack shop, both doing brisk business through the day. The pop of frying travels upwards, along with the aroma of chickpeas, that most favoured ingredient in Gujarat. But what delights D most is the gentle fragrance that wafts in from somewhere. ‘See, can you smell that?’ she asks me, repeatedly, until I admit to a fine, sweet, slightly fruity note in the air. ‘It must mean there are good spirits in the vicinity,’ she announces, launching into a story about a saintly ghost who lived in a tree in the corner of the courtyard in her grandfather’s house in Jharkhand and filled the place with a scent of wild flowers and sweet incense on certain nights. Later on in the evening, we would, however, ascertain a more earthly source for the fragrance. There is a small shop selling ice-cream soda, with multicoloured bottles lined up on the counter.

  15 January 2010, 1:30 p.m.

  Our necks feel the sun as we walk through Junagadh, familiarizing ourselves with the landmarks near our hotel. We walk down Jayshree Road, wondering aloud who this Jayshree might have been, and then up and down Police Lines. The winter sun in Saurashtra – Kathiawar – is just as deceptively bright as its night is cold. The name Kathiawar comes from two communities that in Indian census-speak have ‘dominated’ this region for centuries – the Kathis and the Ahirs. Interestingly, both the Kathis and the Ahirs of the Kathiawar region are claimed by some British historians to be of Scythian origin. The Kathis, who are Suryavanshi Rajputs, however, maintain that they are descended from Kush and are originally from Rajasthan, whereas the Kathiawari Ahirs, like those in Haryana, consider themselves Yadavs. The Kathis, therefore, are closely linked to the Kachhwahas of Dhundhar who also consider themselves descendants of Kush. One often hears in TV studio discussions, especially in the context of elections, a passing reference to ‘Ahir’ as a term by which the Yadavs of Haryana and western UP are known. But while this is not incorrect, the fact is, across India, Ahirs consider themselves Yadavs and trace their ancestry to the ancient Abhira tribe, Ahir being a prakritization of the Sanskrit word Abhira.

  So the Abhiras or Ahirs are not limited to the regions surrounding Delhi, but are spread throughout India, including the Deccan, where they are known as Gavlis (the notorious gangster Arun Gavli belongs to this denomination), derived from the term Gvala or cowherd. And though their customs reflect a great degree of localization, marriages between Ahirs from different regions of India are not at all uncommon. A point often missed by region-centric analysis of India’s polity is the deep intra-caste linkages that exist, reinforced through caste endogamy but regional exogamy. For instance, the pan-Indian network of chamars has allowed the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to create a presence in states like Maharashtra and Karnataka which are not even contiguous with Uttar Pradesh.

  ‘Do you have a headache? I have a headache,’ D says, looking to see if a cake shop is around. ‘I think you are hungry,’ I say, trying to shift the conversation from the specific to the general. ‘It’s time we got some lunch.’ The Barmer incident is still quite fresh in our minds and there is unlikely to be any German (or fancy) bakery in Junagadh either.

  Instead, what we have is a place that describes itself as a Thali Palace.

  D relents. ‘Alright, might as well. Have it your way, fine. Lunch.’ The restaurant has a one-page menu listing various thalis mostly priced at Rs 50. Since this is to be one of our two meals for the day, we agree to order one each. I settle for a Gujarati one whereas D opts for the Punjabi. (Usually, I’m the one who makes a big song and dance about trying out new stuff but D turns out vindicated at the end, having made her usual effective choices. Today, however, my Gujarati thali is quite good. Errs on the side of too sweet, but good enough. And plentiful. Unlimited jeera rice and parathas.)

  ‘Can you finish my paratha? I’ll just have the sweet now,’ says D, pushing her thali towards me. I have already availed myself fully of the unlimited clause, but I barely lift my face while acquiescing.

  ‘Anyway,’ I say, after all the food has been attended to, ‘the walk to Uparkot should burn some of that.’

  15 January 2010, 4 p.m.

  Uparkot rises out of the end of a street lined with ornately carved houses in the Kathiawari style, at the edge of the old quarter of Junagadh. It is to Uparkot that Junagadh, which means ‘old fort’, literally owes its name: the former has been around for over 2,000 years now. First built in 319 bc by Chandragupta Maurya to mark one of the western outposts of his dynasty’s pan-Indian empire, Uparkot hill is only 2 kilometres away from his grandson Ashoka’s famous rock edict of Girnar, which is considered the first of his rock edicts stretching from Kandahar to Guwahati. The title of ‘major’ is appended because the group of edicts one is dealing with here touches upon diverse subjects related to statecraft, including, as it happens, sustainable irrigation systems.

  Perhaps taking their cue from the Mauryans, subsequent rulers of Uparkot laid a lot of emphasis on water management – the key to Uparkot’s two millennia of inhabitation, broken only once for a period of 300 years between the sixth and tenth centuries.

  The signature water preservation structures in the fort complex are a couple of giant step wells, baolis as they are known in many parts of India. The younger of the two, Adi Kadi Vav, draws its name from two servant girls of the then Chalukya (or Solanki) royal palace who had agreed to be sacrificed so that groundwater could fill the well, as per the advice of royal priests who deemed the sacrifice of two virgins mandatory for this to take place. Apparently their belief wasn’t unfounded and water did indeed burst forth from the sated earth, and locals to this day celebrate the sacrifice of Adi and Kadi by hanging bangles and saris at the entrance of this massive structure hewn out of rock.

  Much older than the Adi Kadi Vav and born in less unfortunate circumstances is probably the oldest step well in India, Navghan Kuvo, built by Raja Navghan of the Chudasama royal family almost a thousand years ago (although some historians believe work on it may have been started even earlier, by an ancestor to the king who built Adi Kadi Vav). The Chudasamas of Junagadh consider themselves to be Ahirs, and descendants of the Abhira tribe.

  These two step wells perhaps represent the highest architectural achievements of Chudasama rule. During this time, Uparkot was attacked many times (sixteen incursions have been recorded), with one siege lasting over a decade. And it is Navghan Kuvo that often hid defending armies, who would then creep out at night to reduce any unsuspecting ingressing forces.

  Standing at the fore courtyard of Navghan Kuvo, we look at numerous pigeonholes hewn into the rock face,
perpendicular to the stepped archway entrance of the baoli, almost as if a book written in braille has been made to stand on its spire. To the right of this entrance is a gallery hewn from rock, which allows one to peer down into the well shaft of the baoli. ‘Go in, go in,’ a man in traditional Kathiawari headgear, sitting with his daughter, says to me cheerfully. It is an odd moment. It is as if he knows that I will find something I have been looking for. Something that I may even deserve to.

  I ask D to remain upstairs and clamber down the stairs alone. There are some young men standing outside the Kuvo. They look at me expectantly, perhaps hoping that I might find something that is report-worthy. As I head straight down at an acute angle, it is clear that the staircase begins to curve round the shaft of the baoli, greying and weathered. I descend the stairs and feel the warmth of the sun fade away. I reach the landing at the bottom of the first flight of stairs and round the bend to see the well shaft through a gallery opening and find the young men still peering down at me, although now with the sun on their backs, their faces obscured.

  Navghan Kuvo has a rather unique design among step wells in India, in that it has a single stairway that bends round a squarish well shaft, all the way to the bottom. The landing after each flight of stairs is just that, and not a full-fledged storey that in more ornate step wells provides pillared ledges which serve as balconies around the shaft. This step well is hewn from soft rock and is given constructed support only in very few places, with just one gallery opening on each storey and the well shaft’s wall on three sides. Navghan Kuvo was clearly not designed to double up as a place for social hang-outs besides being a water conservation structure, as many other intricately designed baolis were.

  At the third storey, I hear a flopping sound behind me, amplified in this old vertical cavern, but I don’t see anything when I glance over my shoulder. Maybe Navghan Kuvo is a hang-out after all. For the ghosts of Chudasama soldiers who must have hidden here during countless sieges, waiting to chop off the heads of unsuspecting enemy scouts.

  I hear the sound again and turn abruptly, only to find a pigeon hopping down the stairs right behind me. It halts momentarily on a step above me. It looks up with its head tilted ever so slightly, but then resumes its descent and goes past me. After a few steps, it reaches the landing and disappears round the bend. Well, it’s at least a hang-out for pigeons. They don’t seem to mind the lack of carvings and engravings that characterize other baolis.

  According to the Silpa Sutras, a baoli is supposed to be like an underground sanctum sanctorum, or garbha griha, with the storeys embellished with sculptures of devis and devatas, replicating the ambience of a shrine in an ecologically sensitive structure of civic utility. And make no mistake, Navghan Kuvo is also a shrine. It is a shrine to its deity: water. There are no delicate niches, no balconies, and no carvings to pause and mull over. It is a primeval pilgrimage that puts beyond belief the civilizational article of faith that is water.

  As I walk down the last few steps to reach the bottom landing, where the pool of the baoli resides, there is very little light to discern anything on the walls. This low illumination is, of course, by design since the central idea of a baoli is to retain as much water as possible by minimizing evaporation on account of the sun.

  I ponder over the durability of Indian civilization on account of its water-conserving habits and find the pool strewn with plastic garbage dropped from above. Milling around the pool are a group of pigeons walking on their own poo. I try to locate the imperious step-hopping pigeon among them, but it is an exercise in futility. Dejected by the state of the pool, I begin my climb back to the surface. By the time I reach the third-last flight of stairs from the top, I find D descending, her determined hand movements cutting through the sudden glare.

  ‘You were down there for a while. I decided to find out what was happening since nobody else was going down.’ She stretches her hand to grasp mine. ‘This pigeon shit smell is pretty strong,’ she says.

  I smile and am glad that she is here.

  She turns and we start walking back up, together, when we suddenly hear this huge noise reverberating through the well. It’s the pigeons taking flight down below, all at once. I take her hand and start running, not knowing if they will fly round the stairs. The sound keeps growing all the time. At the exact moment we both make it out into the light, a large group of pigeons launches out through the well shaft into the air.

  After the momentary unnerving by a bunch of subterranean birds, we gather our wits and proceed to one of Uparkot’s other subterranean structures – a Buddhist monastery dating from the second or third centuries ad. This monastery has also been hewn from the same kind of soft rock as Navghan Kuvo next door, but it has carved pillars supporting the ceilings of its underground rooms. Abandoned for years, weather has taken a toll on its walls. It is perhaps still possible to conjure up scenes from the time of the Sangha when you look at the fire pits in the middle of the rooms, used, perhaps, for both homa as well as cooking. The monastery is currently under the supervision of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and is being renovated.

  A Buddhist bhikshu is supposed to eat only as much rice as his joined palms can hold. Outside the monastery a weighing machine conclusively proves that I haven’t followed that idiom in years, if ever. The machine is owned by an old woman who charges two rupees for this service, telling us she has no earning members left at home.

  Not too disconcerted by my weight (since I have actually lost a few kilos since Pushkar), I drag D towards Uparkot’s next attraction – a Juma Masjid that is also undergoing ASI renovation. Just outside the mosque lie many, many pirs, resting under the shade of trees, swathed in green silk.

  Inside the masjid, shafts of light pour in through the windows, doors and three octagonal openings on the roof. The entire masjid seems to reverberate with a warm serenity that is difficult to describe but easy to imbibe. Carved pillars support this unique structure, unusual among masjids in India, which are known for greater austerity in the interior. This has something to do with the fact that the Juma Masjid was originally the palace of Rani Ranak Devi, the queen of Chudasama king Ra Khengar, who was a descendant of Ra Navghan, before it was converted into a place of worship by Mahmud Begada in the fourteenth century.

  Begada or Begadha, which literally means the conqueror of two forts, was the name taken by Abu’l Fath Nasir-ud-Din Mahmud Shah I, a sultan of Gujarat’s erstwhile Muzzaffarid dynasty, after he subdued the ‘gadhs’, or forts, of Pavagadh and Junagadh. The imprint of his dynasty is visible in three Turkish cannons lying around in Uparkot, which were abandoned by the Ottoman fleet during the Battle of Diu. This battle saw a pretty interesting coalition, comprising ships from the Sultanate of Gujarat, the Ottoman Caliphate, the Mamlûk Burji Sultanate of Egypt, the Zamorin of Calicut, the Republic of Venice and the Republic of Ragusa being defeated by a Portuguese expeditionary flotilla in 1509.

  There is a flight of stairs that takes us to the roof of the masjid revealing spectacular views of the entire Girnar range on the southern spur of which rests Uparkot. Powerful as ever is the presence of Girnar Mountain, the highest peak of the range and the focal point of Ranak Devi’s worship, when the masjid was still her palace some 300 years before Begada found it.

  Ranak Devi was famed for her beauty. The Solanki ruler Siddhraj Jaisinh, based in Anhilwad Patan, who had desired her from a time that preceded her marriage, eventually decided to acquire her irrespective of the fact that she was now married to the Chudasama king. The twelve-year siege that Navghan Kuvo withstood was precisely on account of Jaisinh’s efforts to win Ranak Devi and it ended with the demise of Ra Khengar and the sati of Ranak Devi that Jaisinh ultimately agreed to. Kathiawari lore maintains that Mt Girnar was taller than it is now but during her time in the captivity of Jaisinh, Ranak Devi is said to have chided it for holding its head high while she had been doomed thus. At this, an avalanche had set off at the crest of Mt G
irnar which stopped only when Ranak Devi beseeched the peak to not destroy itself.

  Mt Girnar is the real reason I have brought D to Junagadh. When I was struggling with my first book and needed something – a book, an idea, something – to settle my mind, D’s supervisor, the noted Kannada poet and playwright, Prof. H.S. Shivaprakash had recommended Robert B. Svoboda’s Aghora series of books which document the life and views of his guru, the aghori Vimalananda. It is through Vimalananda that I learnt the significance of Mt Girnar as a mystical site for seekers of different religions, whether Hindu, Jain, Buddhist or Muslim. For instance, the orderly graves of Muslim pirs outside the Juma Masjid probably belong to those who chose to be buried in the shadow of Mt Girnar.

  Since almost the early days of Islam’s entry into the subcontinent, there has been a mystic trail stretching from Mansura in Sindh to Uparkot in Girnar for Sufis. Sufis believe in undertaking sadhana which will keep them at the ‘Chautha Aasman’ that corresponds to the Anahata or Heart Chakra, fourth in order from the base of the kundalini. Through their meditative practices, they seek to fill themselves with ishq (a complex Sufi term that cannot be translated as divine love or even simply love) by maintaining their kundalini at the Chautha Aasman. They often choose this with deep deliberation, rather than pushing the kundalini all the way to the Saatvan Aasman or the Sahasra, which is the thousand-petalled lotus at the crest of the head, said to lead to moksha.

  16 January 2010, 11:30 a.m.

  The day after. We are late for Girnar. Very late.

  The sun is now nearly overhead. And here we are, still motoring in an auto on Bhavnath Road towards Bhavnath Mahadev temple, close to the foot of Mt Girnar. This ancient temple is dedicated to Lord Shiva and marks the beginning of the Girnar Parikrama undertaken by Hindus on Shivratri, each year, and essentially involves a circumambulation of the base of the mountain.