|
The Lost Jungle Kingdom
Destination story on Orchha...
The women, in their saris of fierce colours and bold designs – with their feet dyed pomegranate-red and intricate henna designs on their hands; with nose-rings, ear-rings, and necklaces of precious stones – the women strutted past like proud peacocks, the bangles on their legs clinking and their perfume whiffing the air. The sadhus too were groomed for the occasion. After washing in the river, they donned their pink rags and painted religious symbols on their foreheads, and then joined the mass of pilgrims that had congregated in the frontal courtyard of the Rama Raja Mandir, sitting under the shade of a gum tree, playing the sitar and tambourine and violin, and singing the mantras in desirous wails. Inside the temple (which had originally been built as a palace, hence its fortified four corner Moghul-style turrets) a queue filed outside God Rama’s shrine. The pilgrims proceeded to place offerings at God Rama’s miraculous icon, an icon that is said to had been found to be unmoveable and indestructible, thus entering Hindu mythology as a pilgrimage destination. This year, particularly, a crippling drought (the Betwa River was several metres down on last year) had impassioned the pilgrims with urgent piety.
Away from the bustle at the temple and the bazaar outside, just about the only other thing that stirred in the dusty haze in Orchha were the dozens of vultures wheeling overhead. It was summer; the humidity and heat were torturous. But I was distracted from thoughts of heat by the fantastic architecture of narcissistic grandeur and unconscionable romance of the Bundela kingdom. The palaces, temples, self-aggrandising monuments and the forts built by the Bundelas emerge from the scrubby surroundings like a lost or forbidden city. My vain imagination, usually the cause of anti-climactic exasperation, hadn’t prepared me for these enigmatic ruins, a sight so surreal that I couldn’t help feel (romantically, despite my cynicism) as though we had stumbled on a great discovery.
The unexpected setting adds to the mystique. Situated in India’s interior plains of Madhya Pradesh, Orchha is defined by one main street, around which clusters of squalid peasant houses had colonised the fields and surrounding forest in a seemingly random manner. The 300km-wide belt of forest south of the village, home to tigers, and the tentative pastoral hold on the arid land, give the village a frontier air. Idle men loitered around the rickety dhabas built from rusting corrugated metal, and housewives beat chapatis on their pavement.
It was this frontier isolation that attracted the Bundelas in the late fifteenth century. They were beaten out of Garkhundar, the first capital of Bundelkhand, by the Delhi Sultan Tuqluq, and, on retreat, they set up camp 45km away in the thick jungle. Clearing the forest and calling their new home Orchha, meaning “hidden place”, they erected their citadel on an island in the Betwa River, a site chosen for its defensibility. For the next two centuries they added more buildings as their power and influence expanded.
In the citadel, the palace nearer to the gate, the Raj Mahal, was the first to be built, and its enclosed, heavy, almost claustrophobic feel is a reflection of the Bundelas at their low ebb when they felt vulnerable to attack: its grandeur is restrained. Next is the Sheesh Mahal, now converted into a government-run hotel, where a young man with lurid green eyes entertained us to a delicate serenade (as we ate a soggy, carelessly-made paratha at the government-run café). Across the courtyard, the seventeenth-century Jahangir Mahal was created Bir Singh Deo, the king who presided over the ambitious consolidation and militarism of the Bundelkhand (sultan of the Mogul empire visited the newly-erected palace to confer approval). Three storeys of lofty terraces, onion domes, skirting walkways, raised balconies, Islamic doors, royal apartments, braided pavilions and elegant turrets encircle a central courtyard; and the scattered pieces of inlaid mirrors and blue tiles that survive indicate its original splendour. This palace has an airier feel than its neighbours, expressing a confident and outward-looking Bundelkhand at the apex of their power. By the late eighteenth century, however, repeated attacks and peasant uprisings forced the Bundelas to flee Orchha, and these buildings have been deserted ever since.
The weirdest architectural splurge can be seen in the fourteen cenotaphs around the bend of the river. These self-aggrandising monuments to bygone kings look like the Chatturbuj Mandir, the Vishnu temple that represents the regal Bundelkhand style, and the resemblance is deliberate – symbolism for the kings’ self-seeking venerability. The stout, three-storey cenotaphs are open to all sides by Moghul-style doorways that lead to an interior sculpted into ribbed passageways, and the buildings bloom into onion-domes and turrets and intricately-braided pinnacles. They have an air of melancholic solemnity, home to nesting vultures.
In their shadow, on the river’s shore, there were cormorants and ibises, housewives flogging clothes clean, children splashing in the water, young men stalking fish with the slow agility of herons, and a shrunk body being cremated on the pebbly shore. That summer the water was down to a fifth its normal size. A drought was ravaging the crops, and the women had taken to working the fields naked at night in a bid to placate the Gods. In the weeks that followed the Gods relented: the late monsoon caused flooding.
© Victor Paul Borg
|
