Golden wheat and black soil.
The road from Nasik is a little unsure about its identity – switching back and forth between silky concrete smothered across four luxurious lanes; and coarse, unbuttered strips tumbling over the black soil…
Ah yes! The black soil! Heaving with the pangs of her golden dreams…scrounging up intermittent stands of yellow wheat, amid the more common Deccan staples of cotton and the lesser cereals. But they don’t quite have the shimmering allure of the break baskets farther north - the assurance of their Punjabi cousins is pointedly absent and their droopy shoulders seem to betray a sense of shame at having sprung from such a dusky mother.
Teetering at the very edge of the Deccan, not far south from the psychological divide of the Vindhyas, Aurangabad has reason to feel confused and disaffected. Its fractured highways, like its incongruous explosions of wheat, speak of dark ambition, suffering a tortured sleep beneath the dark earth.
Daulatabad
Devagiri is an impressive enough spectacle. The hour long hike to the top of the fort affords an enchanting view. And, a certain sense of power. Looking down at the featureless dustbowl stretching all the way to the horizon, one can be forgiven for presuming to be on top of the world… Look around your feet, though – it’s the black soil at work…
This is the twenty first century, thank heavens - bus loads of picnickers can have a sobering effect on delusionary joyrides. It’s a grand fort, sure - just one of many, many others in the sub-continent. A fine site for a regional satrap of some standing…one might even grant a dalliance or two with events of historical significance…
Daulatabad Fort
But the seat of an empire? Perhaps that ludicrous thought was the handiwork of a bunch of Devas, moping about on the Giri, with a pitcher of Soma-rasa and a few Yugas at their disposal. Divine or otherwise, the suggestion found a susceptible ear in Muhammad Bin Tughlaq. Reeling from a particularly severe currency crisis, the Sultan was desperate for a big idea to arrest his rapid descent into the wrong side of history’s judgment. Thus began the long slog from Delhi to the hopefully re-named Daulatabad, and the inevitable return, allegedly halving in each direction, the population of the capital. The exercise only hastened what its architect sought to prevent – Muhammad bin Tughlaq is gleefully remembered by many an Indian schoolboy, as a case study in administrative ineptitude.
In Ruins
The luckless Mohammed wasn’t the first to be fooled by the apparent merits of the hillock. Ramachandra, the Seuna king, ruling from Devagiri circa 1300 AD, might have allowed himself a chuckle or two at sight of Alludin Khilji’s army advancing on his hill fortress. Presently, a bunch of benjis huff and puff their way up the same slopes, turning tail eventually - a sight that the Seuna king was no doubt used to. As it turned out, however, the king was summarily disabused of his notions about the fort’s impregnability – Allaudin’s men were presumably made of sterner stuff than my erstwhile fellow travelers.
The sight of Ramachandra groveling, cap in hand, to receive his Moslem conqueror and a long list of humiliating terms was, by now, a familiar one. The Crescent’s rambunctious march, cutting a swathe across this continent and the other, swallowed, inside of a century, all that was thitherto coveted by would-be hegemons and some more...At the beginning of the millennium, it was India’s turn to submit, as Mahmud of Ghazni sacked the north - the magnitude of the event should have been amply evident to the college of sub-continental royalty – rarely short of numbers and at that time, particularly well stocked. But our Maharajas were, as ever, busy plotting discursive Ashwamedhas to defraud their neighbours of an extra village or two, quite unaware of the mother of all Chakravarthy-quests, in whose wake their collective military might must have seemed about as intimidating as a group of mallet-wielding ladies at the Croquet club.
Ellora
Had the Moslems arrived about a century earlier, there might have been a semblance of a fight. The shifting sands of the Indian political landscape had settled around three overlapping ellipses, rather like an inverted Adidas trefoil, with its base pivoted around the Doab region - that much sought after stamp of sub-continental supremacy. Between 750 and 900 AD, the Palas from the East, the Rashtrakutas from the South and the Pratiharas from the West, formed a triumvirate of powers locked in a stalemated equilibrium that was to prove the last imperial pretension of the Indo-Aryans, at least in the Aryan heartland.
Ellora - Stairway to Heaven?
If a winner were to be rummaged from the debris of their internecine feuding, the Rashtrakutas have, by far, the strongest claim. Dantidurga and Krishna I can, between them, take credit for laying the foundation of the oil-soaked, mustachioed and utterly un-sexy construct that is vilified by Bollywood as the “Madrasi”. Flicking up their loincloths in a manner that has probably not changed for centuries, these Rajnis and Chirus ran their horses around much of what lies south of the Vindhyas, directly absorbing into their domain, most of Kantaka and Maharashtra, whilst extracting a string of tributes and allegiances from the rest of their fellow-southies. However, it was Govinda III who humbled the Gujju Pratiharas and the Bong Palas to boldly go where no lungi had gone before – to Kannauj, the prevailing seat of supreme power in Aryavarta.
Aurangabad, in the process, had yet another quaff of imperial ambrosia although, at a good 500 Kms from the Rashtrakutan capital of Manyakheta (Malkhed), it can hardly be said to have been at the centre of action. Yet, the rugged tumble of hills at Ellora, just outside the city, must have exuded some unexplained magnetism – perhaps of the sort that transmutes black soil into golden wheat – that caused Dantidurga to impregnate its ponderous, unsightly belly with the seeds of the splendorous Kailasanatha temple. Malkhed, meanwhile, shoulders the ignominy of being relegated to the footnotes of history and is presently an anonymous town on the Bombay Bangalore rail route. Trains make a perfunctory two minute stop – not out of deference to its former glory – but to ferry concrete from the surrounding factories to the rest of the country. Alas, of the considerable portions of building material that were surely supplied to the town during its salad days, not a trace remains.
Kailasanatha
The Kailasa temple, and its Vedic triumphalism, shouts loudly into the ear of a more sober past. A few meters south of the complex, the Buddhist temples yield to their Hindu counterparts, in a poignant architectural acknowledgement of accession. A gentler and more gradual social metamorphosis than the schismatic events that were to follow – and wrought by less violent means than rampaging hordes: Nevertheless, the “golden age” of the Guptas and the formidable intellectual evangelism of Shankara had finally taken their toll on Buddhism even if India’s spiritual eclecticism permitted layers of history to remain side by side rather than one above the other.
Buddhism Eclipsed
Ajanta
Further north of Ellora, the caves at Ajantha are more staunchly Buddhist, reflecting the religious proclivities of an earlier era. The paintings at Ajanta are, however, just another example of the denominational diversity of the Indic religions and represent two distinct effusions of enthusiasm for cave art. The earliest paintings were literally among the earliest brushstrokes on India’s historical canvas, dating back to 200 BC, when the prevailing ethos of Hinayana forbade the representation of the Buddha’s person. Form eventually eclipsed substance - the less austere Mahayana school was better equipped to get across to a population that was used to 33 crore gods – and a million Buddhas smiled. Purists might have been unimpressed but the result was quite satisfactory as far as Indian art is concerned.
Ajantha
The caves weren’t intended to be a museum – the purpose of the Viharas was education rather than exhibition. But the imagination of the Bhikshus (monks) who lived therein was evidently unhampered by their rather prosaic purpose. Nor was the rocky medium any hindrance to lucidity of expression. If masterpieces like the Dying Princes - one of the finest surviving paintings - are any indication, Ajanta may just have been the Louvre of its time…
Shedding light on the past
Aurangzeb
That such worldwide acclaim eluded the caves was, perhaps, a blessing in disguise. Any less obscure a location might have stripped Ajanta of the few treasures that remain…for, the man who took the final bow on Aurangabad’s historical stage – and from whom the town got its name - was not exactly known for his patronage of the arts.
Aurangzeb’s tomb, north of Aurangabad, is a modest one that sits uneasily on his reputation as one of India’s mightiest rulers. There is no reason to believe that the Emperor himself - a frugal man by all accounts - would have found fault with his mortuary arrangements. Nonetheless, he is unlikely to have died a contented man. Obsessed with adding real estate to an empire that was poised to attain Mauryan proportions, the last of the great Mughals, spent over 20 years pitting his iron will, in vain, against the unyielding boulders of the Deccan. After an exhausting game of musical chairs, involving the hill-forts along the Konkan coast, with the nimble footed Marathas, Aurangzeb finally rested at Khuldabad - a mere 3 KMs from the splendor of the Kailasa temple but a good thousand years down the road in terms of historical milestones. Islamic supremacy in India, which was already breathing down the country’s neck when the Kailasa shot towards the heavens, was on its last legs.
The minaret inside the fort
Republic Day
While India would soon have a new master, Aurangabad had finally run through her stock of heroes…Yet, there is still the occasional brush with pomp and circumstance, such as on Republic Day. Atop the Daulatabad fort, a gaggle of junior functionaries wait for the District Magistrate to unfurl the National Standard. The wife calls in – Saheb ain’t showing up…a ripple of shrugged shoulders later, the Flag is unceremoniously installed where…very briefly… India was once ruled from...
It is dawn - a flush of indignation descends upon the black earth below. Aurangabad. A district HQ. A glowering town that grits her teeth…and bides her time…
Palghat Raghu Gangubai Hangal 
