Tall tales in Daulatabad
As happens often, sites of tourist interest near where you grow up are the ones you never visit. As also happens often when you end up living and working halfway across the world, you’re a tourist in places very close to where you grew up. I am no exception. I have to say, though, that being a blogger somehow takes the edge of carrying a camera in such familiar, or ought-to-be-familiar places. I’ve been overcoming the weirdness of such taking ordinary snapshots of my hometown Pune (and the cynically raised eyebrows of everready cultural critics of such touristy behaviour). I’ll post them here sometime. The next few posts beginning with this one, however, are about a short trip I took to Ajanta and Ellora, an ancient complex of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain cave temples, and Daulatabad, an old medieval fortress that once brought a grand imperial dreamer a lot of grief. A mere five hours away from where I spent many years of my life, I managed to visit them last week.
Daulatabad first. Wikipedia will give you the facts here. Plus there are lots of nice b/w pictures here. I managed to take a few myself; the grey clouds hung low, a cool, misty breeze blew the whole afternoon, and fort rose dizzily from the plateau, allowing you to see green for miles on end in all directions.
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It was no doubt this heady fresh scent of the monsoon that made me look favourably on the guide who offered his services as I paid the entry fee. Well, that, and the fact that I have spent the last few years thinking and writing about how historical memories take shape, how ‘popular’ memories of the past interact with scholarly, professional ones, and what sort of cultural and political ideas and aspirations they are linked to. Discarding both my finely honed broad suspicion of charlatans of all kinds, as well as the specialist’s discomfort at dilettantes in my domain, I embraced the guide (not literally).
‘Defence strategy’ is the most popular formula story all tourists to this fortress seem to flock to hear. Friends had prepped me to expect bloodthirsty tales of boiling oil,
hatchets and severed heads, and he told them with relish: by the end of it I knew all the minute ways in which I would have been skewered, flayed and quartered if I’d so much as glanced at the fort with an army.
But I was nevertheless unprepared for the extent to which larger narratives of modernity and nation seemed to impinge on his story. Science, secularism (I got the distinct feeling that he sized us up and decided - correctly - that we wouldn’t enjoy stories of any one religious group triumphing over another), anthropology, evolution, gender-equality, astronomy, military precision: every stone carving, every arch, every turret, it would seem, had been planned and executed with the intention of proving the country’s knowledge of these markers of modernity from ancient times. Is that all these famed guides, who could make these forts come alive with their stories, have been reduced to?
In my defence, I had not expected his story to be a pristine, local memory that would give me a completely different picture from the
political chronology of dynasties, sieges and battles in which Daulatabad usually figures. My pet argument, as some readers will recognize, is that a search for such pristine pasts is futile, as local memories too are influenced by larger narratives of nation, region or community. So I was prepared to be led to the ledge where the local, unsung shepherd led the defence against this important siege, or the well where the local milkmaid preferred death to dishonour during that major battle. I was disappointed that these had almost entirely given way to the seemingly more urgent task of proving India’s Greatness in All Walks of Life Since Ancient Times. This task was at work at Ajanta and Ellora too; indeed, it is in its service that the guides seemed to to be expending much of their creative energy.
Hey, don’t ask me the obvious questions: is there a proper way to tell the story of a historical site? Who decides how local or national or indeed global it should be? Is there a way that scholars can help preserve (or indeed generate!) intermediate historical memories of individual sites that combine both local colour and national chronology? Does this affect the way Indians (or insert any other nationality) remember ‘their’ past? Can it help explain how or why we scribble graffiti on age-old monuments? Or can we safely rely on fleeting tourist memories and relax, knowing that all this matters very little? The most important of them all, asked by my non-historian companion on this trip: is it possible to travel to a historical monument with a professional historian and not want to jump off it in sheer exasperation (just think of how I feel, I retorted!)?