Kolhapur - The City and the Village

During our stay in Kolhapur, we felt that Kolhapur still maintains a strong rustic character. This feeling was reinforced after we went to Belgaum, its neighbouring city in Karnataka that provides an interesting contrast.

The city still doesn’t have many multistoried buildings and extremely wide roads all around the main city streets and they aren’t flooded with the multinational food chains. City limit has been around 64 kilometer square and hasn’t changed in decades. Whether it is good or bad is for the city and its people to decide but the voices on both sides are loud. So is the case with the aspirations of a changing skyline for the Kolhapur sky.

That Kolhapur has a rustic character might be difficult to believe given that someone whom we met in Belgaum mentioned that they used to drive to Kolhapur for KFC as KFC opened first in Kolhapur. But in Kolhapur, the KFCs and such are nestled in the midst of multiple general stores, video game parlours, co-operative banks, Talim mandals, kolhapuri chappal shops and others. However it is a fact that few feel that Kolhapur is losing out by not being able to use the fresh vegetables it gets, in preparing subway subs as the same hasn’t opened yet in Kolhapur. The good part is that the shukrawar peths of Kolhapur don’t stop selling glorious amounts of fresh vegetables on the street and stack up the maximum amount of kothimbir (dhania or coriander) that one could in a heap, anywhere in this world.

The term vela-panti, which now exists as a glorified term in our lexicons, still exists with its old name ‘time-pass’ and is a fruitful occupation for many. Time-Pass video game parlours were abundant in the city. There was a video game-parlour that was full of kids (at least 15) playing Counter-Strike on network!!!

We also went early morning to the Gangvesh area where the place witnesses doodhkatta, an old tradition where people from the surrounding areas bring their cows/buffaloes to the main streets and people come and collect milk and the cattle is milked right there.

After Ratnagiri, we found it as yet another city where people and places were still bound by a shared history, beliefs and in its case, also respect for Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj. It was during the times of Shahuji Maharaj that the modern city started taking shape. He was a social reformer and envisioned a casteless society in Kolhapur in the beginning of 20th century. His emphasis was on education for all and till now the boarding (housing) he promoted for students of various castes and religions can be seen around Kolhapur. The boardings provided free housing and food for the students who came to study in Kolhapur. He himself served as the president on the Muslim board and the tradition still continues and his descendants have been on the board.  He also enacted a law in his time for widow remarriage and took multiple steps on affirmative action. 

Being in Kolhapur was an immensely pleasant experience and opened us up to us a city so historical and living in harmony with it.

Kolhapur – The Three Ts

As we roved around Kolhapur, we were constantly aware of the fact that the city has a very strong tongue and taste for non-vegetarian cuisine. We were told that if we don’t eat mutton, Kolhapur isn’t the best place for us. We came across multiple restaurants and meat shops specializing in mutton delicacies. Apparently there are special meat shops, which sell only male mutton meat as well - phenomenon I heard for the first time!

One of the persons we met told us-Kolhapur is a place of three Ts - Talim, Tamasha and Tambra Rassa. The three Ts in a way capture a bit (or much?) of Kolhapur other than the Kolhapuri chappals that almost everyone who knew we were in Kolhapur, asked us to buy.

Abundant with great climate as well as dairy and meat products, Kolhapur traditionally has been a centre of Talims (and Akhadas), which is the first T. 

Talims are old and local institutions that serve as the center for wrestling training.  Talim’s have been managed and patronized by the prominent people of the city/locality. Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj, coronated as the king of Kolhapur was a patron of Talims and many akhadas were created and Talims flourished under his time. He himself trained as a wrestler. When he visited Europe and saw Colosseum of Rome, he came back and commissioned construction of Khasbag maidan, a wrestling amphitheatre with a capacity of ~40,000 (couldn’t verify this) for wrestling. Money for the operations of Talims comes from local subscriptions and through donations for various local festivals, which encompass all religions. They have been models of institutions that originated, managed and perpetuated from local strengths-physical as it may be and financial. The Talims are still prevalent and are visible all around Kolhapur and produces not only wrestlers, but athletes, football players and others. They follow the master-disciple format where a disciple is initiated and trained by senior ustads.  Originally, most of the Talims were set up in Maruti (Hanuman) temples as Hanuman has been the God of bachelors as well as wrestlers.

Tamasha (or Tamasa), the popular performance based art and recreation is the second T. It is an indigenous form of folk entertainment.  Tamashas were usually performed at annual congregations such as local festivals or harvests with a team of locally trained and honed artists. In the times when no electronic media had made inroads, this art form combined films, music, theatre, radio in one medium. Like the various similar performance based art forms in Rajasthan, Haryana and other states, Tamasha was patronized much more in villages and night was the preferred time of performance.  The dominant deity is Lord Ganapati who is invoked at the beginning in a song/arati called gana. It is followed by Gavalana depicting the Krishna and milk-maid stories.  Tamasha has/had multiple layers of songs, dances and acting after the opening acts. The reason that Kolhapur became a melting pot of Marathi Cinema is because of its strong roots in Tamasha and other folk forms of entertainment and this interactive medium still holds on to its own. Dadasahab Phalke made the first film based on one of the stories often featured in Tamashas-Raja Harishchandra. Natrang, the recent Atul Kulkarni starrer Marathi movie used Tamasha/Lavani as the backdrop for its narrative.

Tambra (and Pandra) Rassa is the third T. Rassa are the curries mostly associated with mutton in Kolhapur. Tambra curry is the signature red curry prepared with a host of spices and mutton stock and made extremely red by using red chillies. Complemented with roasted mutton, Tambra Rassa is a hugely popular local preparation. Wheat or multi-grain Bhakhari is the bread with what all of this goes. We couldn’t relish its taste but we were glad to see the excitement and love for the food that Kolhapur has. (We did enjoy the vegetarian fare very much including misal, usal, akha masoor, kanda besan, bhakhri and matka dahi). The uniqueness of the masala that goes to prepare Tambra Rassa is trying to seek a wider recognition by getting it registered with a geographical indication (GI) mark. The Karveer Adarsha Mahila Aaudyogik Sahkari Sanstha, a local women self help organization, has applied for the GI mark for the mixture that gives Tambra Rassa its unique taste and it hopes to claim the uniqueness for the benefit of local producers against the various spurious mixes in the name of Kolhapuri masalas.

Talim Mandal

Khasbag-Kolhapur's Kolhosseum

Khasbag-Kolhapur's Kolhosseum

Ratnagiri: Economies of Geographies

Ratnagiri made it to our list of cities partly because of a unique feature of its history highlighted by Amitav Ghosh in The Glass Palace and partly because of its proximity to Panchgani. The drive from Panchgani to Ratnagiri through the picturesque route of the Sahyadri mountains down the Mahad ghat sealed the deal of starting our nagarnagar travels with Ratnagiri.

Ratnagiri, a small sleepy Konkan town on Maharashtra’s coast, is considered the largest coastal city between Mumbai and Goa. Its beautiful landscape consists of breathtaking ocean waves crashing into jagged mountain cliffs at high tide with surreal rock formations exposed during low tide contrasted with the green estuaries just 500 meters away.

Each of these geographical features, the mountains, the estuaries as well as the coastline provide a unique economic history to Ratnagiri. The laterite rock plateaus along with the red iron rich soil provide the perfect soil for the world famous alphonso mangos. In our discussions with a local geologist, he explained that the unique taste of these mangoes comes as a result of the iron content in this soil. The plateaus also provide the perfect climes for cashews. Cashew orchards are interspersed amongst the mango farms.

The estuaries were navigable until 1985 providing the only means of travel to towns like Harchiri and Rajwada. The road networks have only developed over the last two decades. With the roads developed and the silting of the many of the estuaries, the waterways have become mostly defunct other than the odd fishing boat and a couple of small river crossings. But this network of waterways has historically meant that locals are well versed with ship-building. Historically, artisans from Ratnagiri were hired by the British for ship-building and are still hired around Belgaum and Kolhapur for their carpentry skills.

As these traditional occupations are on the wane, with mango and cashew being seasonal, there has been a spurt of a peculiar kind of service industry. Ratnagiri, a town of merely 70,000 persons, is home to at least fifty banks, many of which that have recently established branches. This business seems to be thriving partly to do with another aspect of Ratnagiri’s history and geographical location, its remittances. Through the 1900’s, Ratnagiri has acted as a key source of labour for Mumbai’s growing business and service industries. Given the similarity in language and geography, there has been a strong economic linkage between the two cities with every household from Ratnagiri has at least one person in Mumbai.

Even though Ratnagiri has a number of universities few of the skilled graduates stay in Ratnagiri. Mainly those with a family businesses continue to stay in Ratnagiri, many others are still migrating to Pune, Mumbai and Bangalore. However, we met a couple of young men that have made their way back from Mumbai to set up a tech startup in Ratnagiri. Their allure for Ratnagiri were the short (10 minutes to anywhere) commute times, clean air and generally living in Ratnagiri. They explained that the benefits of living in Ratnagiri were far more than the challenges of living in Ratnagiri especially when compared to life in a metro. 

Would we have gotten lost without Google maps?

In the past month we have driven about 2500 kilometers through six states (New Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka) on all types of roads – national highways, state highways, village roads, city roads and non-existent roads.

Navigation has been made significantly easier by Google maps and mapmyindia. For us, the little pre-planning for the trip was possible only because of Google maps. This tool gave us a lot of courage that other than asking the next person walking on the road, finding our way would be not so difficult most of the times and allowed us to make plans. That said,  the charm of getting lost is lost in this age of Google maps. So whenever we hear the hopeless declaration 'GPS Signal Lost', we know that we are going to end up on something unexpected - which is not always a bad thing. We ended up on the other side of the grand Gokak falls that had an amazing view of the entire fall and the valley ahead. Using our all knowing GPS maps, we drove to Gokak falls, and at the time that both of us thought that maybe we have been led astray since we seemed to be driving through fields and villages without any sign for a fall, we suddenly found ourselves looking at the fall at a deadend-except that we were on the side of the village rather than the side where the Gokak mill and parking area is. It made for a spectacular view that we may have otherwise missed. There is a joy in getting lost indeed.

There is a sense of comfort in having this crutch especially given the dearth of signage on most roads. It was inconsistent, even on some national highway, that we found key signage for bypasses, intersections, and roads into cities. There have been many turns that we would have surely missed if it wasn’t for Google maps.  For those seeking an adventure, it may not be undesirable to miss a turn but for those who are trying to get from City A to city B, these missing signposts may turn out to be a lost half hour or many kilometers lost. So far, we havn’t been completely lost, between Google maps and common sense (once it tried to send us over a wall) we have kind of managed to figure out our way even though sometimes it may be a much longer way or a road barely wide enough for our car to pass.

In India, most often we are able to find someone to ask directions from so getting lost may not be the worst thing. But the lack of signs can affect us in more ways than just making us clueless or lost. Road signs also alert the driver about an intersection, a diversion, or simply a indicate a speed breaker. These vital signs were missing on most highways except a couple of the main NHAI (golden quadrilateral) highways. When we think of road safety in India, we often associate it with reckless driving. But improved road signs may be a simple way to at least alert cautious drivers about possible road blocks or turns or more simply, just provide us signposts regarding our destination.

1000 Years of Solitude - Badami and Hampi

We had heard a lot about Hampi, the expansive ruined city of the 16th century Vijayanagara empire. The iconic Garuda Chariot and Narsimha images from our history books and tales of Vijayanagara king Krishnadeva Raya (and Tenaliraman) were imprinted in our memories from our childhoods. Both of us had a long-standing desire to visit the place so it was part of our travel plan. Also, our non-Indian friends who came to visit India always had Hampi on their list and recommended highly of the place. When we realized that some of the ruins in and around Badami (which is hardly 150 kms from Hampi) are almost a 1000-years older, we decided that Badami would be our main destination. Also, Pattadakal and Hampi are the two UNESCO world heritage sites situated in Karnataka.

Badami takes its name because of the almond (badam) coloured rocks of red sandstone that dot the landscape all around and its earlier name was Vatapi. The area with Aihole and Pattadakal in the vicinity, was the seat of the Chalukya dynasty and was at its peak between between 6th and 8th centuries AD. Pulakeshin I was the founder of the Chalukyas with Badami as his capital. During the reign of Pulakeshin II in the 7th century AD, Chalukyas were one of the most powerful kingdoms in the Deccan region.

The temple architecture of the Badami caves, Aihole and Pattadakal is not only splendid but probably unparalleled in that time in the north Deccan region.The magnificent ruins of Badami and those at Hampi are testimony to the established fact that architecture and art forms travel far and wide across time and space.

There exists a relationship between the cave temple architecture (and the paintings) of Badami region and Hampi with that of Ajanta and Ellora, the other two UNESCO world heritage sites in Aurangabad about 600 kms away. The rock-cut temples techniques and the paintings perfected in Badami and Pattadakal temples were first tested in Aihole and they are said to be inspired by the Ajanta caves that date from the 2nd century BC to 5th to 7th century AD.

Chalukyas, who built the temples around Badami, rose to power in the Deccan after the decline of Vakatakas of the Deccan. Harishena, a Vakataka ruler is said to have done much of the work in Ajanta caves and it is likely that the Ajanta caves would have awed the builders of the Chalukyan kingdom. Also, not only did the Ajanta caves inspired the Badami temples, Ajanta caves were inspired by the Badami kingdom too. Few of the  painitings in Ajanta caves depict the events of the Chalukyan kings including the reception given to a Persian embassy by Pulakesin II.

The marvels of Pattadakal also influenced the Ellora caves of Aurangabad.. The Kailasantha temple at Ellora was modeled around the Virupaksha temple of Pattadakal (which was also modeled on the Kailasa temple of Kanchi). The Virupaksha temple at Pattadakal, dedicated to Lord Shiva, was also improvised later by the Vijayanagar kings at Hampi and is one of the iconic sites in Hampi today. Surprisingly, amongst the numerous ruins of the temples both at Pattadatkal and Hampi, the Virupaksha temples in both places are still worshipped.

There is also another strand of continuity between Badami and Hampi’s architecture through the form of architecture developed by Western Chalukyas. Western Chalukyas, who are believed to be from the line of Chalukyas of Badami, influenced the Hoyasala architecture (Hoysalas succeeded the the Western Chalukyas), which then inspired the Vijayanagar architecture too after them. The Hoysalas and then the Vijayanagara kings incorporated in their architecture, the decorated stepped-wells called Pushkarni which were developed in the times of Western Chalukyas. The step-well in Hampi was discovered as early (or late) as mid 1980s.

As we go further south, we look forward to the splendor of the architecture of Chola kings, which also influenced the ruins of what we see in Hampi today and what was one of the largest and prosperous city of its time.

Bypassing the 'Crowded and Unattractive'

Another thing we talked about in our journey were the bypasses. We took bypasses to many cities on our way including Chittorgarh, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Bharuch, Bombay and others.

I told Yutika that bypasses must feel an unjust and unfair thing to the city and city wouldn’t be very happy with them. I felt sad especially bypassing Chittor as I wanted to see the victory pillar that I grew up seeing in my general knowledge and history books. We had bypassed the city (and the pillar) even before we knew it. She had a point that it is efficient, as we don’t have to get stuck in the traffic. I agreed to that part as I prefer taking Meerut and Muzaffarnagar bypasses when I travel home.

However if cities didn’t have much traffic then one wouldn’t have to make the bypasses and then make others take the bypasses.  One could then go through the city instead of bypassing it.

In past 14 years, I have travelled between Delhi and Rishikesh hundreds of times by road. Once the bypass came up around 7 kilometers before Rishikesh, people started taking it to arrive at the extreme north west end bypassing the whole of Rishikesh town (which the Lonely Planet describes as crowded unattractive downtown area). And I always got very sad every time the vehicle I was in, either the roadways bus or a car I was traveling in, took the bypass. My sadness stemmed from the fact that I grew up going to a school in the cantonment area of Raiwala town which was 12 kms away from home and everyday I passed in and out of the then not-so-crowded and not too unattractive a town. The road and the city on its sides were part of almost 10 years of my life.  So whenever I traveled towards Rishikesh, I used to close my eyes when my vehicle went past my school. I played the game of identifying the point I was crossing based on the turns or the sounds and my judgment. I was justified in feeling sad, as I couldn’t play this game anymore, for more than 50% of my journey between my school and home. But I can imagine others being happy due to the time-savings and this is how it is.

Perhaps those who consider a city’s core as crowded and unattractive might feel the same of an old human heart too. Thus I wonder if the timing of a human heart bypass has any similarities with the bypassing of a city’s heart and if the bypass is a life-saving operation in both cases at a particular age in each one’s life. It however might be harsh on the cities as they are born with a blessing of wishful death, which they themselves can never ask for and will never be allowed to wish for.

Travel-Absolute or Relative?

The journey during the test run along with our stays, brief and elaborate both, made us think and reflect on a lot of things, which we otherwise never do.

Driving between two destinations, distance is always absolute and thus more you move forward, more is the distance that gets covered. Yutika said that this is one of the best things about driving between two destinations is that more you do it, more it gets done unambiguously and you are bound to reach your destination and 'finish the task'. This is in contrast to a lot of other work that we do which seems to always increase the more we do it e.g. writing reports!

Anyway, while driving on a highway, default belief or hope with which I was driving was that I could keep overtaking. But as the navigator in the left seat said, there are times when one has no option but to just wait. It can be on the turns that are too blind to take a risk, or on a single lane highway where the view on either side of the leading vehicle doesn’t inspire overtaking confidence. And then you drive on, sometimes for a kilometer without overtaking. This reality of highways seemed to have much more meaning to it. Perhaps each one of you can make your own meanings. I think this also has something to do with the way one considers travel as an absolute or relative. So if the travel and distances are not absolute, no matter how much you travel, you won't reach the destination. Then overtaking might not be so much fun. It only gives a perspective to your journey as you can compare it with that of someone else's.

I am doing such intense highway driving for the first time in my life and thus other than the mindless thinking, I also got the most important lesson of highway driving-that truck drivers are the best drivers on the highways and you can trust them more than anyone else on the road. Yutika asked me to think of a truck as a moving wall on the highway. In the beginning I used to be dead scared to come near a truck but by the end of our test run, I am scared of cars more than anything and feel happy overtaking even between two moving walls.