Inspectah Deccan

The central, inland portion of southern India is a large, hot plateau known as the Deccan. Being located right in the middle of everything, it has an incredibly convoluted history of different parts of it falling into the hands of just about every local dynasty and foreign invader imaginable. It's like Central Europe, but worse. Since most Western people can't tell a Hohenzollern from a Hohenstaufen, I will spare you all detailed accounts of the Chalukyahs, the Adil Shahs, the Vatakas, and so on. The point is, if you're anybody that matters in India, you have to get involved in wars in the Deccan, and no matter what happens it will end up being a bigger pain in the ass for you and your kingdom than you anticipate. Much in the same way, Ghostface's invasion of the Deccan got off to an inauspicious start of being left stranded by the roadside by a heap of rubbish somewhere in Mumbai the night before a government holiday on which the railway union was expected to strike. And much like the kings of old, GFB has no time for ill omens and marches onward to war.

I made my camp in the old town of Aurangabad, the sleeping dog of a city that once ruled over nearly all of India. It takes its name from Aurangzeb, the last of the Mughal Emperors to rule a mighty kingdom. You could hardly tell now that Aurangabad has ever had any kind of glory. The most impressive monuments in the city limits are a handful of fake grottoes as one might find at a cheap casino and a sloppily-painted mosque that has neither domes nor minarets. Yet, in its day it was the capital of the Mughal Empire at the height of its territorial conquests, the court moved here from Delhi so that the unfailingly warlike Aurangzeb could better conduct the incessant, draining wars that marked his tenure as lord of the Deccan.

Aurangzeb, even on the scale of Indian despots, was both excessively belligerent and a general asshole. Aside from overthrowing his own father (Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal) and having most of his vanquished brothers quietly disposed of, he made a number of incredibly stupid moves. For starters, he was a hardcore religious fanatic and decided that if people insisted on continuing to be pagan Hindu swine, they could at least pay a hefty tax for the privilege. He also ordered the decapitation of the Sikh guru of the time, with the result that the Sikhs immediately became extremely militant and predictably anti-Mughal. Then, he also had the brilliant notion that since he had the largest armies in India, he could fight pretty much everyone at the same time. Though he stretched the Empire to greater breadth than ever before, he used up all his resources and pissed off just about everyone, so that when he died the Empire immediately fell into shambles and was left a pathetic shadow of its former self. He was also a rabid iconoclast, and had seemingly half the temples in India desecrated, which did a lot to make sure pretty much every non-Muslim in the country despised him. In short, Aurangzeb was a brutal, artless man, and in Aurangabad it shows that he left nearly nothing of value behind for posterity.

Not long after his death (but before everything completely went to shit), his wife died and his son decided that the Emperor's wife ought to have a tomb befitting of her dynasty. Remember, of course, that the previous Emperor's wife got the Taj Mahal. The decision was then made to construct an imitation of the Taj Mahal outside Aurangabad. The result, called the Bibi-ka-Maqbara, looks like what you would expect if you found the first gut-scratching, pit-stained contractor knocking back cheese fries at the local Hooters and asked him to build the Taj Mahal using two postcards and a diagram on a greasy chilli-dog wrapper as blueprints. It's not that it's a terrible building. As just any Mughal tomb it would be quite impressive, but it is so obviously a copy of the Taj Mahal, and so obviously inferior that you can't help but laugh a bit. Yes, it is marble (partially), and vaguely the right shape, but it has an unmistakable appearance of cheapness to it. Where the Taj has inlaid stones the Bibi-ka-Maqbara has plaster. The minarets are painted in imitation of stone, and the domes on the roof are all kind of smooshed together. In fact, the whole building looks kind of narrow and squashed, like a Taj Mahal clenched betwen Allah's own butt cheeks.

Believe it or not, there are not one but two failed Muslim capitals of India around here. Just down the road is the crumbling old fortress-city of Dalautabad, the site of on the most idiotic, farcical political decisions in history. During the 15th century, Muhammad bin Tughluq was the Sultan of Delhi and ruled most of India. Sound familiar? Even for an Indian despot, he was warlike, brutal, and a general asshole. In due course he got himself embroiled in various wars in the Deccan, and found it expedient to move his capital southwards to the mighty fort at what became Daulatabad. What he didn't do was first check if the location was suitable for a city, but we'll return to that oversight soon enough. The Sultan, intent on moving his court, was not satisfied with merely relocating his administration. Instead he ordered the entire population of the city of Delhi to pack up their things and join him on the thousand-kilometer march south with hardly any preparations.

Thousands of people died on the march, and many more were reduced to poverty when they quickly tired of hauling their possessions along with them. They couldn't stop or turn back, because Muhammad bin Tughluq was not a man to tolerate dissent quietly. By the time they finally crawled into the site of the new city, most despaired of ever seeing their homes again. But they did, because Daulatabad turned out to have almost no water supply, and just when they finished building the doomed city after two years, the Sultan ordered them to box up all their shit and walk back to Delhi. This part of the Deccan just seems to bring out the worst in royal mass-murderers.

All this to build a city around a spectacular fort the Sultan was convinced would be the key to his complete mastery over India. I had to see it.

You pull up to the outskirts of the ruins and you notice the standard crumbling fortifications, though in this case they look particularly sturdy and well laid-out for deadly crossfires. I was willing to agree with various Europeans of the day who said it was among the strongest in India, though I failed to see what was so special. Then, noticing what an 80-year-old librarian could spot with her glasses off, I saw that the walls of the fort formed a wide ring around what was clearly an extinct volcano in the middle of the city. Oh. Passing through various temples and military facilities inside the walls, I passed through a second set of equally formidable walls. This fort was not fucking around. And just inside this wall lies what is surely the most ridiculous, paranoid, and perverse citadel on this green Earth. Behind the wall is a deep moat, its waters now about 50 feet below the edge of the precipice on which I stood. On the other side of the moat was not another wall, but some 200 feet of sheer-vertical, solid stone cliff face of a fucking volcano. Now you can cross on a narrow iron bridge, but back in the day the only way across the moat was down a staircase to a very low, narrow bridge to stairs going back up the other side. As if this weren't dangerous enough, the moat was so engineered that a system of dams could be opened and closed to raise the water in the moat and leave the only bridge some 15 feet underwater. Now, you can't just swim across when people are shooting at you, particularly not when on the other side is not a bank to crawl up, but THE SHEER STONE SIDE OF A FUCKING VOLCANO. Oh, and by the way, in their off time the garrison was apparently fond of breeding a battalion of man-eating crocodiles to fill the moat with.

Now, assuming you crossed the crocodile-filled moat to the narrow opening in the walls of the volcano on the other side and somehow got a foothold at the base of the citadel, you would still have to climb to the top of the volcano in order to secure the stronghold. There is of course, only one, easily defensible, way to get up the volcano. Perhaps a steep, narrow staircase carved into the side of the cliff? No. That wouldn't be twisted enough, for I have concluded that Daulatabad's cartoonishly wicked defenses are the work of men as concerned with entertaining the sadistic pleasures of their own ingenuity as they were with military necessity. To get to the top you have to go into the side of the mountain, through a winding, pitch-black tunnel and up a number of stairs. I probably shouldn't even bother mentioning at this point that the only (deliberately inadequate) sources of light were the long shafts which the defenders would drop rocks and hot oil through; their schemes were far more devious than those obvious measures. Of all the defensive contrivances, in my view the most wicked, a device of sheer spite meant only to enliven the laughter of the victorious defenders (as they drink wine the next night out of their victims' skulls, no doubt) was after rounding a corner in the utter blackness they placed a single, unnecessary step. Just one. One step for an army running terrified through the darkness to suddenly turn the corner and all fall right on their faces with a clang of weapons and armor. Shit is fucked.

Some ways beyond this dastardly step are a series of proper staircases, which of course are of completely uneven height and depth so even to this day it is a little prickly to climb in the dark even without being in the middle of the war. Now suppose you have run up these stairs and you finally see the light of day shining through a doorway. You rush towards it, letting loose the cry of battle, and you suddenly find yourself falling because the blinding 'doorway' is in fact an opening in the side of the cliff and you've just run into the open air, which you are now traversing at an acceleration of 9.8 m/s^2 in the direction of a very deep moat and some very angry crocodiles about 100 feet below. Behind you, your best friend has no time to mourn your loss because he, ahead of his time, has discovered what the phrase "Indiana Jones boulder trap" means.

Finally, should the defenders be forced to abandon the passageway for whatever reasons -tying their shoelaces springs to mind- they could light a giant brazier at the mouth of the tunnel and almost instantly use the principle of suction to fill the passage with an impenetrable wall of heat rushing through the darkness. They could also spread toxic gases into the tunnel this way, but this was probably overkill, and they would have to pick up poisoned vultures along with the rest of the corpses the next day, so the other defenses would have to do.

I did not breach Dalautabad at the head of an army. Rather, I was trailing one; an army of 5th-to-9th graders on class trips. It was just Republic Day, and the remainder of the week thereafter is traditionally a time when Indian schools go on their (attendance mandatory) excursions to witness History and Culture firsthand. As you well know, schoolchildren hate history, and the only thing they like about class trips is going outside and making a complete shitshow on the bus. Oh, how I pine for the days of wandering in loud, obnoxious cliques of boys through some area of tremendous cultural importance, making life as irritating as possible for the girls we secretly wanted to perform poorly-understood sex acts with. Indian children do not behave quite in this manner. First of all, this is India, so replaces the word cliques with swarms. Now, increase the student-to-chaperon ratio by a factor of about 5, and completely subtract any interaction between the sexes. This operation should leave you with several hundred merrily chatting girls trotting about in cliques, harmlessly engaged more in gossip than in Culture. Then you have the boys. The equally large host of boys channel their budding -more like erupting- levels of testosterone almost exclusively through testing the strength of their vocal cords in echoing chambers and by forming fast-moving uniformed wolfpacks that descend upon all persons of interest (i.e. foreign tourists) and ritually word-vomiting all of their English and quite a bit of their Marathi for each other to ravenously poke at, bursting into crazed, drooling laughter after devouring a particularly choice morsel of their classmates' steaming-fresh verbal puke.

It was in this setting that I was taking my notes on Daulatabad's defenses, and soon discovered just how easily such devious mechanisms come to mind when directed against a close-at-hand object of derision easily substituted for the enemy. Oh, you like shrieking, kid? Let's see how much you like it when a bowl of hot magma falls down your throat! Yeah, yeah, it's really quite fucking hilarious when you all start shaking your butts in my photographs. Let's see how funny it is when you wiggle your asses over to that harmless piece of flooring...I mean THE TRAPDOOR TO MY RHINO PIT. I looked inside myself and knew that within every man lies Evil, waiting only for prodding of Nuisance to come out.

I ascended the hill, which after the tunnel would have been a simple matter of walking up a winding path up a very steep hill while people shoot at you, but by that point if you got through you'd probably have the defenders fleeing from you in final desperation, or just because you're on fire. The views from the top were stunning, looking out into a huge sky over a seemingly endless expanse of the hot, brown hills of the Deccan. And then I went back down, carefully avoiding the various deathtraps and swatting in the general direction of fluttering bats.

Over the next two days I engaged in a brutal campaign of conquest taking me to the cave refuges of Ajanta and Ellora, but I will tell of that another day. I shall do with the chronology of this narrative what I wish. Indeed, even the great Hindu bards who sung the timeless epics skipped from scene to scene, imparting a tale of great wisdom, where the sequence of words depends more upon their true meaning in the context of this vast tale we call life than upon in what order the original events transpired. What I'm saying is that this post is getting long and Ajanta and Ellora are both about caves.

Shortly after departing Ellora (that place, dear reader, of which we shall hear soon enough), I arrived in the little town of Khuldabad. It's a rather forgettable little Muslim village with a sprinkling of ruins and a small, unimposing shrine to a long-dead Sufi. What I came to see, however, was just outside the tomb. In a small, half-walled enclosure lies a low and simple grave, no more than a foot high and topped only with soil and a handful of blossoming flowers. It is the grave of Aurangzeb, who in his piety demanded only the simplest of burials, paid for by funds he raised selling little white hats he knitted. The megalomaniac, in his zeal, stumbled upon a fragment of humility and it now marks his last, for all of history. I looked at the little grave, in this near-random little town way down in the Deccan, where Aurangzeb desired to be buried by the side of his teacher, and almost felt a little sorry for him. The British viceroy (of course the British) had built a modest marble lattice around the tomb, but otherwise it was a most mystifying lack of distinction or extravagance from a man whose terrible ways tore apart half a continent and brought his own kingdom to ruin.

Thoughts to live by? Perhaps. I'm still thinking of how to build a subterranean catapult for coating a spiked ceiling with middle-schoolers, and whether or not I need a gutter if the bodies get...leaky.