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Here is the itinerary for one day in Delhi. First drop is the Jantar Mantar. Completed in 1724, this is one of the five parks built by Jai Singh II of Jaipur. The park contains 13 instruments designed to take observations of the positions of the sun, moon and planets. It is not at all clear as we stroll round the park how the instruments were used, but the park is well maintained and the instruments themselves, reddish plastered and white edged, make interesting patterns. It is still early in the morning and there are few other tourists about.
Our next stop is the Old Fort, Purana Qila, a sprawling walled enclave on the banks of the Yamuna River. It dates from the middle of the 16th century and the beginning of the Mughal period. The empire was founded by Babur in 1526 with the defeat of the Lodhi regime. Babur was a descendent of Genghis Khan (1167-1227) on his mother’s and Timur (1337-1405) on his father’s side. He was succeeded by Hamuyun (1531-40, 1555-56), Akbar (1556-1605), Jahangir (1605-27), Shah Jahan (1628-58) and Aurangzeb (1658-1707). At the time of Aurangzeb the empire extended across most of the Indian subcontinent. There then followed a period of decline and loss of territory to local rulers and foreigners, until the last nominal emperor was exiled for supporting the 1857 rebellion and the empire was replaced by the British Raj. The most interesting features of the site are the three gates, each topped by stone pavilions, and the old mosque. The mosque is a single aisle with five doors to the side opening onto the courtyard. It was completed in 1541.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of foresight, we were in Delhi only a few days before the Independence Day celebrations on August 15th, and some of the main sites such as India Gate, the Rajghat Gandhi memorial and the Red Fort were closed. Our next stop then was Humayun’s tomb. This is the earliest example of the royal mausoleum in India. It is based on the tomb of Timur in Samarkand and is surrounded by a formal garden representing the gardens of paradise. It is a fine building but I found the visit somewhat flattening.
The tomb is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as is our next stop, the Qutb Minar. The tower, built of brick, is 72.5 metres tall. It dates from first Sultanate of Delhi. The sultanates were five dynasties that held Delhi from 1206 until 1526 and whose rule extended over time to most of northern India. The tower was commissioned in 1192 by Qutb-ud-din Aibak, the first sultan of the Mamluk dynasty. There are a number of other buildings within the complex, including an iron pillar, surprisingly rust proof due to the high phosphorus content of the iron. The pillar is older than the complex and is thought to date back to the Gupta period. The earliest inscriptions on it are in Sanskrit in a Gupta period script. The Gupta period lasted from around 320 to 554. There is also the base of what would have been an even more immense tower which was never completed.
We then drove to the southern side of Delhi to visit the Baha’i Temple, a striking lotus shaped building. The Baha’i religion is based on the idea of unity, the unity of God, of religion and of humankind. There are many visitors but the process is well marshaled. Footwear has to be left some distance from the building and silence is requested inside.
It is now getting towards evening and the last site we visited during our Delhi in a day tour is Safdarjung’s Tomb. This is another mausoleum set in a paradise garden but much more weathered and battered than Humayun’s tomb, although it is later. It was built in 1754 for a chief minister. But it is a pleasant place to wander in the evening.
Although we were in Delhi for 3 days, this was our main day sightseeing. We stayed at the Claridges Hotel (*) and they also organised the car and driver for the sightseeing. On another day we visited Connaught Square which is not very interesting, and Hauz Khas, an enclave south of the city centre, which is quite pleasant to stroll around. Just round the corner from the hotel is the Lodhi Gardens, an extensive park which contains the tombs of a number of sultans of the Lodhi dynasty, the last of the sultanates before the Mughal conquest. The gardens themselves were landscaped in 1936 under the supervision of the then Governor-general’s wife Lady Willingdon.
We arrived in Delhi on the Saturday and left on the following Wednesday for the journey to Jaipur and Agra, the Golden Triangle of the tourist brochures. The same driver who took us round Delhi was organised for this trip. There is a fairly good road between Delhi and Jaipur, a distance of about 275 kilometres. Even so, cattle can stray onto the highway. We passed a motorbike with three goats stuffed into panniers. We broke our journey for lunch at a roadside restaurant selected by the driver. Our destination is the Samode Palace (*), original a fort but turned into a palace in the 19th century and now run as a hotel. The state rooms are intricately decorated and there is very fine swimming pool finished in decorative tiling. The restaurant in an annex though was somewhat underwhelming.
Samode is some 40 kilometres north of Jaipur. The plan was to visit the Amer Fort in the morning and the town in the afternoon. Amer was the capital of the region until 1727 when the capital was moved to Jaipur, 10 kilometres down the road. Building was started by Man Singh, the local ruler and a general in Akbar’s army, in the late 16th century, The present structure is substantial and completely covers the hilltop, a complex of courtyards and domes and passageways and pavilions. Elephant rides are available but we preferred to walk up.
In the afternoon we drove into Jaipur. Constructed between 1727 and 1734 and commissioned by Jai Singh II, Jaipur is built and red and pink sandstone, giving everything a cohesive look. The long streets run on a grid pattern. Lunch was at the cafe outside the Anokhi shop (*). Anokhi sells block printed clothes and as well as the garments there is an exposition of the workshops and techniques.
We visited the Jantar Mantar. Like its counterpart in Delhi this was organsied by Jai Singh. It is the oldest of the 5 sites. It is possible to climb the instruments; the steps are surprisingly steep. Next stop is the City Palace, another complex of courtyards and passageways. There is a museum in the palace displaying armour and weaponry. The palace was built between 1729 and 1732. But the most memorable building in Japiur is the Hawa Mahal, the palace of the winds. The intricate stone latticework conceals the passageways which allowed women in purdah to view the street without being seen. It was built in 1798 under Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh. On the way back to Samode, we stopped by the Man Sagar Lake to look across to the Jal Mahal, the water palace. The lake is artificial and was created by damming a river in the 16th century; the renovations of the original palace were made in the 18th century. The palace has since been restored but at the time we visited in August 2006 it was still a ruin. Samode is at the foot of the Aravalli range of hills and in the evening I climbed to the top of the hill at the back of the palace to the site of the old fort to watch the sunset over the valley.
Next day we travelled on to Agra, but before leaving visited the Jaigarh fort which stands above Jaipur in the Aravalli hills. Completed in 1726, it is one of the three forts that with Amer and Nahargarh provided defence for Jaipur. Extended walls link this fort to the Nahargarh fort and there is an underground tunnel between Amer fort and Jaigarh fort. The fort houses the Jaivana cannon, the largest cannon in the world when it was cast in 1720. We wondered around and took in the views before leaving for Agra.
We only had one day in Jaipur. On reflection, I think we would have done better to cut the stay in Delhi to 2 days and had the extra day in Jaipur. There are other sites to visit in the city and the Samode Palace is a beautiful building in which to relax.
It is 240 kilometres or so from Jaipur to Agra, but unlike the Delhi road, this is a single carriageway road of variable quality. Driving discipline in India is poor. You can never be sure there won’t be oncoming traffic on your side of the road. It is not a tranquil ride, but we have confidence in our driver. After lunch at a road side restaurant, again a large hall with benches and long tables, which is fine, we get to Fatehpur Sikri in mid-afternoon. Fatehpur Sikri was founded in 1569 by Akbar. He moved his capital here in 1571 from Agra. In 1585 the imperial complex was abandoned, possible because there was a lack of water supply, perhaps because the political situation required another base. In 1585 Akbar moved his capital on to Lahore before returning to Agra in 1598.
Its characteristic aspect comes from the red sandstone used in the building. The buildings are very well preserved. It isn’t a ruin, but neither is it intact, the buildings aren’t ‘sealed’ in the way functioning buildings are – many of the structures are shells and there is no real distinction between interior and exterior spaces. This means that the impact on the ground is not quite what you expect from the distant views. The complex contains private quarters for Akbar’s wives and ministers, audience halls, meeting houses, and a mosque. There is also a garden with an ornamental pool surrounding a square platform connected by four bridges.
40 kilometres further on we arrive in Agra, and check into the Oberoi Amarvilas (*). The hotel is only a few hundred metres from the Taj Mahal, and all the rooms face across the garden and a hedge of trees to the dome which you can watch reflecting the setting sun. Flocks of kabutar, pigeons trained to fly in groups, rise from the town hidden behind the hedge and circle before returning to ground. The last Lodhi sultans moved their capital here from Delhi in 1506 and it remained their capital until the defeat of Ibrahim Lodhi at the first battle of Panipat in 1526. It became the Mughal capital from 1556 to 1571 and then again from 1598 to 1658.
Transport to the Taj Mahal site the following morning is by golf kart. This is another mausoleum, built by Shah Jahan for his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal. It is faced in marble inscribed with Koranic verses in elaborate calligraphy and surrounded by a rectangular formal garden. Work started in 1632 and it was completed in 1653, the twenty years of construction marked in the count of small domes over the main entrance gate. To one side is a mosque. It is a very fine building, particularly the delicate minarets at each corner, but like the mausoleums in Delhi it is not a building designed to be lived or worked in and that is its limitation. Below the walls a lawn mower pulled by oxen is working to keep the lawns maintained.
In the afternoon we visited the 3rd of Agra’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Red Fort. Construction of the current fort started in 1558, two years after the second battle of Panipat in 1556, at which Akbar re-asserted Mughal control. It was extended by his successors Jahangir and Shah Jahan. The fort is a little upriver from the Taj Mahal, and there is a less well known view of the Mausoleum from here. Shah Jahan was deposed and imprisoned in the Fort by his son Aurangzeb.
In the audience halls I try to picture the emperor Jahangir receiving an embassy from king James I of England, although in fact this happened at Ajmer in Rajasthan. Sir Thomas Roe was the king’s ambassador to the Mughal court for 3 years between 1615 and 1618, trying to gain protection for the East India Company’s trading post at Surat on the coast. Agra was also visited in 1615 by an english traveller called Thomas Coryate, himself trying to reach the court of Jahangir. He eventually catches up with the emperor at Taragarh fort in Ajmer. Here he hangs around with the men from the East India Company who are themselves waiting for Roe. Roe was looking for an agreement between the Company and Jahangir, while Jahangir wanted English help against the Portuguese, but Roe needed confirmation from king James before he could agree to this. Coryate wants to continue on to China and hopes Roe will introduce him to the emperor so that he can ask Jahangir for money and letters of introduction. However, Roe doesn’t think he is impressive enough and might give the emperor the wrong impression of Englishmen, so eventually Coryate has to join the petitioners in the courtyard. Jahangir refuses to give him letters; the Chinese are not friends; but does give him a paltry gift of money. The story is in Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa’s book about Coryate called ‘The Long Strider’.
This is the last day of this tour. The final leg of the triangle is the 240 kilometres return to Delhi, and we are back on dual carriageways. We are dropped directly at the airport for the flight back to Mumbai.
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In November we flew south from Mumbai to Kerala. Kerala has traded spices for thousands of years and it was here at Kozhikode that Vasco de Gama arrived in 1498 after the first voyage from the west round the Cape of Good Hope.
We were in Kochi for 3 days, staying at the Old Courtyard Hotel (*). There is a mainland section to the city called Ernakulam and across the harbour the old part of the city called Fort Kochi on a peninsula. The roads here are narrow and not really suitable for cars, but it is a compact area and easy to get around on foot or by auto-rickshaw. Just around the corner from the hotel is the waterfront. At this point the harbour entrance channel is very narrow and along the water front are ranged the Chinese fishing nets, and behind these small cooking areas and seating. Kerala has a significant fishing industry but most of the catch comes in on the boats we saw returning to shore in the mornings. The spectacular nets are more for show.
We visited the church of St Francis, where da Gama was originally buried, and the Santacruz Basilica. There was once also a Jewish settlement here and there is a synagogue built in 1568 on Jew Street. We also visited the spice warehouses along the north shore. We also took a boat across the bay to the mainland and Ernakulum. The boat ride was pleasant but the town itself is dull although there is a walkway along the waterfront from which you get a good view of the harbour. On the way back we stopped off on the opposite side of the harbour entrance channel to have a look round and then took a short ferry ride back to Fort Kochi in what was little more than an upturned metal tub.
The second part of our visit was onboard a boat on the Kerala backwaters. Our boat was the Oberoi Vrinda (*), We were picked up by car from the hotel in Fort Kochi for the drive to Lake Vembanad. The motor vessel moors up here for the night then tours the lake and the channals during the day.
The MV Vrinda is much larger than the typical houseboats and it turned out that for this trip we were the only guests. As well as cruising the back-waters, the trip includes guided tours and cutlural events. We visited a primary school on the riverbank and said hello to a class of tiny schoolchildren sitting at tiny desks. The state of Kerala has the highest human development index score in India, a consequence of high state spending on infrastructure and education. We also visited a private house called Katampally House at Chambakulam. The lady who owns the property showed us round. Her children work oversees in the Gulf, a typical scenario here. Remittances from people working overseas are a significant part of the economy. We also watched the rice paddies being worked.
On the first and third nights we watched performances of Keralan classical dance forms. The Kathikali dancers are heavily made up and perform a kind of pantomime accompanied by drums. The authentic dances are very long but we got the 45 minute version for tourists, performed on the quayside before dinner. On the third night, this time on the deck of the boat, we saw a performance of a quite different type of dance, Mohiniyattom , slow and graceful and abstract, performed by women dancers.
These waterways are lived by and bathed in and ferried across, a true water world. We passed many houseboats, traditional boats to which a canopy has now been added to create living accommodation and tourist transport. The long lake itself is placid and open, though there is vegetation floating by. In the morning we could go up to the sun-deck, do some yoga practice, and watch the sunrise over the lake.
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We were based in Mumbai for 18 months. The city is built on a number of islands separated from the mainland by Thane creek. The geography of the city is fairly straightforward. The southern part of the island, south of the Mahim River, which our driver called Townside, is the older part of the city built on the seven small original islands. North of the Mahim River on the larger island of Salsette are the western and eastern suburbs, so-called because they follow the lines of the western and eastern railways. This can be confusing because each suburb is itself divided into a west and an east by the railway so that, for example, the western suburb of Andheri is divided into Andheri West and Andheri East. Across the Thane creek is the new town of Navi Mumbai.
The East India Company’s original trading post was at Surat, up the coast from here in Gujurat. It was to protect the factory, not a factory in the modern sense but a place where factors traded, that Sir Thomas Roe was in India in 1615. At that time the islands had been ceded by the sultan of Ahmedabad to the Portuguese, who then gave the largest of them to Charles II of England on his marriage to Catherine of Braganza in 1661. He soon acquired the others. The islands were then leased to the Company in 1668, pulling the trigger for the development of the city as the first British colony in India. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 greatly improved access to European markets.
For most of the time we remained within the western suburbs in a corridor running south to north from Bandra through Juhu and Andheri to Malad. Our apartment was in Bandra, just off Linking Road, one of the main north south axes. Few blocks here are more than half a dozen stories high and we had the top floor flat in a seven storey block. From the west facing balcony in the evening we could watch the black kites circling Pali hill as the sunset. Then as the sky darkened the fruit bats would make their way home to the roost, flying directly over the apartment from east to west.
It is quite easy to walk around Bandra, though in the heat sometimes more comfortable to take the car. There were some good restaurants nearby; it is a few years since we were there but I think Zenzi and Olive are still open. There was a branch of Crossword, the best bookstore chain in India, on Turner Road. The liquor laws were restrictive and still may be. It wasn’t possible to buy wine in a supermarket or it a wine store where you could browse the shelves, but only at small outlets where you ordered over a wooden counter. We typically brought local Maharashtra wines from the vineyards in the cooler hills inland. From time to time there would be a dry day when the outlets were closed which was very frustrating if you were unprepared. We usually brought our wine from Pinky Wines. The owners were refugees from Sindh which had become part of Pakistan at Partition. The owner of our apartment block, who lived on the floor below us, was also Sindhi. The seafront was within walking distance, a place to stroll and people watch. At the entrance to the river is Bandra Fort, now a ruin, but once a Portuguese military post. As an urban environment I doubt there are many better places to live.
Juhu is 10-15 minutes drive north of Bandra. We joined the sports club at the Marriott hotel on Juhu beach. The swimming pools overlook Juhu beach and the Arabian Sea. The beach itself had become quite polluted but was cleaned up shortly after we arrived but the sea here is not clean enough to swim in. The Marriott was our principal retreat for relaxation at the weekends and for Sunday brunch.
Work meant travelling either to the office at Technopolis in Andheri near Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport or to the Mindspace complex at Malad. The other reason to travel to these suburbs was the malls. There are malls everywhere in the world but the function of the mall is more significant in Asian cities because there usually isn’t a modern downtown in the way that there is in a European style city. Malls collect together not only retail outlets but also restaurants and recreational facilities. InOrbit in Malad, Infiniti in Andheri, Atria in Worli and Phoenix High Street in Lower Parel have probably been joined by many more since we left.
We would make the trip downtown from time to time, usually at the weekend. At the time we were there the Bandra – Worli link across the entrance to Mahim bay was still under construction. I can’t say that it was being built for as far as was observable no progress was made in the 18 months that we were there. I think some of the pillars were misaligned and some specialist equipment was needed to fix the problem before work could continue. I read that it has since opened. We therefore had to cross the old causeway on SV Road which was always something of a bottleneck for traffic. The road then passed through a district we called Goat Town because there were donkey sized goats roaming the pavements.
Mumbai is really only a two day town for a tourist. The Nehru Science Museum in Worli contains some interesting interactive exhibits. Also on the western side, the Gandhi house at Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya is evocative. The house was Ghandi’s base from 1917 until 1934. There is a formal garden on Malabar Hill called the Hanging gardens and from the Kamla Nehru Gardens across the road there is a fine view down Marine Drive and Chowpatty Beach. Near the tip of the promontory is the Walkeshwar Temple Complex and the Banganga tank, originally constructed in the 12th century and rebuilt in 1715. It is quite peaceful to contemplate the pool of water here.
The drive along Marine Drive leads to the business district at Nariman point. Across the pensinsula there is the ceremonial and administrative centre of the city. The predominant architectural style is called Indo-Saracenic, a fusion of Victorian gothic revival and Indian components. The eastern railway terminates at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, built in 1887, and the museum at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya is worth visiting, maybe more for the building, completed in 1914, than the exhibitions. Chhatrapati means great king and commemorates the Maratha warlord Shivaji who challenged Mughal power in the region in the 17th century. The Gateway to India, completed in 1924, sits on the quayside in front of the Taj Hotel.
On these trips we often used to stop by at the Jahangir Art Gallery, where the exhibitions of local artists changed frequently, and the private art galleries in the neighbouring street or the National Gallery of Modern Art opposite. Our favourite place for lunch was the Oberoi hotel.
From the Gateway it is possible to take a boat across the harbour to Elephanta Island, which is the highlight of any trip to Mumbai and would occupy the second day of a two-day tour. The boat ride takes about an hour and the visibility varies but if it is clear you get a good view of the dockside from the boats. Elephanta island houses a number of rock excavated temples dedicated to Shiva, carved rather than built in the 8th century. There is a fairly steep set of stairs up to the temples and a pleasant restaurant at the top, run by the municipality, which serves Thali lunches and beers. Thali is essentially a selection of dishes on a tray.
We rarely drove off the island. The distances and the state of the roads mean that flying is the easiest way to get around. The only drive outstation was to take the new highway to Pune, 120 kilometres to the south-east, where a number of the big software companies have campuses. These are very impressive. On the way back, it is worth taking a detour off the highway at Lonavala, where there are fine views over the plains.
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