Only a tiny fraction of the millions of travellers who flock between Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, the three vertices of India's touristic Golden Triangle, make the short detour south to Madhya Pradesh, or MP as it’s commonly known.
It's easy to understand why: the landlocked state's dry and dusty climate, inferior infrastructure, and sheer size - roughly equivalent to that of Poland - mean that journeys between the distant tourist sites are long, hot and arduous.
Travelling here is always uncomfortable and can often be stressful, but those who make the effort are rewarded with a much more authentically Indian experience than can be had in neighbouring Rajasthan.
One might think that the unpopularity of MP, and its poverty, would result in even more hassle and exorbitant price gouging for the foreign tourist, but this is not the case. Here, local people approach goras* with kindness, curiosity and an almost childlike innocence, while the children themselves clamour for attention and photos rather than for pens and rupees.
Unlike some other Indian states I’ve visited, there are very few touts in MP, and travellers are often quoted a reasonable price. It's a predominantly rural and tribal state where the swaraj* way of village life has continued without much change for thousands of years. For sophisticated Mumbaikars, Dilliwallas and Kolkatans, MP is truly mofussil*.
*The Hindi noun gora means ‘white’. Often, though not always, used derisively towards westerners.
*Swaraj is Gandhi's idealised concept of non-hierarchical Indian 'home rule' in which "every village [is] self-sustained and capable of managing its own affairs."
*Mofussil is analogous to the English term 'in the sticks'.
***
The western city of Indore is MP's largest and is a busy place of limited charm. The last time I arrived there I was approached on the tarmac by kindly soldiers who took my elbow and ushered me back towards the plane in the assumption that I had disembarked by mistake. When I insisted the opposite, they smiled and asked, Why you come here? - nothing is here for you.
How wrong they were. Some of my best memories of India come from that trip to MP in 2006. I met wonderful people and I experienced some of the world's most sensational, and least visited, Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim historical sites which, for the most part, I had all to myself. I didn't see another gora for eight consecutive days.
This time there was no confusion at the airport and I went directly to meet another gora: my friend Richie who had flown out from Ireland to travel with me for a few weeks. I took a cab to Indore's mid-market Surya hotel - where the ratio of staff to guests seemed, as is usual in Indian business hotels, to be at least three to one.
None of them attended the reception desk. Instead they all stood with hands clasped looking with expressions of sad concern at a filthy mechanic who extracted a series of greasy cogs and wheels from the workings of the broken elevator.
After checking in with the usual bureaucracy - documents photocopied; multiple signatures; passport and visa numbers, issuance and expiry dates; my previous and subsequent destinations - I shouldered my bags and climbed six flights of stairs, past three concierge desks, to our room.
Richie peered through a crack in the door with a head like a scarecrow, distinctly the worse for wear after flying in that morning via Abu Dhabi and Bombay. After shooting the breeze for a while he seemed to revive, so we headed out for what I hoped would be a cheap-and-cheerful dinner and a few drinks at an atmospheric rooftop restaurant.
But I had the wrong expectations. I had forgotten that this was not Rajasthan. There are no rooftop restaurants for travellers in Indore, so we ended up trading salacious gossip in hushed tones in an oppressively silent family restaurant, followed by a couple of drinks in an oppressively silent bar where groups of heavy men lurked in the dim corners raising whiskey tumblers to their moustachioed lips with burly gold-encrusted fingers.
***
Our first destination was the medieval ruined city of Mandu, perched on a plateau near Indore, where I had spent an amazing Diwali in 2006 - fireworks, and thunder and lightning, and whiskey and hashish, and delicious chaat*, and frenzied cricket, and bonfires on the plain as far as the eye could see.
On that occasion I had spent twelve hours travelling the 100km from Indore to Mandu, squeezed into local buses between a fat sadhu and a tiny schoolgirl. Changing vehicle at the manic bus station in the town of Dhar I hung around eating oily samosas, drinking scalding chai, and watching the bony cattle munch placidly on the garlands of marigolds bedecking the buses.
That was a memorable, though exhausting, journey and this time I wanted to do it again. But a miserable local bus experience of Richie's on his own last trip to India made him insist on a rented taxi. As we settled the hotel bill in Indore, the reception desk a sign was missing a letter and so read “CHECK OUT TIM 10AM.” I hoped I was looking my best.
The hotel clerk who had arranged our taxi astonished me by graciously refusing to accept some decent baksheesh* - the first time I had experienced this embarrassing situation. Clearly I had mistaken someone of either a relatively high caste or position for someone who would denigrate themselves by accepting trifling sums from porcine foreigners.
This time the journey from Indore to Mandu took just three hours, thanks largely to the new highways which are in varying states of completion across the state. But it was very hot - hot enough for our bottles of iced water to attain the ambient temperature within five minutes. There are few more unpleasant liquids to drink than water as warm as one's own blood.
*Chaat can be loosely translated as ‘delicacy’. Savoury bread-, pulse- or potato-based street food with onion, tomato, peanut, coriander, tamarind, yogurt and many spices.
*Baksheesh is a tip or a bribe.
***
At Mandu in 2006 I had stayed by the cliffs at the edge of town, in a basic room crawling with bugs that batted off my face as I tried to sleep and crunched under my feet as I used the bathroom in the darkness. And when I gave the elderly night watchman twenty rupees for waking me at 5am to see the sensational sunrise over the plain he embarrassed me by falling to his knees in thanks.
This time, to my consternation, Richie had booked accommodation at the town’s most expensive resort. At a thousand rupees each per night, it was over twice what I was accustomed to paying, and quite outside my budget. But our little air-conditioned bungalow was pleasant and we flitted gleefully between a bedroom, a sitting room and a walk-in dresser. Our veranda looked onto a lake, sadly depleted by several years of failing monsoons.
In the morning, small groups of colourful sari-clad women appeared on the lip of this lakebed with huge copper pots balanced on their veiled heads and gold bangles jangling on their thin arms. Picking their barefoot way down into the dry basin they collected their families' daily water from grave-like makeshift wells sunk deep into the cracked yellow clay. I felt pangs of guilt thinking of our hotel’s large swimming pool.
At noon a crowd of little boys splashed around in the distant knee-high remnants of the lake chasing lazy storks through the heat haze. And as the sun set families of monkeys squabbled screaming in the lakeside treetops as the scent of frying spices drifted across the water.
This timelessness that pervades rural India affords the western intruder a view of a lifestyle that at a macroeconomic level has changed little in thousands of years. The microeconomic changes have of course been non-trivial - many people now have mobile phones, and the roofs of their hand-built adobe homes are now made of corrugated steel and sport satellite dishes fixed in place with stones. But they still ride bullock carts to market and burn dried cowpats to cook their dinner.
***
How different the sultans’ lives must have been when they wintered here at Mandhavgarh, the City of Joy. The plateau has borne a fortified settlement for thousands of years, claimed by many kings, but its golden age was as the capital of the Afghan Khans of Marwar and their succeeding dynasties, who broke from the Delhi Sultanate in 1401 but were inevitably folded into the Mughal Empire 150 years later by Akbar.
During this brief independence Mandu was heavily crenellated and populated with many ornate structures in a refined Pashtun architectural style that was much admired by later conquerors - including Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, who sent his architects here to study Hoshang Shah’s exquisite tomb - India’s first marble building - as a model for the Taj Mahal.
Such was the magnificence of the brief Marwari interregnum that it warranted the construction of a special palace for the royal harem. The sultans were spoiled for choice: the long and narrow Jahaz Mahal, or Ship Palace, built between two artificial lakes, housed a thousand Turkish concubines.
Although now stripped of all ornament, it’s easy to imagine the glittering jewels and rich textiles that once adorned the vaulted halls of the Jahaz Mahal. From the graceful lotus-shaped rooftop bathing pool, fed by spiralling floor channels, one can see rising from the adjacent lakes the stone platforms which would once have borne lanterns, musicians and medieval go-go dancers.
Scattered across the plateau are numerous other monuments - elegant crumbling chhatris, or tombs: cupolas enclosed by jali screens of tan or red sandstone laboriously pierced by intricate geometric and arabesque patterns; deep baoris, or step-wells, with Escheresque staircases descending to the water; cathedral merchants’ halls and caravanserais; and the ruins of mighty palaces proclaiming the victory of Islam by featuring prominently in their brickwork inverted carvings from demolished Hindu temples.
But the most atmospheric of Mandu’s monuments is the pavilion of Rani Rupmati, perched on a cliff on the outskirts of the city, overlooking the Narmada river plain on one side, and on the other the palace of her husband Baz Bahadur Shah. The tragic coda of this interfaith love story has inspired many poems. Emperor Akbar, obsessed with the beauty of the dancing Hindu queen, easily defeated Bahadur’s forces and conquered Mandu, but Rupmati poisoned herself on the clifftop before she could be forced into the imperial harem.
***
Richie and I wandered this splendid evocative city for three days. Although this visit to Mandu was never going to compare with my wonderful Diwali experience five years previously - not least because of the forty-three degree heat on this trip - we had many memorable encounters.
As soon as we left our hotel we were much in demand. Little boys called down from every treetop and shopkeeping families clamoured for group photos. In the shade of a spreading neem tree in the little market square we were treated to chai by a travelling pharmaceutical salesman.
The family in whose memorable company I dined in 2006 had replaced their atmospheric home with a dark and cavernous concrete hall built for busloads of tour groups. Now it was empty, but the same ancient matriarch sat gazing at soap operas blaring from the wall-mounted television and her demented ramblings were still studiously ignored by her crushed middle-aged son who brought our thalis* from the distant smoky kitchen.
Richie sprang up and down the treacherous steps to Rupmati’s pavilion with the supple grace of a young goat. We endured a lengthy historical lecture from an elderly Dutch traveller wearing a long grey beard and white socks under his sandals. Later, in a barn outside of town that previously functioned as a royal mosque, we smoked charras* and drank beers with another Irish traveller until a nearby local, sleeping outside, shouted at us to move on.
*Thali is the Hindi word for ‘plate’. As a meal, it’s a delicious selection of basic daily curries served in small bowls with rice and bread.
*Charras is hashish.
It's easy to understand why: the landlocked state's dry and dusty climate, inferior infrastructure, and sheer size - roughly equivalent to that of Poland - mean that journeys between the distant tourist sites are long, hot and arduous.
Travelling here is always uncomfortable and can often be stressful, but those who make the effort are rewarded with a much more authentically Indian experience than can be had in neighbouring Rajasthan.
One might think that the unpopularity of MP, and its poverty, would result in even more hassle and exorbitant price gouging for the foreign tourist, but this is not the case. Here, local people approach goras* with kindness, curiosity and an almost childlike innocence, while the children themselves clamour for attention and photos rather than for pens and rupees.
Unlike some other Indian states I’ve visited, there are very few touts in MP, and travellers are often quoted a reasonable price. It's a predominantly rural and tribal state where the swaraj* way of village life has continued without much change for thousands of years. For sophisticated Mumbaikars, Dilliwallas and Kolkatans, MP is truly mofussil*.
*The Hindi noun gora means ‘white’. Often, though not always, used derisively towards westerners.
*Swaraj is Gandhi's idealised concept of non-hierarchical Indian 'home rule' in which "every village [is] self-sustained and capable of managing its own affairs."
*Mofussil is analogous to the English term 'in the sticks'.
***
The western city of Indore is MP's largest and is a busy place of limited charm. The last time I arrived there I was approached on the tarmac by kindly soldiers who took my elbow and ushered me back towards the plane in the assumption that I had disembarked by mistake. When I insisted the opposite, they smiled and asked, Why you come here? - nothing is here for you.
How wrong they were. Some of my best memories of India come from that trip to MP in 2006. I met wonderful people and I experienced some of the world's most sensational, and least visited, Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim historical sites which, for the most part, I had all to myself. I didn't see another gora for eight consecutive days.
This time there was no confusion at the airport and I went directly to meet another gora: my friend Richie who had flown out from Ireland to travel with me for a few weeks. I took a cab to Indore's mid-market Surya hotel - where the ratio of staff to guests seemed, as is usual in Indian business hotels, to be at least three to one.
None of them attended the reception desk. Instead they all stood with hands clasped looking with expressions of sad concern at a filthy mechanic who extracted a series of greasy cogs and wheels from the workings of the broken elevator.
After checking in with the usual bureaucracy - documents photocopied; multiple signatures; passport and visa numbers, issuance and expiry dates; my previous and subsequent destinations - I shouldered my bags and climbed six flights of stairs, past three concierge desks, to our room.
Richie peered through a crack in the door with a head like a scarecrow, distinctly the worse for wear after flying in that morning via Abu Dhabi and Bombay. After shooting the breeze for a while he seemed to revive, so we headed out for what I hoped would be a cheap-and-cheerful dinner and a few drinks at an atmospheric rooftop restaurant.
But I had the wrong expectations. I had forgotten that this was not Rajasthan. There are no rooftop restaurants for travellers in Indore, so we ended up trading salacious gossip in hushed tones in an oppressively silent family restaurant, followed by a couple of drinks in an oppressively silent bar where groups of heavy men lurked in the dim corners raising whiskey tumblers to their moustachioed lips with burly gold-encrusted fingers.
***
Our first destination was the medieval ruined city of Mandu, perched on a plateau near Indore, where I had spent an amazing Diwali in 2006 - fireworks, and thunder and lightning, and whiskey and hashish, and delicious chaat*, and frenzied cricket, and bonfires on the plain as far as the eye could see.
On that occasion I had spent twelve hours travelling the 100km from Indore to Mandu, squeezed into local buses between a fat sadhu and a tiny schoolgirl. Changing vehicle at the manic bus station in the town of Dhar I hung around eating oily samosas, drinking scalding chai, and watching the bony cattle munch placidly on the garlands of marigolds bedecking the buses.
That was a memorable, though exhausting, journey and this time I wanted to do it again. But a miserable local bus experience of Richie's on his own last trip to India made him insist on a rented taxi. As we settled the hotel bill in Indore, the reception desk a sign was missing a letter and so read “CHECK OUT TIM 10AM.” I hoped I was looking my best.
The hotel clerk who had arranged our taxi astonished me by graciously refusing to accept some decent baksheesh* - the first time I had experienced this embarrassing situation. Clearly I had mistaken someone of either a relatively high caste or position for someone who would denigrate themselves by accepting trifling sums from porcine foreigners.
This time the journey from Indore to Mandu took just three hours, thanks largely to the new highways which are in varying states of completion across the state. But it was very hot - hot enough for our bottles of iced water to attain the ambient temperature within five minutes. There are few more unpleasant liquids to drink than water as warm as one's own blood.
*Chaat can be loosely translated as ‘delicacy’. Savoury bread-, pulse- or potato-based street food with onion, tomato, peanut, coriander, tamarind, yogurt and many spices.
*Baksheesh is a tip or a bribe.
***
At Mandu in 2006 I had stayed by the cliffs at the edge of town, in a basic room crawling with bugs that batted off my face as I tried to sleep and crunched under my feet as I used the bathroom in the darkness. And when I gave the elderly night watchman twenty rupees for waking me at 5am to see the sensational sunrise over the plain he embarrassed me by falling to his knees in thanks.
This time, to my consternation, Richie had booked accommodation at the town’s most expensive resort. At a thousand rupees each per night, it was over twice what I was accustomed to paying, and quite outside my budget. But our little air-conditioned bungalow was pleasant and we flitted gleefully between a bedroom, a sitting room and a walk-in dresser. Our veranda looked onto a lake, sadly depleted by several years of failing monsoons.
In the morning, small groups of colourful sari-clad women appeared on the lip of this lakebed with huge copper pots balanced on their veiled heads and gold bangles jangling on their thin arms. Picking their barefoot way down into the dry basin they collected their families' daily water from grave-like makeshift wells sunk deep into the cracked yellow clay. I felt pangs of guilt thinking of our hotel’s large swimming pool.
At noon a crowd of little boys splashed around in the distant knee-high remnants of the lake chasing lazy storks through the heat haze. And as the sun set families of monkeys squabbled screaming in the lakeside treetops as the scent of frying spices drifted across the water.
This timelessness that pervades rural India affords the western intruder a view of a lifestyle that at a macroeconomic level has changed little in thousands of years. The microeconomic changes have of course been non-trivial - many people now have mobile phones, and the roofs of their hand-built adobe homes are now made of corrugated steel and sport satellite dishes fixed in place with stones. But they still ride bullock carts to market and burn dried cowpats to cook their dinner.
***
How different the sultans’ lives must have been when they wintered here at Mandhavgarh, the City of Joy. The plateau has borne a fortified settlement for thousands of years, claimed by many kings, but its golden age was as the capital of the Afghan Khans of Marwar and their succeeding dynasties, who broke from the Delhi Sultanate in 1401 but were inevitably folded into the Mughal Empire 150 years later by Akbar.
During this brief independence Mandu was heavily crenellated and populated with many ornate structures in a refined Pashtun architectural style that was much admired by later conquerors - including Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, who sent his architects here to study Hoshang Shah’s exquisite tomb - India’s first marble building - as a model for the Taj Mahal.
Such was the magnificence of the brief Marwari interregnum that it warranted the construction of a special palace for the royal harem. The sultans were spoiled for choice: the long and narrow Jahaz Mahal, or Ship Palace, built between two artificial lakes, housed a thousand Turkish concubines.
Although now stripped of all ornament, it’s easy to imagine the glittering jewels and rich textiles that once adorned the vaulted halls of the Jahaz Mahal. From the graceful lotus-shaped rooftop bathing pool, fed by spiralling floor channels, one can see rising from the adjacent lakes the stone platforms which would once have borne lanterns, musicians and medieval go-go dancers.
Scattered across the plateau are numerous other monuments - elegant crumbling chhatris, or tombs: cupolas enclosed by jali screens of tan or red sandstone laboriously pierced by intricate geometric and arabesque patterns; deep baoris, or step-wells, with Escheresque staircases descending to the water; cathedral merchants’ halls and caravanserais; and the ruins of mighty palaces proclaiming the victory of Islam by featuring prominently in their brickwork inverted carvings from demolished Hindu temples.
But the most atmospheric of Mandu’s monuments is the pavilion of Rani Rupmati, perched on a cliff on the outskirts of the city, overlooking the Narmada river plain on one side, and on the other the palace of her husband Baz Bahadur Shah. The tragic coda of this interfaith love story has inspired many poems. Emperor Akbar, obsessed with the beauty of the dancing Hindu queen, easily defeated Bahadur’s forces and conquered Mandu, but Rupmati poisoned herself on the clifftop before she could be forced into the imperial harem.
***
Richie and I wandered this splendid evocative city for three days. Although this visit to Mandu was never going to compare with my wonderful Diwali experience five years previously - not least because of the forty-three degree heat on this trip - we had many memorable encounters.
As soon as we left our hotel we were much in demand. Little boys called down from every treetop and shopkeeping families clamoured for group photos. In the shade of a spreading neem tree in the little market square we were treated to chai by a travelling pharmaceutical salesman.
The family in whose memorable company I dined in 2006 had replaced their atmospheric home with a dark and cavernous concrete hall built for busloads of tour groups. Now it was empty, but the same ancient matriarch sat gazing at soap operas blaring from the wall-mounted television and her demented ramblings were still studiously ignored by her crushed middle-aged son who brought our thalis* from the distant smoky kitchen.
Richie sprang up and down the treacherous steps to Rupmati’s pavilion with the supple grace of a young goat. We endured a lengthy historical lecture from an elderly Dutch traveller wearing a long grey beard and white socks under his sandals. Later, in a barn outside of town that previously functioned as a royal mosque, we smoked charras* and drank beers with another Irish traveller until a nearby local, sleeping outside, shouted at us to move on.
*Thali is the Hindi word for ‘plate’. As a meal, it’s a delicious selection of basic daily curries served in small bowls with rice and bread.
*Charras is hashish.
