BharatSangraha

Khandesh · Deccan Inland Plateau

The small things

  • Ajanta is not in KhandeshThe caves lie in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (Aurangabad) district — Marathwada — cut into the far face of the Ajanta range, about 59 km from Jalgaon and 104 km from Aurangabad. Because the railhead, the road approach and most visitors come from the Khandesh side, they are routinely described as Khandeshi. Ellora, also in that district, is likewise Marathwada. The range is Khandesh's southern wall; the monuments cut into its other side are not.
  • Wipro began as an Amalner oil millWestern India Vegetable Products was founded at Amalner in 1945 to press groundnut and cottonseed — the two oilseeds this valley grows. The company diversified out of vegetable oil decades later and became Wipro. One of India's largest software firms started as a response to a Khandeshi crop pattern.
  • A GI for a vegetable defined by a dishThe Jalgaon Bharit Brinjal received a geographical indication in 2016–17 — protection granted not to a market grade or a size class but to a thorny landrace grown specifically because it roasts well over an open fire and separates cleanly from its charred skin. The dish came first and the crop was bred to it.
  • The fire is the harvest residueBharit is roasted over parathi, the dried cotton stalks pulled after picking. That is why the dish tastes of smoke, why it is a winter food, and why it belongs to a cotton district — the fuel is free and available exactly once a year, at exactly the time the brinjals come in.
  • Counted as Gujarati, then as MarathiThe censuses of 1911, 1921 and 1931 recorded Ahirani speakers as Gujaratis. Later enumerations moved them towards Marathi. The language has an ISO code of its own, several million speakers, a substantial oral literature and no administrative existence — and the size of the recorded speaker population depends as much on the classification used as on how many people speak it.
  • The two ChangdevsChangdev of the Tapi–Purna confluence is the yogi to whom Dnyaneshwar addressed the Changdev Pasashti. Changadeva of Patan, near Chalisgaon, was Bhaskara II's grandson, who set up a math to teach his grandfather's Siddhanta Shiromani and left the inscription that records the family. They lived a century apart and are constantly confused, including in local signage.
  • Where the Lilavati was writtenThe standard Indian arithmetic text for six centuries was completed in 1150 by a man whose family inscription places him at Patan near Chalisgaon, in a wooded gorge of the Satmala range now inside a wildlife sanctuary. The site is a temple, a waterfall and an unmarked mathematical address.
  • An underground waterworks at BurhanpurThe Khooni Bhandara, built in the early seventeenth century, draws groundwater from the Satpura foot through a system of tunnels and vertical inspection shafts and delivers it to Burhanpur by gravity. Parts of it still supply water. It is the same engineering idea as a Persian qanat, applied on the Tapi.
  • Mumtaz Mahal died on the TapiShe died at Burhanpur in 1631 while the Mughal court was campaigning in the Deccan, and was first buried across the river at Zainabad before the body was moved to Agra. The Taj Mahal's occupant spent her last years in the Tapi valley.
  • Bread must not leave the houseThe rot offered to Kanbai in Shravan has to be eaten within the household and its invited guests, and by rule is not carried outside. It makes the festival strictly domestic — there is no public distribution, no prasad taken away, and the observance cannot scale beyond a house.
  • A festival for the dead at the hottest hourAkhaji falls at the peak of the pre-monsoon heat. New earthen pots are bought, filled with water and offered with mango juice to the household's dead before the living eat. In a valley that touches 47 °C, offering the ancestors cold water from a new pot is a precise piece of ritual logic.
  • The railway was built for cotton and now runs on bananasBhusawal became one of Central Railway's largest junctions because nineteenth-century cotton needed moving to Bombay and Surat, particularly during the boom created by the American Civil War. The yards and sheds built for lint now dispatch banana. The valley has ginning presses and no looms for the same reason — the railway made it cheaper to export raw material than to weave it.

Small local details of Khandesh — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)