BharatSangraha

Marathwada · Deccan Inland Plateau

The small things

  • A temple carved from the top downThe Kailasa at Ellora was not built. Three trenches were cut vertically into the escarpment to isolate a block of basalt, and the carvers then worked downward and inward from the top, finishing each level before exposing the next. There is no scaffolding in a subtractive medium and no way to correct an error — every cut is final. M. K. Dhavalikar's estimate, working from a plausible rate of four cubic feet removed per worker per day, puts the job at roughly 250 workers over about five and a half years.
  • The line where the money ran outBibi ka Maqbara is marble to dado height and around the dome, and plastered basalt in between. The Tarikh Namah records the cost at Rs 6,68,203 and 7 annas against Aurangzeb's sanction of seven lakh. You can stand at the plinth and see the exact course where the budget stopped.
  • Ajanta drains the wrong wayThe Ajanta caves sit above the Waghur, which flows north into the Tapi — the far side of the watershed from the Godavari basin that defines the rest of this region. The caves are administratively Marathwada and hydrologically Khandesh, which is why almost everyone reaches them from Jalgaon.
  • An Ethiopian founded the cityMalik Ambar, born in Ethiopia and sold into slavery in Baghdad before reaching the Deccan, founded Khadki in 1610 on the site that became Aurangabad, laid its water supply through the Nahr-e-Ambari channels, and ran the Nizam Shahi state's defence against the Mughals for two decades. The city that carries a Mughal emperor's name was laid out by the man who spent his life fighting that empire.
  • A calendar and a currency of its ownHyderabad State ran on the Fasli harvest year for revenue and issued its own currency, the Hyderabadi rupee, which circulated in these districts alongside the Indian rupee until it was withdrawn at the end of the 1950s. Old land documents here are dated in a calendar the rest of Maharashtra never used.
  • The railway zone that remembers the NizamNanded and Parbhani are on South Central Railway, headquartered at Secunderabad, while the rest of Maharashtra is Central or Western Railway. The lines were laid by the Nizam's Guaranteed State Railway, and the zone boundary drawn afterwards followed the princely one. Buying a ticket here still routes you through Hyderabad.
  • The mango that beat the Alphonso to a GIMarathwada Kesar was registered as a geographical indication in November 2016, the first mango from Maharashtra to get one. The Alphonso followed in 2018. Kesar is planted here because it tolerates shallow soil and heat that Alphonso will not, so the drought region got the earlier certificate.
  • The weaving town without the weavingThe Paithani is named for Paithan, where the tapestry-woven pallu was developed. Most of it is now woven at Yeola in Nashik district, several hundred kilometres away and outside this region entirely, by several thousand weavers. The geographical indication protects the technique and the name rather than a single town.
  • Shivaji's family were the headmen of ElloraMaloji Bhosale, Shivaji's grandfather, held the patilki of Verul — the village a kilometre from the Ellora escarpment and the Grishneshwar temple. The Maratha dynasty that later defined western Maharashtra begins as a village office in Marathwada.
  • An earthquake where the map said there was noneThe Killari earthquake of 30 September 1993 struck at 3.56 in the morning in a stable continental interior with no mapped active fault, in a zone then rated low-hazard. Around ten thousand people died, mostly under heavy stone-and-mud roofs that collapsed inward. It is one of the most-studied intraplate earthquakes anywhere, and it forced a revision of Indian seismic zoning.
  • Ambedkar's college in a princely-state townMilind Mahavidyalaya was founded at Nagsenvana in Aurangabad in 1950 by Ambedkar's People's Education Society — deliberately sited in a region that had come out of Hyderabad State two years earlier with almost no higher education of its own.
  • A tunnel built to be a chimneyThe only route to Daulatabad's citadel runs through a dark rock-cut gallery with a false side passage and a grating part-way along that could be turned into a fire-pit. The design assumes the attacker gets in, and then makes the inside worse than the outside.

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