Through India and Burmah with pen and brush

by A. Hugh Fisher

On my way back from Udaipur I stopped at Chitorgarh, fifty miles away, to drive to the famous fortress city of Chitor, the former capital of Mewar.

The hill of Chitor lies on the flat land like a long mole or hog's back. All along its crest old tawny buildings with towers and turrets stretch in a broken line as if they formed the ridge of some old saurian's back with many of the spines broken. Rather beyond the centre the Tower of Victory, yellow and tawny as the rest of the buildings, appears sharply prominent. Trees circle the hill at its base and rising from among them the road leads steeply along and up the side of the cliff in one long zigzag. The slopes of the hill looked grey as I approached.

The tonga I had engaged to drive me from Chitorgarh crossed by a stone parapeted bridge the almost empty River Ghamberi, in the bed of which the bare rock jutted up in sloping shelves. We passed a cemetery and several fields of green barley, and the zigzag road up the hill looked more imposing the nearer we drew, with its eye-holed curtain wall, its bastions and towers. Still in the plain below, we now entered through the pointed arch of a gateway the bazaar of modern Chitor. It was full of dogs, pigeons, cattle and people,—a narrow crowded street at right angles to the hill. We turned by the large white Kotwali and a beautiful temple porch and passed houses with elaborately carved fronts having stone balconies with grey reliefs of elephant processions.

Then we entered the "fort" itself, and began our progress through the long series of its seven gateways that close the zigzag road at intervals. First came the "Padal Pol" of Akhbar's time, and then a new gate with two monuments and the sacred emblems of Siva. The third was the Gate of Hanuman, the monkey friend of Rama. Set within a grand stone arch, the old wooden doors covered with large iron spikes were dropping to pieces with age. Between this and the preceding gateway Akhbar himself is said to have shot the besieged leader in the great siege of 1568. The Ganesh Gate followed, and just at the turn of the zigzag far above our heads the rough masses of bare rock—here, blood-red ochre, and there, pale purple grey—reared up and up to yet higher steeps of masonry to the line of the great road wall above. Here and there stunted trees clutched the stones or straddled some projection with clinging roots. The fifth gateway was the Jorla Pol with a rough, stone house built over it. The Lakshman Pol was close to this last, and had a group of nine brown-legged native soldiers lounging in the gate-house. Beside this part of the road there were some hundreds of small monuments like double cubes from two to three feet high, and I was told that in past days anyone of Chitor who had been to Benares built one of these.

In front of the Ram Pol, the seventh and last gateway, there is a wonderful old stone building with carved pillars and a long beam-like piece of stone, now used as a bench to sit upon, carved from end to end with alternate balusters and figures. The carving round the base of this gateway is very remarkable, being in three tiers together, not higher than three feet, with human figures in the upper course, horses in the middle one and elephants below.

Beyond this gate are the ruins of old Chitor. Blue-glazed tiles still gleam from broken walls of palaces and time takes leisurely its slow revenge. There are two towers in Chitor—one, the Tower of Fame and the other the Tower of Victory. The first is close to an old Jain temple, and is itself of Jaina architecture, built probably about the time when Saxon pirates looked on the Roman ruins of Londinium.

In a niche over the very tiny doorway and on each of the other three sides at the same level, stands a perfectly nude figure which I suppose to be that of the deified saint or Tirthakarai to which the tower was dedicated. Throughout its seven storeys the tower is covered with elaborate sculpture and horizontal mouldings. The door was locked with a brass lock, and it took some hunting to find the keeper of the key.

When I bowed down and crept at last within, the dusk was filled with a great whirring sound of many things. I clambered up to the open storey at the top, and as I climbed grew more used to the subdued light and could distinguish in the carving dancing-girls with strings of jewels, strange stags among trees and lines of geese, while a myriad long-eared bats squealed about my head. There was no lightning-conductor on the Tower of Fame.

The Tower of Victory, glowing a golden yellow in the declining sun, was obviously more used to visitors, and has an easier and a cleaner stairway. It is a fifteenth century monument built to commemorate a victory over Mahmud, King of Malwa, and has nine storeys covered with carved decoration. Within this also there are many sculptures of the Hindoo mythology—Brahma, Vishnu and Siva and their various incarnations. On the top storey but one there are eight carved marble columns very old and yellow, in an inner rank, and on the outer projecting portion of the storey other marble columns. By a wooden ladder I ascended from here to the top storey which is roofed with a dome restored last century, and now protected by a lightning-rod. There were no marble pillars on this upper storey which is octagonal in shape with four open sides and four closed by stone screens. Inside, against the latter, four stone slabs about two feet square are let in to a stone framework, and two of these are old and covered with inscription.