Tag: India

The Cursed City of Bhangarh

There is a famous ruin in Rajasthan, India that is said to be haunted by Mughal princes who once kept a palace there. A sign has been hung by the local authorities forbidding visitors from entering the ruin after sunset. It threatens that legal action will be taken against anyone who disobeys the command. This is the city of Bhangarh. It contains a magnificent palace, several impressive temples, and a walled fort. Despite the size and glory of its buildings, the city lasted little more than a few generations. According to legend it was brought low by a curse.

Bhangarh was founded in 1573 by the Mughal nobility that resided in the area. Bhagwant Das, ruler of Amber and close ally to Emperor Akbar, gave the valley where Bhangarh is situated to one of his sons for his personal residence. The precinct was uninhabited except for a few sheepherders and a guru who lived and meditated in a hovel hidden away in the forest. As the only permanent tenant of the valley, the guru gave his blessing to the city’s construction, but only under the condition that its spires and pagodas not shade him in his meditations. “Should the shadows of your palaces at any point touch me,” the guru said, “your city will be no more. I shall have it committed to the dust and wind.”

As a provincial capital, Bhangarh grew. rapidly Emboldened by his mounting wealth, the son of the city’s first ruler embarked on an ambitious project to expand and improve his royal palace. Its turrets grew to such a height that they did eventually obscure the guru’s hut from the sun. The guru was angered that his wishes were ignored and placed a curse over the city of Bhangarh. And sure enough, with the ascension of Jaipur just a few miles to the southwest and the gradual diminution of the Mughal throne, Bhangarh’s position in the region began to decline. In 1720, Jai Singh II conquered the city and incorporated it into his kingdom. Seeing it as the old Muslim capital he let it fall to ruin. The city underwent steady depopulation until finally, in 1783, a famine caused it to be completely abandonment.
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There is another story and another curse. A famous and beautiful princess once lived in Bhangarh. She was courted by all the noblemen in Rajasthan. A tantrik magician loved her from afar but could not pursue her on account of his caste. To make her come to him, the tantrik enchanted a vial of oil which the princess’s handmaid had bought from the market to anoint her mistress. If the oil were to have touched the princess’s skin she would fallen hopelessly in love with the magician. But the princess herself had some command of magic and was able to discover the spell. She threw the vial out of the window of her bedchamber. When it struck the ground, the oil transformed into a boulder, which grew as it rolled down the palace hill. The boulder sought the sorcerer through the streets of the city and finally crushed him in a gruesome spectacle. But before it did, the magician managed to utter a curse against the palace and all who dwelled there. That following year Bhangarh went to war with a neighboring city. In a terrible battle, the ruling family of Bhangarh was butchered by their rivals and their palace ransacked.

According to the Rajputana gazetteers, the remnants of that ruling family of Bhangarh still resided in the area as late as 1879. They are called the Rajawats. After the fall of their kingdom, they were dispossessed of all their lands and riches and made to grow food as simple farmers. The chronicle says of them, “Though they are now only cultivators in many villages, they retain much of their noble bearing, and to some extent their social position. The Rajawat cultivators always hold their land at favorable rates.” In recognition of who they were, landlords let them rent them land at lower rates than the other farmers.


Threshold of Order in Traffic Systems

The video above captures a typical flow pattern on a typical street in Hyderabad, India. An opening in the median allows vehicles in the top lane to turn across the opposite lane to reach a side street. The seemingly blind intentionality of the turning drivers and the disinclination of oncoming traffic to stop for them is startling. It drives up the blood pressure a little bit to watch it. I’ve heard that there’s a shared, though intermittently observed, system of right-of-way that prevails on dense, chaotic Indian streets like this one. Perhaps its only legend; I think I learned it from the Youtube comments section, but apparently larger vehicles are given precedence over smaller vehicles. This is for the very pragmatic reason that in the instance of an accident a bus or a delivery truck will cause quite a lot more damage than a motorcycle. Essentially, the more dangerous your vehicle the more likely others are to defer to you on the street. So even in the mess of Madrassi traffic, there is a system of public safety in place that it works most of the time, though not as often as the efficient, organized systems found in protestant Christian countries where obedience to the common rule is unquestioned and everyone is willing to respect everyone else’s turn.

This next video is also quite harrowing. It was taken from a helmet-mounted camera worn by someone who is participating in a bike messenger race through the heart of Manhattan. The cyclists thread their way through different lanes of traffic, cutoff pedestrians in crosswalks, and stare down oncoming traffic at every intersection.

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Certainly this journey through New York City very closely resembles the dizzying trajectories of the rickshaw peddlers in the Hyderabad video. There is, however, one important distinction between the two. The people in the India traffic video are continually re-establishing a new set of rules with one another which will allow them all to reach their destinations quickly and safely. As new people arrive in the intersection new demands are placed on the system, and the system then has to adjust itself to accommodate its new constituents. We see constant improvisation exercised by everyone involved. Rules are made and broken and remade again, and this process of rule-making and rule-breaking is collaborative. Contrast this with the example of the Manhattan bike race: cyclists encounter a fixed system of rules (cars remain in their lanes, they stop at stoplights, pedestrians enter the street only in designated areas, motorists wishing to turn left against several lanes of traffic remain out of the intersection until signaled to go). Because of the reliability/rigidity of the urban American traffic system, the cyclists are able to safely predict how everyone they encounter will behave. The predictability allows them to construct a plan of action far ahead of time without having to reconstruct that plan abruptly and all subsequent decision thereafter.

I think this proves that in the consistency of reliable order lies the very key to its own undoing. The better one can calculate an outcome, the easier it is for that outcome to be manipulated or circumvented or, to call it as it is called today, hacked. The Manhattan bike messengers and the Hyderabad rickshaw drivers might share precarious circumstances which closely remember one another, but they are really nothing alike. The bike messengers are exploiting a system of order and trying to operate outside of it, at its margins. The drivers in Hyderabad, on the other hand, convene in the middle of the street and together negotiate a system that accounts for everyone present. There is no subverting such a system. It will accommodate you, even when you actively try to defy it.