Tag: ruins

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.


Country Lanes of Urban Detroit

Much has been written about the death and decay of Detroit, Michigan. Especially in the last five years, major news outlets have been covering the story as if it were news; like it was something that had just happened and not the long, slow, inexorable dissolution that it is and has always been. Our understanding of the ruination of Detroit has been shaped a great deal, I think, by these images captured by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. They have appeared in Time, Huffington Post, and all over the internet. The Marchand/Meffre exhibition is mainly concerned mucking around in wreckage and making a spectacle out of the scale of the desolation. They show big iconic buildings like Michigan Central Station and old assembly plants all abandoned and empty. The images are eerie and apocalyptic-looking because many of the places still retain some of their character as places—they just no longer have people in them. It’s the lack of activity that is disconcerting. They are spaces that ought to have people in them and do not. What’s sad about Detroit is that despite its decline, it still has to go about its business being a large, swarming city.

I prefer these pictures I copied from Google maps on one of my daydream roadtrips. Rather than making Detroit look abandoned, they make it seems as though it was never all that inhabited to begin with.

Not only the man, but his partner will also be in a position to attain greater satisfaction. http://foea.org/thank-you/dlp_0867/ order cheap viagra Stress causes many issues to a person. brand cialis price It keeps you in good health and sildenafil super longevity. These viagra 5mg pills don’t claim to increase the size of the penis to make it bigger. Detroit was a city built to hold 2 million people. Today, only about 700,000 people live within the city limits. During the 90s and the early aughts, the city embarked on an aggressive effort to condemn and demolish tracts and tracts of abandoned structures throughout the city. In the years that followed, trees and prairie grasses native to southeastern Michigan reclaimed entire city blocks. Many of the central neighborhoods in Detroit look like this now. These pictures were taken in East Poletown and Core City.

Detroit grew big from industrialization. From 1900 to 1950, with the rise of the auto industry and mechanized manufacturing, it probably grew faster than any city in the world. It was one of the first cities to be blessed by large-scale global trade. Anybody who bought a car was sending his money to Detroit. Compare the picture below with those above. It was taken in Black Bottom in the 1920s—more or less the same place, just 90 years earlier.

Modernity tore down Detroit as precipitously as it built it up. It is a stark example of how development always its end in destruction and how one can often necessitate the other: Progress dismantling the past.