This is a personal view of a three day journey I made with my family in July 1999 to the northern Konkan coast of Maharashtra, India. This journey was of particular interest to me because my family originally came from these parts. My father spent some time there while he was growing up. The magical wonderland that is India never ceases to amaze me. My curious combination of interests - natural history, human history and religion gives me something to observe, understand and cherish almost anywhere I go.
1. Greatest traffic jam on Earth
It all started innocuously enough. I got on to the 11:45 bus at the Pune station, which started about 5 minutes late. Before I got in, I heard a passenger say that buses were taking 12-14 hours to travel the 165 kilometres to Mumbai (Bombay). I needed to travel only about 120 km to reach Vashi (Navi Mumbai) to get to my sister's house, the planned starting point for our journey down the coast. A preview came at 14:30 or so, when our bus was held up near Talegaon for about an hour. It started moving again, but not for long.
After moving in fits and starts until about nine at night, things finally came to a complete standstill. It was raining outside and the bus had stopped in the middle of nowhere. I spent a very uncomfortable night trying to snatch some sleep inside the bus trying to keep the mosquitos away.
Early next morning, I abandoned bus. It was about 10 km to the railway station at Lonavala, but it was raining heavily, as it does in these parts in the month of July. My raincoat was inadequate to cover my camera bag and me. Since my net worth is about half the cost of the camera, the camera got the raincoat to cover itself and me to carry it. It took me two hours of walking through the longest parking lot you would ever see, to get to a phone booth. I called up Rasayani to let them know that I had had enough and planned to take the next train back to Pune from Lonavla. They convinced to take a train in the opposite direction and reach Karjat, where they would come and pick me up.
I reached the station at about 0830. A train for Karjat was just pulling in. In keeping with the great luck I had been having recently, the ticket office was in knee-deep water and by the time I got to the platform with a ticket, the train was already moving.
More rain. Some hot tea, with a wada-pav. Another telephone call to Rasayani to let them know that I was still alive and in Lonavla waiting to get to Karjat. I finally made it to Karjat on the next train. The train journey from Lonavla to Karjat during the rains is incredibly scenic. The thickly forested Ulhas Valley with the imposing, cloud shrouded massif of Rajmachi now forms Maharashtra's newest sanctuary - the Rajmachi Sanctuary. Many years ago I had planned a three day trek to explore this valley. It got canceled for some silly reason. I never got a chance again.
My sister Ketakee, my father and my brother-in law Anup were waiting for me, and we reached Anup's house in Rasayani at 1330. It had taken me 26 hours to travel one hundred and thirty kilometres. I got into some dry clothes, had a fabulous lunch of rice and dal, my first meal in two days. It was still raining outside.
2. Kihim
We left Rasayani as soon as I had finished lunch. We planned to take a short route to Pen via Patalganga and Apta. The incessant rains of the past two days had caused the Patalganga river to overflow its banks. As our two tiny Maruti 800's began to plough their way through knee deep water, we were warned by the locals that if we went further along that road, our cars would be completely submerged. We changed our route and took a longer route along the Mumbai Goa National Highway via Panvel.
A few kilometres beyond Panvel is the village of Shirdhon, the home of the first Indian armed revolutionary Vasudeo Balwant Phadke. In the 1870's this man single handedly built up a motley force of Ramoshis to rise in an armed uprising against British rule. When he was arrested, he managed to escape by lifting the door of the prison. Unfortunately he was recaptured and sent off to prison in distant Aden where he died. Today, in Shirdhon, we saw young chilren walking in the rain to their newly built school, the Adya Krantiveer Vasudeo Balwant Phadke Vidyalaya.
We next passed through the Karnala Bird Sanctuary. It is dominated by a fort of the same name which rises up from the sanctuary at its base. The fort was originally used in the seventeenth century by Shivaji, just one of his many impregnable mountain hideouts. The 450 metre high pinnacle is almost permanently wreathed in wisps of cloud and mist at this time of year.
Thal-Vaishet Fetrilizer, Vadkhal Mittal Steel Plant
We got to the coastal village of Kihim in the late afternoon. My sister had been there before and she took us to the same people who had rented them rooms during her previous visit. All the rooms that they had had leaking roofs, so the beds had to be stragically placed to avoid the leaks.
Kihim has a rocky beach as well as a sandy one. Straight in front stand the twin sea forts of Chanderi and Underi, sentinels on the approach route to the sea fort of Kolabah (Alibag), the head quarters of the Maratha navy and the home of the most formidable Maratha admiral of the early part of the 18th century - Kanhojee Angre.
In the year 1680, Chanderi was being garrisoned for a impeding attack on the British port at Bombay (now renamed Mumbai) by Shivaji. Twenty thousand of his best troops were assembled at Kalyan waiting to march into Bombay. Unfortunately for India, Shivaji died in April 1980; the campaign was abandoned and the British power survived. Later under Kanhoji Angre, the Maratha navy was destined to achieve unprecendented power and glory, making Kolabah the most prosperous naval outpost along the west coast of India, but they would never again seriously threathen the British enclave at Bombay. The arrow of time has redrawn the contours of that city. Where was once the fort and harbour of Bombay has become the high rise citadel of India - Nariman Point. The skyscraper dominated skyline peeks eeriely out at the horizon at Kihim.
The famous Indian ornithologist Salim Ali used to visit Kihim often as that is the nearest place to Mumbai, where the Whitebellied Sea Eagle can be seen. I was busy noting the position of Kihim beach on my GPS unit, when an eerie call caused me to look up. There soaring majestically over the beach was a huge Whitebellied Sea Eagle, calling as it flew overhead. It sailed slowly and majestically along the entire stretch of beach, before disappearing into the line of trees that saddles the high tide line. This was a lifer for me and as far as I was concerned, this sighting was enough compensation for the bus journey.
I fell asleep thinking about wht the next day would bring as we drove south of Alibag - to Nagaon, Chaul, Revdanda and finally to Murud.
3. Nagaon and Chaul
South of Alibag along the road to Revdanda lies the small idyllic village of Nagaon. My father was born here, in the house of his maternal grandfather which still stands exactly as it was, when he was born here in 1936. His grandfather managed to support his seven children on the alms he earned as a bhikshuk, which to the western mind is no different from a beggar. In the Hindu way, the life of a bhikshuk is the life of a scholar entitling him to a great deal of respect from society. The alms were given not out of a feeling of pity but out of a feeling of gratitude.
A few of his relatives still stay there. We met his uncle, Vinayak Mama - Vinayakshastri Puranik - a great scholar of Sanskrit, particularly of that great scripture - the Mahabharata. This old man now lives a life of destitution, eking out a living from the meagre income of his wadi. He was extremely happy to see my father after an eighteen year hiatus.
Behind the house is the wadi - still largely unchanged inspite of the mad rush for development in surrounding plots of land. The wadi is essentially a small patch of forest with mango, coconut, betelnut and jackfruit trees. The mango trees are special here. Every tree produces a different flavour of mango and has its own name. For example the Keshrya produces mangoes with the distinct after taste of saffron and the Kelya which is banana flavoured. Another tree has been producing several thousand mangoes every year for the last half century. My father recalls a particularly fertile harvest of seven and a half thousand mangoes from that single tree.
Nagaon has its fair share of temples and we went to some of the important ones. The old Someshwar temple has a beautiful moss covered pool in front of it which was overflowing because of the rain. We also went to a temple of Dakshinamukhi a south facing deity, a relative rarity in Hindu temples.
The most famous temple of the area is a few kilometres south of Nagaon in Chaul - the Sitaladevi temple. Chaul is said to be the oldest settlement on the west coast of India.
4. Revdanda-Murud road
Until we crossed the creek at Revdanda, I used to think that the finest stretch of coastal highway is to be found on the Pacific coast of the United States, where the coastal mountains meet the sea. I changed my mind after I traveled from Revdanda to Murud.
On this short stretch of highway hugging the sea coast, it is possible to stand with you back to the raging surf and see stretched before you, a waterfall decorated mountainside clothed in enchanting tropical forest with a narrow stretch of rice fields in between. We were in the Phansad Sanctuary, a tiny 70 sq km. protected forest in the Western Ghats of India, one of the nineteen biodiversity hotspots of the world.
5. Murud
The tourism department has tried to promote Murud as a tourist destination. Murud for its splendid sand beach and Janjira for its fort. They do this by referring to the place as Murud-Janjira, as if they were a same place which they are not. Historically, ethnically and economically Murud and Janjira are are as different as it is possible to be. Janjira was a nodal centre for the slave trade of the western coat of India. Murud was just another sleepy village on the coast before the twentieth century's passion for beaches gained it a place on the map.
A short distance into the sea from Murud, lie a bunch of rocks barely sticking out of the high waves that are forever pounding them. In his desperation to conquer the fort of Janjira, Shivaji fortified it and called it Kasa. From here the cannons were mounted to launch an attack on Janjira from the sea. But the attempt did not succeed, although Shivaji launced two full fledged campaigns against it. Janjira represents the biggest failure of Shivaji's otherwise unfailingly successful military career.
At Murud, we stayed at the excellent MTDC accommodation right next to the high tide line and a 30 second walk from one of the finest sand beaches in these parts. We walked along the beach for a while, and surprise, surprise I saw a Whitebellied Sea Eagle again soaring in the wind as before, but not calling like the bird in Kihim was doing. We saw Kasa in front and decided that we had to immediately go take a look at the fort that prompted Kasa's construction.
6. Janjira
Leaving Murud town, driving southwards across a small creek. The road goes up 200 m up a hill after that. Nothing I say will prepare you for the shock that is Janjira. You round the crest of the hill and suddenly it is there before you, a deceptively small rock fortified on all sides by stone walls - walls that have borne the systematic assault of wind and rain, waves and cannon for over seven hundred years.
If this were the United States, they would have had a million visitors a year to this place. Here we stood watching in the wind on top of a hill, just the three of us, Janjira looming before us in the rapidly advancing tropical night. A Whitebellied Sea Eagle flew past calling as it went - my third bird in less than 24 hours! It was so close, we could hear it above the wind.
We drove a little ahead to the village of Rajpuri.
References
- Grant-Duff, History of the Marathas, 1854
- Setu Madhavrao Pagadi, Chhatrapati Shivaji