Devanahalli
was something of an important city for several dynasties which ruled large
parts of (what is now) Karnataka, before the British conquered and unified a
lot of different regions and kingdoms. Having read vague accounts of a quiet,
forgotten and preserved fort which houses Tipu Sultan’s birthplace, one holiday
(Karnataka’s birth anniversary), we decided to visit the old military
stronghold.
Taking the airport bus and then an auto are
not the wisest or most economic way to travel to Devanahalli, but we realised this
only after an interesting adventure to the place. You may end up missing your Air-conditioned
Volvo bus due to faulty timings published on the BMTC website, be subject to
incredulous looks given by the conductor on it, and paying astonishingly high
prices (even by ripping-off-auto-drivers-in-strange-places-standards) for a
roughly 7 kilometre ride from near the airport to Devanahalli – all of which
can put you in a bad mood fairly early in the day. If you’re not driving to the
place, the most convenient way to get there is to take a train from Bangalore
City.
Last
year, on my way back to Bangalore after an extended holiday at Mysore, Ooty,
Kodaikanal and Coimbatore, I had found the day-long drive down the Bangalore-Hyderabad
highway, the most enjoyable part of the trip. Maintained well from the proceeds
of very regularly collected toll taxes, the road is wide, beautiful, safe and
urban as its bypasses or flies over the many villages on its way. It is also a
journey in observing some of the greatest bastions of our civilisation – from
the windows of your cruising vehicle you can see large and open fields, tall
and proud windmills, sellers of many different varieties of coconuts, and
factories with pollution-under-control. The route from the airport to the
Devanahalli fort covers around 7 kilometres of the erstwhile National Highway
Number 7.
The Fort
at Devanahalli is a brick wall which encircles a living town full of people and
activity. Over the years, the modern lives of quite a few families have
magically sprouted from and blended into the many historic structures that dot
their hometown. The monuments, visibly belonging to different phases of time,
have undergone a series of many renovations over the years, unless they were
specifically 'deemed to be of national importance’ by the Archaeological Survey
of India. Here we find centuries old stone walls and pillars standing tall over
freshly marbled floors; ancient, disfigured idols of gods and goddesses adorned
with trendy new saris. Just as we had reached the fort that late morning, we had
been forced to stop just outside the low entrance of the formidable military
fort to allow the passage of a large herd of buffaloes being driven out to
graze through them.
One can
go up to the grassy top of the Fort by climbing some rough stone steps. Here, along with grazing cattle and brave herdswomen, once can walk along the battlements
with their immaculately engineered crenels. An almost ethereal landscape of the
surroundings from where an attack may come, can be viewed through these
crevices. One crenel however, is blocked with a wall, breaking the regular
pattern of the Fort. This was evidently the temple where the soldiers of the
Muslim King prayed to their gods for courage, mercy and forgiveness. As I
walked by this one closed crenel, I wondered what the soldiers who held this
Fort had been feeling when they had surrendered to the colonial masters in
1791. In the same year, the French royalty had finally surrendered control of
their country to its first democratic constitution. 
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Home to
many ancient, large and ornate hindu temples, which continue to be protected by
the International Society of Krishna Consciousness to this day, the Fort at
Devanahalli was given its present form by the Sultans Hyder Ali and Tipu. In
fact, Tipu Sultan’s birthplace is located just at the outskirts of the Fort and
is a ten minute walk through the fringes of a village from its main entrance.
The actual birthplace of the quirky Sultan is a let-down, having spent the day
looking at the fancy fort that he engineered. It is a mere memorial at a spot
next to a grassy path, marking the spot where he is believed to have been born.
Nothing else remains preserved today to here can tickle your imagination. No
palace, castle or manger.
Our
dampened spirits were restored just a little later, when on the walk back to
the Fort from the birthplace, we stumbled upon a leafy entrance to something
which from outside looked like pictures of the Great Bath of Mohenjodaro found
in any standard history textbooks. Venturing inside the gate, we found
ourselves in an almost abandoned stone amphitheatre-like structure, with a
small puddle of water at its grassy centre.
In two of its four directions it was
surrounded by small structures. One of them was old, unkempt and housed a
distorted idol of an unrecognisable God. Outside it stood a few ancient pillars
and some large pictures of Gods, some of whom had their heads torn off. The
other structure was locked, and could have been a temple of some kind. Outside
it were 2 tulsi stands – an old one
and a new one. Neither of them had any holy plant growing from them.Wild grass had taken over the wooden steps of the bath/amphitheatre, and goat droppings at some places suggested that only sometimes, cattle was brought in here to graze by the very agrarian people of the town. There were very few wrappers thrown on the ground. Apparently, neither the archaeologists, nor the enterprising people of this historical town knew what to do with this devastatingly beautiful structure. Having had imagined many romantic and spiritual stories which explained what happened at this place, and walked around the square steps several times, I noticed that there was only one flowering shrub amidst the green wilderness. It was at a corner of the lower-most layer of steps, and in the sunny, cloudless afternoon, its fresh yellow blossoms, stood for all the life in dead, ancient stone that we had witnessed that day.
