The palace of illusions

Ram Singh Malam, the Kutchi polymath, designed a palace for Rao Lakhpatji, a rajah with an equally wide-ranging mind. It was called Aaina Mahal. A literal translation would be Palace of Mirrors. I prefer to call it the Palace of Illusions. When it was built in 1750 it must have been a stunning sight. Faults in the Indian continental plate which developed 180 million years ago during the breakup of ancient Gondwanaland triggered an earthquake of magnitude 7.7 on Republic Day, 2001, in Kutch. Bhuj is about 20 kilometers away from the epicenter, and the palace was badly damaged. It had housed the state museum. In the aftermath of the quake, many of the pieces that remained were stolen. The restoration is slow because of the lack of funds.

Ram Singh Malam’s Aaina Mahal seen from the entrance of St. Clair Wilkins’ Prag Mahal. The cannon presented by Tipu Sultan is in the foreground. Details of Aina mahal on the right. Click to expand.

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Looking at the palace today, you have to work hard to imagine the opulence that impressed people even thirty years ago. Visiting in the early 19th century, a Marianne Postans wrote a travel memoir called Cutch; Or Random Sketches, Taken During a Residence in One of the Northern Provinces of Western India; Interspersed with Legend in 1839, where she describes the palace in these words, “Feeling quite inadequate to the task of presenting the reader with a catalogue raisonné of all the unnamable articles of virtù, which adorn this chosen retreat of luxurious royalty, I must request him to imagine himself introduced, by some wholesale glass dealer, to his sample room, where, amongst jelly glasses, and old vases, are introduced some half dozen antique musical clocks, all playing at once, and the whole display brilliantly illuminated by large wax candles at noon-day!”

A small part of the palace has been restored and is on display, as part of the state museum. The rooms are now overcrowded, and you have to spend time to examine all that is on display. I’m afraid that the time we spent was not adequate. Still, I must make special mention of the doors in this palace. Fantastically decorated doors are a specialty around the Indian Ocean, from Kerala to Konkan, north around the coast in Gujarat and Arabia, and down to Zanzibar and Malindi. Even among them, these are amazing. I wonder which was the door that a colonial Governor General was prevented from taking away as a gift to Queen Victoria.

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This is also a good place to say something about the architect, Ram Singh Malam, whose portrait hangs in one of the galleries of the palace. Little is known about his early life, except that he was born in Okha, at the mouth of the Gulf of Kutch. His early life was spent as a sailor. He was rescued from a shipwreck by a Dutch ship bound for Netherlands, where he spent eighteen years learning a variety of crafts: glassblowing, architecture, clock making, enamel work, foundry and gun casting, to name a few. You can see his influence in the cast iron structure of Aina Mahal, and its once-famous mirrors.

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The mirrored ceilings were an invention of Malam. The gallery around the room called the Fuvara Mahal, the wonderfully designed music chamber, the bedchambers, and the inner corridor all have ceilings in this style. They require restoration, but given the magnitude of the post-earthquake restoration needed, I was happy that at least they gave some indication of the former opulence of this palace. The Kutchi school of painting developed largely due to the royal patronage given at this time. I was entranced by the painting with the flamingos. It catches the terrible beauty of the Rann very nicely. I was happy to see a portrait of Rao Lakhpatji eventually in a niche in one corner. The tour of the palace would have seemed incomplete without portraits of him and his architect, Ram Singh Malam.

A farmer of Jamnagar

As we finished our hunt for larks outside Jamnagar, a man on a motorbike stopped to inspect us. He didn’t mind being inspected in turn. Communication was difficult, since he spoke only the local dialect of Gujarati, notoriously difficult for even a native Gujarati speaker. He was undoubtedly prosperous; the motorbike, crisp white clothes, the large gold ear ring, all were signs of his local status.

On this southern shore of the Gulf of Kutch water is plentiful, and agriculture has long been a good source of income. Nowadays cash crops like sugarcane, tobacco, and cotton bolster the income that the cultivation of bajra and jowar, and fishing used to provide. As we found in late March, a month after this photo was taken, this district is also a destination for migrant agricultural labour. So I’m pretty sure this gentleman was a local landowner. He gave us up for a lost cause soon and drove off.

Puffer fish

On a walk in the intertidal region of the Marine National Park at Narara reef in Gujarat, I saw a live puffer fish (family Tetraodontidae) for the first time. I’d only seen it in restaurants in Japan, where it is called fugu. It is famously poisonous. One of these small fish contains enough tetrodotoxin to kill about 30 adults! But the neurotoxin is not genetically programmed into the fish, apparently the protective poison is accumulated from its diet.

The tiny thing was swimming at a leisurely pace. Our guide picked it up, and it came up almost as big as his hand. I was amazed by its big eyes; apparently puffer fish have very good vision. Inflating rapidly by ingesting water seems to be its main defense mechanism. It deflated to normal size and swam away as soon as it was released. Which of the over hundred species was it? An inventory of this region mistakenly calls it Tetraodon lineatus. It doesn’t look like this purely African species. Distribution maps and pictures eventually led me to the conclusion that this is the Takifugu oblongus.

Rage against the dying of the light

Like many others, I must have discovered Dylan Thomas’ poem in my teenage years. In those days it was a sort of a secret anthem on how to live for a cryptic club. The anthem adapts to circumstances. On a late afternoon walk through the Marine National Park in the Gulf of Kutch, I thought about the poem again. People I knew in Wuhan were already in lock-down, and in February it was already clear that the pandemic would strike some time, but that was not what was uppermost in my mind.

We strolled for more than a kilometer out to the waterline. The tide in this gulf is spectacular, and the receding sea had left pools in which we could see sponges, puffer fish and crabs. Over the years I’d discovered that I was similar to a migratory shorebird, like the common greenshanks (Tringa nebularia), which visits these pleasant coasts in winter, striding through tide pools, stopping to inspect things, turning over little stones. The sun was about to set. “Time to go back”, said someone. “Just a few minutes more”, I said, trying to prolong the pleasant day, raging against the dying of the light.

The poem is about living right, as all teenagers know. It is not about dying.

A Tern’s turn

On our last visit to the Gulf of Kutch during our trip to Jamnagar, I was dismayed to see this bicycle parked near the tide line. Two children had come out here as the tide receded, and were playing at the edge of the water- skipping from one rock to another. Their presence had driven the birds out into far shallows. Although it was going to be hard to take photos, we hung around for a while. I spotted a whiskered tern (Chlidonias hybrida) circling over a spot out over somewhat deeper water.

I hadn’t tried to shoot photos of a tern at hunt ever before. Nor had I ever watched one closely as it hunted for fish. Now I was mostly fussing about focus and distance, but through the viewfinder I followed it as it hovered over one spot, looking straight down. This behaviour is a boon for photographers, since it allows you to fix the focus. It moves very quickly when it spots a fish and dives. I was lucky to get a few shots of it as it dived, but missed the moment when it picked up its prey. It seems that it likes to wait until the fish is at the surface. Its bill may have broken the surface, but without much of a splash. Unfortunately it winged away from me immediately after, so I didn’t get a shot of it with the fish in its beaks. The next time I see this, I’ll know that I can zoom in a bit more, since its motion is fairly predictable.

Western Reef Egret

There was only one kind of dark egret wading through the tidal waters in the Gulf of Kutch. That was the western reef egret (Egretta gularis), which would stir up the water delicately with its long toes, before becoming totally still and gazing down at at. The thing about traveling with expert bird watchers is that you get to learn little snippets like the fact that there is a “morph” of the bird with white feathers. I’d seen and read about birds changing colours around their breeding season, so I didn’t pay it much attention. It was only later that I read a report which made it clear that the different “morphs” of E. gularis are like human skin colour, fixed at birth and unchanging. So it makes sense that someone would write a long article about how to tell the difference between the white morph of E. gularis and the little egret (Egretta garzetta). So next time I see a small white egret I’ll carefully look to see whether the beak and the forehead are in a line, and whether the back of the head is blunt. If it is, then I know it must be E. gularis. But if the head is more rounded then it has to be E. garzetta.

I watched one hold its body quite still as it gazed intently into the water. Occasionally it would move its head forward a little, and I would wait for it to strike. But it didn’t. I was surprised later to see a paper which had studied these motions of the head to determine how the bird corrected for refraction of the image of its prey in the water. Apparently, this slow forward motion of its head scans a range of angles, allowing it to determine the true position of the prey. At the moment it decides to strike, its beak moves in a straight line towards the prey, piercing through the water to catch it with slightly parted beaks. I wish I had managed to catch it in action.

The joy of mucking about

I thought I was not much of a beach person until a few years ago, when I realized that I actually like beaches which are long and shallow, on seas which are not dead. There are beaches which fit all these descriptions along the Gulf of Kutch near Dwarka. Due to its peculiar shape, the Gulf of Kutch has huge tides twice a day. On one of the days I was nearby, the sea level changed by 8 meters between high and low tides at the end of the Gulf. The coastal shelf is very gentle, so this allows you to walk kilometers into the sea at low tide.

At the Marine National Park near Dwarka, I went for such a walk. This is what I enjoy about beaches, being able to walk for long times at the place where the water and land meet each other. Such places around India are full of hermit crabs which have donned the shells of dead sea animals. Every shells that I saw was on the move. I’d first noticed these zombie shells in the Andamans, where I fell in love with beaches.

I made my way back to the tide line when the horizon started tilting up to the sun. The tide was beginning to turn and I was keen to get away from the slippery rocks and corals while there was still light. The long shadows of the evening threw the tracks of the hermit crabs into clear relief. They seem to be constantly on the move, foraging for food, and occasionally searching for a better shell to move in to. I thought it was a day well spent, doing little other than turning rocks over to inspect whatever is hiding below it.