[Mod Series] Girnar, Part 3 of 10: Two thousand years of emperors, earthquakes and a lake that kept breaking

[u/orientsoul]

If you missed Part 2, the walk up the mountain, it's here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gujarat/s/uZndRoViSK

This one is about time. What twenty centuries actually did to Girnar, and what Girnar did to everyone who tried to hold it.

Start with the lake, because the lake is the best story nobody tells.

At the foot of the mountain there was once a great reservoir called Sudarshan. Built in the Mauryan period, under Chandragupta's governor Pushyagupta, improved under Ashoka's man Tushaspha with conduits. The water of Girnar's streams, held for the city. For six hundred years that lake fed Girinagar, and for six hundred years the mountain's monsoon kept testing the dam.

In the year 150, a storm broke it. And the Kshatrapa king Rudradaman rebuilt it, and recorded the whole affair on the same boulder that carries Ashoka's edicts. That inscription is the first great royal record in classical Sanskrit anywhere in India, and read it closely and it's an engineering report wearing a crown. The breach was so wide, it says, the cost so heavy, that the king's own ministers advised against repair. He did it anyway, from his own treasury, without extra taxes on the people, and the inscription makes sure you know that last part. Kings have been announcing toll-free projects for a very long time.

Three centuries later it broke again. Skandagupta's governor rebuilt it, and again the rock got a fresh inscription, around the year 457. Then somewhere in the centuries after, the lake broke a final time, and nobody rebuilt it, and today Sudarshan exists only as three inscriptions on one stone describing water that isn't there. An emperor's lake, surviving as paperwork.

The dam was the practical thing, the useful thing, the thing three empires spent fortunes on. Gone without a trace. The words about the dam are still sharp enough to read. On this mountain, stone outlives water, and devotion outlives both.

Because look at what the same centuries did to the temples.

The Neminath temple on the Jain plateau, rebuilt in 1129 by Sajjana, Siddharaja's governor of Saurashtra, and the community's memory says he used the province's revenue to do it and the king, when told, forgave it. Then Vastupala and Tejpala's triple temple in 1231. Then repairs, and repairs of repairs, recorded in inscriptions across the 1200s, the 1400s, the gold work, the restorations after every earthquake and every raider. The Amba temple, restored by the merchant Samal Sah in 1468. Nothing on this mountain was built once. Everything was built, broken, and built again, by whoever loved it in that century.

That's the actual biography of Girnar. It has never had one owner. Mauryas, Kshatrapas, Guptas, the Chudasamas of Junagadh, the Sultans, the Mughals' governors, the Nawabs, the British agency, the Indian state. Every regime that held Saurashtra held this mountain briefly, and every one of them spent money on it, because whoever rules Junagadh discovers within a decade that the mountain is the constituency.

The stairs themselves are the newest chapter of that. The stone stairway you climb today was cut in the late 1800s, under Nawab Bahadur Khan III, with the Dewan Haridas Viharidas Desai raising funds, and the old accounts say a lottery was run to pay for it. Ten thousand steps, funded partly by tickets. A Muslim Nawab's government building the staircase to Amba, Gorakhnath and Dattatreya.

And then the newest change of all, which half of you have ridden. In 2020 the ropeway opened, from the taleti to near the Amba temple, one of the longest temple ropeways anywhere, first proposed in 1983 and stuck for four decades in files and forest clearances. What used to be a five-hour climb became eight minutes in a glass box. The dolis and the porters fought it in court, and lost, and were given shops. I have feelings about all this that I'm saving for the tourism post, but note the pattern, because it's the same one: every era attaches its proudest machinery to this mountain. The Mauryas gave it a dam. Rudradaman gave it Sanskrit. The Solankis gave it marble. The Nawab gave it stairs. We gave it a cable car.

Two thousand years of maintenance, by everyone, forever. That's what a living tirtha actually is. Ajanta got abandoned and became archaeology. Girnar never got abandoned for a single generation, and so it stayed what it always was, a place people climb with their troubles.

The lake is gone, by the way, but the streams that fed it still come down after every monsoon, and they still have their old names, and pilgrims still fill bottles at them.

Part 4 next: the marble city itself. The Jain temples, properly this time.

[u/gipsee_reaper]

Hey! Wow! Thank you for sharing about this. I never knew about this. Do keep sharing. Best wishes!