Gods, Kings & Slaves: The Siege of Madurai

by Venketesh, R.

  He had led a life of contradictions. From being the bravest in the land, he had stooped to become a fleeing coward. From ruling the largest of empires, he had been shunted to an obscure corner. Now, in the last phase of his life, he desperately sought some meaning to his life. The wish to return to Madurai gradually increased in urgency, for with every moment that passed, he saw time running out for him. he finally gave vent to a long-standing desire.

  Veera called for a meeting of his generals and announced, ‘I do not know how much time I have left. I would like to see the city for one last time.’ They didn’t need to be told which city he was referring to; Madurai would always be the city.

  For a fleeting moment his generals thought he was contemplating an invasion. No community wanted fetters on its feet and likewise the Tamils wanted their city back. But they knew the time was not ripe yet. The invader had clutched Madurai like an eagle holds onto its prey with its talons.

  But Veera had not lost his reason. And he could no longer fight the feeling. ‘I want to see the city once again,’ he emphasized once more. His aspiration left his generals to decide on the challenging issue of getting their monarch to visit a city now held by the enemy. The king would be powerless to defend himself if discovered. Veera’s idea seemed absurd to them and he was amused at the startled faces around him. But he remained adamant.

  The generals then set to work on what could be the last whim of their king. The Turks had commenced a trade relationship with the locals and supplies to Madurai had begun once again. Many artisans who had fled the city had now returned to Madurai, leaving their families prudently behind. A flurry of construction went on within the fort, and an espionage network was cultivated once again.

  The generals finally decided that Veera could set off on horseback and alight a mile or so from the city. From there he could enter the city disguised like a trader, with a soldier for his protection. The gates of Madurai were closed from dusk to dawn. he would make his entry an hour before dusk and spend the night there. He could then fulfil his wish to see the temple and be ready for the gates to be opened at dawn to get out. Nobody in Madurai had seen Veera for years so they hoped he would not be recognized.

  Sunanda tried to dissuade Veera from going, but he refused, saying, ‘I will return, Sunanda. There’s nothing there that can hold me.’

  Sunanda sent for Chandran, Vani’s son. ‘I entrust the king to you. Look after him like a son would,’ she instructed him. Chandran was only too willing and gave an oath to die for his king, if need be.

  Just before sunset the next evening, twenty horses left Tenkasi for the north. The solemn procession marched underneath a starless sky. The road unrolled ahead of them and all except Veera marched on it with dread. Two days later, the immense flat horizon around the fort walls stood etched in the horizon from afar. There was nobody on the ramparts to notice the small troop of cavalry amid the blinding cloak of darkness.

  Veera was disguised as an old man who had come to sell ducks within the fort with his assistant. The basket of ducks, now balanced on Chandran’s head, stank. Veera remembered the incognito trips he took with his father to evaluate their subjects’ lives when they used the same ruse. My father would have never believed that the guise would be used to gain entry into our own capital, Veera thought, a devious twist of fate indeed.

  The Pandyan soldiers watched Veera hobble towards the city gates. The reddish hue in the sky reflected the fire blazing within their own hearts, looking at their beloved land in alien hands.

  Just outside the gates, Veera looked up to see a figure swinging from the fort bulwarks. It was a stuffed body hanging from a palisade. His spies had told him what to expect. It was Vir Bhallala, the hoysala king who had attempted to take Madurai. The corpse was many years old but its clothes were changed regularly so that it would strike fear in the populace. Veera blinked. Prospective invaders would have been frightened by such a spectacle, which was but a sample of the Turk’s savagery. Veera knew he would meet the same fate if he were captured. he shuddered at the thought.

  He was not stopped at the gates. The sentry was not too keen on checking a seller of ducks. Veera looked the part anyway, with a beard that had been unshaved for fifteen days. The twelve quacking ducks on Chandran’s head convinced the guard that the two were mere tradesmen. Once he stepped foot inside the city, Veera felt nervous. he had once dreamt of a triumphant return to his city, but now he was afraid someone would recognize him on the streets.

  *

  How a city can change in twenty years! The sight that greeted Veera’s eyes seemed surreal, like hazy figures in a dream. The Turks had built a mosque straight across the gates in commemoration of their conquest, a place of prayer in the middle of the fort. since the Turks depended on wares from the outside to sustain themselves, a market had come up very close to the gates itself. It buzzed with the voices of men and animals, and Veera felt physically sick at hearing the sounds of an alien tongue in his land, a noisy chatter in a dialect he did not understand.

  The change had become more pronounced within the subdued city. A culture more than a thousand years old had been forced into submission. Women and men now wore long black robes that covered them entirely, while the men also wore a headdress they called a turban. Even the skyline had changed. Several minarets pierced the skies with their slender tips. The smell of meat on charcoal wafted towards him from all directions. The Turks had enslaved Madurai’s population and had disfigured its culture, and they had silenced the prayers within its temples. There can scarcely be a city more dishonoured than this. Veera could scarcely bear to think. He wanted to end this trip and return to his refuge.

  Veera stopped at a point from where he could see his old palace. The slender pillar-like towers towered over the city. The green pennant of the Sultanate now flew where his Pandyan fish used to swim in the blue sky. The pangs of sorrow that rose in him were more than he could control. Chandran felt the king shake visibly.

  The Madurai Sultanate, initially an offshoot of Delhi, had declared independence and begun minting its own coins. Sultan Ghiyasuddin, the current monarch, was the cruellest of them all. The internecine wars of the Sultanate did not change their attitude to the subjugated Hindu population, and most Hindus had fled to other lands, fearing the despotic rulers.

  Veera moved from the busy streets towards the secluded area which held the temple. His heart thumped in dread. What damage had the Turks wrought here?

  By the time the two reached the Meenakshi temple, darkness had enveloped the city. Veera was thankful that he could not see the battered faces of his gods in the darkness. But he was puzzled. He expected to see only ruins, thinking that the temple would have been pulled apart by the Turks in search of wealth and a place in the Mohammeddan heaven, but two invasions had not brought down the temple. He noticed the stumpy roots of saplings winding outwards from the cracks in the towers, where their seeds had lodged before the rains. Perhaps they would soon accomplish what the Turks could not and eat into the very foundations of the age-old structure.

  The temple was cloaked in unadulterated silence as the first light of the rising moon tinged the earth white. Chandran and Veera walked along its walls to avoid being seen. Chandran suddenly gripped the king’s hand. Veera turned to face him, and followed Chandran’s gaze to the end of a passage. At the end of the path lay a door, hidden in the shadows, which would give them access to the venerable compound of the Meenakshi temple.

  Veera was guided towards the door by Chandran, who swung open the gates with a gentle push. He instructed him to guard the door while he went in. Chandran at first protested, then he realized guarding the door would effectively seal off the temple.

  The interiors of the temple looked nothing like they had earlier. Stale air greeted him, while he prowled from pillar to pillar to assess the damage. The hand of destruction was upon them all and the temple was a mass of ruins. Hindu rulers had over centuries built an immense assemblage of arches and columns, which becam
e the seat of the most revered goddess in the land. Successive rulers of Madurai had vied with one another in enlarging and enriching it. Kings had taken pride in adding new halls, sanctums and towers till they made Meenakshi’s temple almost a town within a town. And then they had handed it to the iconoclastic Turks who had reduced it to rubble.

  Granite blocks were strewn everywhere in the courtyard, victims of the Turks’ fanaticism. Weeds now grew where the faithful used to prostrate themselves in prayer and where sacrificial fires would spew clouds of black smoke. He turned to look at the armed deities, now cloaked in cobwebs. They had not blocked the Turk’s way. Or had they? The savages had attempted to erase all signs of the temple, but had stopped short of the inner sanctum. Veera was bewildered. Why had this temple been spared when others had been obliterated? Some of his spies had reported that the local Turks avoided the temple like the plague. A local legend went that the stone elephants within had come alive and Malik Kafur, upon witnessing the spectacle, had not destroyed the temple.

  His eyes searched for and found many familiar spots lost in the gloom. Veera stood transfixed as his mind returned to the olden days, when this temple would be lit up with thousands of oil lamps. The processions, with their musicians, the palanquins and caparisoned elephants all came back in a flash. A low sob left his throat.

  Surprisingly, a thoroughfare more than a hundred yards long that covered the distance between the main tower and the sanctum revealed a path cleared of weeds. He thought, So somebody is using the temple – perhaps a small-time looter or a bootlegger who needs sanctuary from the teetotaller Turks. He walked through the utter darkness onto the path. His gaze drifted into the blackness, which was suddenly broken by a flicker of light, and his heart skipped a beat.

  There, right in front of him, was a human shape. He looked closely and saw it was a man, his eyes like glowing embers. He remembered he had the constant feeling of being watched ever since entering the temple. But that could not be, for this temple was supposed to be deserted. It must have been an illusion of his frightened mind. He dared not look again, for it could be a ghost.

  There was a sudden jolt as a hand closed over his mouth. The nails upon the fingers were long and like the claws of an animal. Veera was turned around with a sudden jerk as the hands roughly whirled him around. In the feeble moonlight, he saw that the ghoul was a man after all. But that gave him no relief, as he remembered the spectacle on the bulwarks.

  The man’s hot breath smelt like rotting meat. The chiselled features on his face partly covered by his shaggy beard betrayed him as a man of far higher standing than just a tramp. Veera had seen something else in the man’s eyes, something he had not expected to find. It was a glow of divinity, a spark of religion. The man whispered to him in chaste Tamil, ‘Don’t make a sound.’ Veera’s heart thumped within. The creature clad in rags bore more semblance to a wild beast, yet spoke to him in Tamil. The man forcibly guided Veera towards an inner sanctum. he walked as if he knew his way around with absolute surety. he certainly was no looter.

  The sanctum smelt like its occupant. The man now turned Veera’s face towards the moon to examine him, as if he were pox-ridden.

  ‘I know you,’ he said, after his inspection.

  The man had cut down his voice to just a whisper, but it boomed in the darkness. Veera shivered involuntarily. ‘You are Sundar’s brother. How is that traitor – dead by now, I presume?’

  Veera was heartened, for he had labelled Sundar a traitor. But the man sighed. ‘One a traitor and the other a coward – what sins your father must have done to beget you both!’ he said.

  Guided by the moonlight, the man walked away. Veera followed him, bound by an invisible rope of curiosity. Halfway to the main sanctum, he sat down on a toppled pillar, a giant granite stump with intricate carvings of divine danseuses. Veera felt the pillar with his fingers.

  ‘It collapsed during a thunderstorm. The Turks don’t come in any more. For the first few years, some came in to try their luck at finding some treasure. But I would frighten them by hooting like an owl. They decided the place was haunted.’

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Veera, no longer able to hide his curiosity.

  ‘I just look after the elephants here,’ the man said cryptically.

  ‘But there are no elephants here,’ Veera pointed out gently. The man must be obsessed with the legend of the stone elephants.

  ‘I have seen them eat,’ the man insisted.

  ‘Who are you?’ Veera repeated.

  ‘I am, or rather, was Rayan, Malik Kafur’s lieutenant. I saw these elephants eating sugarcane out of his hands. That was why he left this temple alone. He had given the lord his word. I did not want to leave this place and I stayed back. The lord disguised himself as a mendicant and made the elephants eat sugarcane from the hands of the invader.’

  ‘But why did the lord reveal himself to a temple-breaker like Malik Kafur?’ Veera wondered aloud.

  ‘The lord works in mysterious ways; he decided that the man who had done the most harm to his temples should be graced with his presence.’

  Veera gave him a look reserved for the insane and walked to the spot where he had been crowned. He could almost hear the applause from the distant past within the hall. He sighed. As if he was reading his mind, the man replied, ‘Your Highness, when we were young, you were a legend. For us in Dwarsamudra you were the ultimate king. And in a moment you threw away everything and ran.’

  Veera did not want to enter a debate with a lunatic. In a few hours the sun would be up. He wanted to know more. ‘What happened to the statue of the goddess?’ he asked.

  ‘The lord asked Malik to take it. Malik loved the statue, he even spoke to it. He must still have it.’

  ‘An old man deposited the statue in Tenkasi last month,’ Veera said quietly.

  ‘Then Malik Kafur must be dead,’ he said simply. He continued, ‘Do you know that the lamp within the sanctum is still burning, twenty years after they sealed the altar? Your people had built a fresh wall to protect the idols from the Turks. But it was a pathetic replacement for the bravery they lacked to defend it. I have seen the flickering lamp from one of the cracks.’

  The two sat in silence as the moon crept over in an arc above their heads. Veera realized the man hadn’t spoken to another person for twenty years. And after he left, he would resume his silence.

  Chandran had entered to look for Veera, and had been startled to find the king had company, but the two men seemed to be at peace with each other, so he had not disturbed them. But as dawn broke, he had returned and placed a hand on Veera’s shoulder. Veera was shaken from his reverie. ‘Your Highness, it’s time to leave. The sun will be up very soon.’

  Veera reluctantly stood up. He held Rayan’s hands in a last moment of affection. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ Veera asked him.

  ‘And do what?’ Rayan laughed. ‘If only you had seen the lord, Veera, you too, would want to remain here forever. I will stay here. My men will come for this temple.’

  ‘Dwarsamudra is finished – your king hangs from the ramparts of the fort,’ Veera pointed out.

  ‘No, not them. A dynasty will come in my lifetime, a king who will speak Telugu – and the temple will be saved.’

  Veera felt some solace in the man’s optimism. Bidding him farewell, he walked back towards the door at the end of the corridor. He turned for one last look at the sanctum of the goddess, and at the old man who now served her.

  They could hear the massive gates of the city opening for the day in the distance.

  *

  The horsemen waiting a mile away prayed their sovereign would hasten. His delay had aroused their fears. There was little to do except get back home, assemble an army and advance to Madurai, but that act could finish off the last of the Pandyans. But as the gates opened, they saw two figures walk out amid all the traders who were desperate to enter the city. The men sighed in relief.

  Veera took one last look at his city. He realized t
he Turks had learnt from Pandyan mistakes: they had repaired the bulwarks, had maintained the drawbridge and had even deepened the moat. The canal to the Vaigai had been opened up. He thought regretfully that he should have done all that – even the last look at his city reminded him of what he had failed to do as a king.

  The horses began to gallop towards the south. Soon they would cross over into their territory. Only then would it be safe to halt. The emperor was silent, drowned in memories and thoughts. His visit to Madurai had made him feel isolated, but the journey had imparted a sense of closure, like a huge weight being lifted off his head.

  When they finally entered Tenkasi, it was dark. Hearing of his arrival, Sunanda had spread out a lavish dinner. She had a thousand questions to ask. But it was pointless, for Veera did not speak a single word. What could she do to get a word out of him in his present state of mind?

  As he tossed and turned on his bed, he had a feeling that something was pressing against him, suffocating him. Pearls of perspiration appeared on his forehead. When he closed his eyes, he was flooded with a luminous vision of the future: the Meenakshi temple would be consecrated very soon, and the Mohammedans would be driven out. Veera could almost hear the drums of war outside the gates of Madurai. He did not know whether a Pandyan, or for that matter, a Tamil king would drive the Turks out. But he knew those who did would be Hindus.

  The trip to Madurai had given him faith that the hopes nursed by his people would not have to wait for long to be fulfilled. His land would soon rise in glory and the Hindu people would rule themselves once again. Madurai, the city that never slept, would awaken once more, even if it would not be his hand that would guide its future. In fact, he would not be there to witness it. He wanted to call out to everybody and tell them about his vision, inspire them with his newfound assurance. He wanted to tell at least one person so that the word could spread. But he found that he could not speak. His tongue refused to articulate the words in his heart.