Holding fort

The one at Daulatabad is a triumph of design

Dose it take an architect to appreciate another architect8217;s brilliance? Perhaps. Which is why Aurangabad8217;s Daulatabad fort is not as well-known as the adjoining Ajanta-Ellora caves. But to someone in the field of creating structures out of stone, a visit to the 16th-century structure quite overshadows the experience of the caves.

Architects today may claim to fashion custom-made abodes that take into account their clients8217; objectives. But none comes close to the perfection achieved by this 600-year-old citadel that used an understanding of the human mind to fulfil its ultimate aim: to secure it from invasion.

You enter the fort to find that the entrance has low visibility from any distance and is protected with a fire-proof wooden door studded with spikes to prevent it from being rammed by elephants. There are a series of eight such gates.

Start climbing the steps and you find they all have variable treads/risers. The idea is to make the enemy look down while climbing and thus vulnerable to attack from the fort8217;s defenders. Spatial cognition being on the left side of the brain, many of the gates were constructed at right angles to the approach. To add to the confusion, a few dummy gates lead into a dead wall or a corridor between high walls that open into the moat where once crocodiles crawled!

Cross the moat and the intruder would find himself in a dark passage leading to an open courtyard, where the temporary blindness caused by the glare invariably made him an easy target. The second stage passage beyond the courtyard is a pitch dark tunnel known as 8216;Andhari8217;, with multiple turns with a small opening for light and air that could mislead 8212; fatally.

The core of the fort is a hill the height of more than a hundred feet, making it impossible for anyone to climb in. The second largest cannon in India, the Mendha tope, was mounted on a pivot so as to rotate 180 degrees. Were the fort to fall, the canon could not be turned against interiors.

Final result: a series of secret, coiled, quizzical and subsurface passages made the fort a maze. Is it any wonder then that the only way this fort was ever conquered was by treachery?