Gujarat Pilgrimage with Heritage Tour

Barely glimpsed by many travellers scuttling between the state of Mumbai (Bombay) and Rajasthan, Gujarat is an easy side-step off the well-beaten tourist trail. Here, its capital, Ahmedabad, retains some charm amid its chaos. Ahmedabad, also called Amdavad, Ahmadabad or Ahemdavad is Gujarat’s major city and a startling metropolis with a long history, many remarkable buildings, and a fascinating maze of an old quarter, excellent museums, fine restaurants and fabulous night markets.

You need a little stamina to get to know the city better, as it’s quite spread out and moving around can be a bit of a task. The old city lies on the east side of the Sabarmati River and used to be surrounded by a 10km-long wall, of which little now remains except 15 formidable gates standing as the forsaken islands amid swirling, cacophonous commotion of the city. The new city on the west side of the river, nearly all built in the last 50 years, has wider streets, several major universities, and many middle-class neighbourhoods.

Roughly 300 kilometers from Ahmedabad, Jamnagar is another little-touristic but interesting city, brimming with ornate, decaying buildings and colourful bazaars displaying the town’s famous, brilliant-coloured bandhani (tie-dye) – produced through a laborious 500-year-old process involving thousands of tiny knots in a piece of folded fabric. Perhaps best of all, people here are exceedingly friendly. Before Independence, Jamnagar was capital of the Nawanagar princely state.

Let your passion trail your root, where once stood the City of Thousand Doors – Dwarka. Dwarka literally feels like the end of the earth. Enter the city of the God, a remote pilgrimage spot at the extreme western tip of the Kathiawar peninsula. This is one of the four most holy Hindu sites in India, where Krishna Vasudeva built his capital after leaving Mathura.

The lord here blesses his devotees with wide, benevolent eyes, gazing for time immemorial, from his seat, 60 miles away from his submerged kingdom of 32,000 years old, which is twice the size of Manhattan. From the lingering existence of the folklore, scale the historicity of Lord Krishna Vasudeva, the king maker, who can reveal a lot about, what are vivid, yet unsaid truths of the Saraswat Civilization and Pre Vedic Primary Prakrit.

Behold, as the famous, phoenix-like temple of Somnath will stand gazes at you in neat gardens above the beach, 6km southeast of Veraval. The sea below gives it a wistful charm of the endless time. Somnath celebrates Kartik Purnima, marking Shiva’s killing of the demon Tripurasura, with a large colourful fair, a spectacle worth witnessing. Legend had it that the moon God Somraja first erected Somnath, a temple made of gold. This was rebuilt by Ravana in silver, by Krishna Vasideva in wood, and by Bhimdev in stone; all bedecking the Phallic Stone, the heart of the temple, one of the 12 most sacred Shiva shrines, known as jyotirlinga.

Witness the self-illuminating temple in the coastal serenity that even prompted the most unwelcoming visit of the infamous looter Mahmud of Ghazni from Afghanistan. Gazni was baffled with the wealth of the temple, which also included 300 musicians, 500 dancing girls and even 300 barbers. It took two days to take the temple town, where 70,000 Hindu defenders were slaughtered. So began a pattern of Muslim destruction and Hindu rebuilding that continued for centuries. The temple was again razed in 1297, 1394 and finally in 1706 by Aurangzeb, the notorious Mughal ruler. After that, the temple wasn’t rebuilt until 1950.

Experience the time travel of the classic civilization in the old city of Rajkot, east of the newer centre, still has plenty of character, with narrow streets, markets, and farmers still selling ghee on street corners. Rajkot was founded in 1612 by Jadeja Rajputs, and in colonial times it became the headquarters of the Western India States Agency, Britain’s administrative centre for some 400 princely states in Saurashtra, Kachchh and northern Gujarat. After Independence Rajkot was capital of the short-lived state of Saurashtra.