I recently found a crumpled piece of paper, caught between the drawers of an old filing cabinet. Scribbled on it was a testimony to one of my obsessions of the last decade of the last millennium. It had a title, ‘Fortitude’, and reading its contents provoked a tsunami of nostalgia. There were two vertical columns. In the first column was a list of some Maharashtran place-names (Rajgad, Vijayadrug, Shivneri, Lohagad, Harnoi, Raigad, Janjira, Sinhagad…), several of them among my favourite places to visit anywhere in the world. In the second column was a longer list of place-names. The names Rajmachi and Torna were underlined – the destinations of my next Maharashtran journey, a journey I am still to make.

Maharashtra has, or had, a sublime secret. Sandwiched between the cosmopolitan hyperactivity of Goa and Mumbai is a land of great natural beauty and historical importance. The west of the state, both the precipitous Ghats and the sea-lapped Konkan, is littered with formidable forts, most of them once ruled by Maharashtra’s most formidable ruler, Shivaji. His forts are perched on hilltops amid dramatic moonscapes, and along the coastline amid glorious beaches. The Maratha forts are supreme examples of Indian military architecture, often very hard to reach and, when I first encountered them, barely visited.

Shivaji’s controversial biographer, James Laine, tells how forts are fundamental to the culture and history of Maharashtra. He recounts that at Dussehra, ‘children all over Maharashtra shape small mounds of mud into the hill-forts of Shivaji, and populate them with toy figures of Maratha warriors, their horses and their elephants.’ They dominate the countryside in a way I have seen nowhere else. The palace-forts of Rajasthan may be grander and more welcoming; the Crusader castles of Syria and Jordan may be older and larger – but the Maratha hill forts are simply breathtaking, perched perilously on mountain peaks and pinnacles, extraordinary feats of engineering that have survived centuries of neglect.

 

It was these towering hill-forts, especially the ones which involved several hours of trekking, which were my favourites. From the valley below many of them looked entirely inaccessible, surrounded by sheer rockface, a treacherous staircase often concealed in a crevasse. The fatigue and perspiration involved in getting there made them seem even more special. Best of all was the delicious solitude on reaching the summit, as I explored the ruins of a citadel that had been empty for more than two hundred years. In the silence, the past seemed to come alive. I might find some cannon-balls, or the remains of a palace or some barracks, or an algae-covered rock-cut water tank; I would peer over the battlements, imagining a siege, and an invading Mughal army encamped far below. It was as if no one had been there since Shivaji. Romantic nonsense, of course, as the occasional Crisp packet or cigarette stub would testify. But these apart, there were no signs of modernity.

 

I only once came upon another hill-fort aficionado, a soft-spoken computer scientist from Pune, and in all my fort-wanderings I never met another foreigner. There were many friendly farmers, with a smattering of Hindi, who would look at me as if I were a little mad, point me the way, usually up several hundred time-worn moss-carpeted steps. Village children would invariably ask me for a pen, never money – and follow me for a few hundred metres. Local dogs would trail behind me for a little longer, chase a dancing butterfly, and give up before the summit. The only other outsiders I met were Shivaji admirers on pilgrimage. And at one fort near Lonavala, some workmen were erecting a shamiana in preparation for a district-level Shiv Sena conclave.

My two favourite hill-forts have similar names which have caused considerable confusion for guide-book writers and historians. Raigad is famous; Rajgad is not. They are twenty-five kilometres apart, but a lot further by road. Shivaji died at Raigad in 1680, and the remains of his throne, his samadhi, and a memorial to his beloved dog Waghya, appeared to be the main attractions for visitors, allof them, it seemed, Shivaji devotees. The view from Raigad over the surrounding countryside, a rugged land of lakes and mountains, is outrageously beautiful.

But Rajgad, forgotten and deserted, was Shivaji’s capital for much longer than Raigad, and cast an even greater spell over me. Apart from feeling like the most remote place on earth, it contains some miraculous military architecture that seems to confound the laws of gravity. For there are three long narrow ridges that stretch out, like spider legs, from the overgrown citadel. And each of these ridges or machi is itself fortified with double-thickness walls and bastions made of huge blocks of dressed stone, which appear to have descended from heaven, or spirited there by a magician. It seems astonishing that these enormous walls have not just tumbled down into the valleys.

 

I returned to Mumbai from my trip to Rajgad, convinced I had been to one of the most extraordinary places on earth. And I needed to tell people about it. I received a lot of blank looks. The Maratha forts simply weren’t on the tourist trail, and neither were the majestic beaches of Maharashtra. People would rave about the forts of Rajasthan, even Madhya Pradesh, and, of course, the Goan beaches. In fact, any Mumbaikar flying to Goa only needs to look out of the airplane window to see just how special the beaches of Maharashtra are – and a lot less crowded than Goa’s.

 

Much has changed over the last decade, and large chunks of the Maharashtran Konkan and the western Ghats have been ‘discovered’. Pictures of the Maratha forts leap forth from airline magazines. The latest issue of the best guide to weekend breaks from Mumbai, refers to more than fifty forts (spending several pages on Raigad, and dismissing Rajgad in quarter of a paragraph), and mentions dozens of ‘unspoilt’ beaches. There are websites devoted to trekking in the western Ghats. A group of ‘fort-capturers’ is methodically attempting to visit all the forts, in the way that Scottish hill-climbers aim to ‘bag’ all the ‘Munros’, the name given to all mountains higher than three thousand feet. Raigad even has a ropeway which reduces a two-hour climb to a four-minute chairlift ride. GoogleEarth provides close-up satellite pictures of almost-forgotten Rajgad, tagged with comments by people who have visited it.

There are a number of reasons for this change. The Konkan railway opened up a near-coastal transport route. The boom in domestic tourism and in adventure holidays turned people’s attention to Maharashtra. And anyway it seems impossible that such an extraordinary area between India’s largest city and its best-known tourist destination should remain undiscovered forever. The secret is out. There’s the opportunity and the threat of western Maharashtra being turned into a major tourist destination. There is great potential to boost the economy of this underdeveloped region, and to show its beauty and history to the world and to the rest of India. But there’s also a real threat of unmanaged growth, of construction blight, the destruction of a gorgeous coastline, and of the kind of massive environmental degradation that has been suffered by almost every major tourist destination in the world.

 

I already feel a sense of loss. ‘My’ forts are now on trekking itineraries; people camp out on them all night. I fear I may never again find that feeling of delicious solitude on a Maratha hill-fort; even if my creaking knees can get me up there. But Shivaji, the history books tell us, had more than three hundred forts – and there were many others that he never ruled. So, I need to return to my list, remembering that there are still many more hill-forts to be ‘discovered’. Torna and Rajmachi, here I come.