『Chitradurga Fort: The Woman Who Defended It Alone With a Pestle, and the Fort That Held Out for Four Hundred Years』のカバーアート

Chitradurga Fort: The Woman Who Defended It Alone With a Pestle, and the Fort That Held Out for Four Hundred Years

Chitradurga Fort: The Woman Who Defended It Alone With a Pestle, and the Fort That Held Out for Four Hundred Years

無料で聴く

ポッドキャストの詳細を見る
In 1779 Hyder Ali had been trying to take Chitradurga Fort for twenty years.Three sieges. Three failures.Against seven concentric walls. Nineteen iron-spiked gateways. Thirty-five secret passages. Two thousand watchtowers. And a water harvesting system so sophisticated that the fort never ran dry regardless of how long the siege lasted.He finally found the weakness.Not in the walls. Not in the gates. In a hole in the rock. A natural fissure in the granite hillside just large enough for one soldier to crawl through at a time. A chance sighting by one of his men had revealed it. His intelligence officers had confirmed it. And on the day the guard posted beside it went home for lunch, Hyder Ali sent his soldiers through.The guard's wife had gone to the nearby pond to fetch water.Her name was Obavva. What she had in her hand was a pestle, the heavy wooden implement used to grind grain. What she saw when she arrived at the pond was a soldier crawling through the hole into the fort.She did not run. She did not shout. She positioned herself at the exit of the hole and killed each soldier as he emerged, one at a time, moving each body quietly before the next man came through.The fort that seven walls, nineteen gateways and thirty-five secret passages had defended for four hundred years was defended, at its most critical moment, by a woman with a kitchen implement.This episode tells the complete story of Chitradurga Fort, one of the most formidable medieval military structures in India and one of the most completely unknown extraordinary forts in Karnataka.What You Will Discover in This EpisodeThe complete history of Chitradurga Fort, locally known as Elusuttina Kote or the fort of seven circles, from its earliest Ashokan era origins through the Chalukya and Hoysala periods to its peak as the most formidable hill fort in Karnataka under the Nayaka rulers between the 14th and 18th centuriesHow the Nayaka dynasty came to power as feudatories of the Vijayanagar Empire, how they navigated four centuries of shifting alliances between Mysore, the Marathas and the Mughals as each threatened to overwhelm their territory, and how this constant political pressure drove them to build the most comprehensively fortified military structure in the Deccan plateauThe specific military engineering genius behind Chitradurga Fort, its seven concentric walls each commanding a view over the lower walls outside it, its nineteen gateways designed with sharp internal bends to prevent battering rams and force attackers into point-blank defensive fire, its iron-spiked main gates to stop war elephants and its cascade of interconnected water reservoirs that filled one from the other as rainwater collected on the hillside and routed the overflow into the moat belowThe complete story of Onake Obavva, the guard's wife who in 1779 discovered Hyder Ali's soldiers attempting to infiltrate the fort through a hidden hole in the granite rock during her husband's lunch break and killed them one by one with the pestle in her hand, moving each body quietly before the next soldier came through, in one of the most extraordinary individual acts of military courage in the recorded history of KarnatakaWhy Hyder Ali, one of the most formidable military commanders in 18th-century Asia, had failed to take Chitradurga Fort across three separate sieges over twenty years, and how he finally succeeded in 1779 despite Obavva's defence, through a combination of sustained military pressure, Maratha betrayal and the political exhaustion of a small kingdom that had been fighting for its survival across three decades of constant assaultThe extraordinary interior of Chitradurga Fort, its eighteen temples including the Hidimbeshwara Temple whose connection to the Mahabharata tradition places this landscape within a mythological history considerably older than its military one, the Ekanathamma Temple built in the 15th century with its distinctive lamp pillar and swing arch, and the mosque built during Hyder Ali's brief period of rule that makes this one of the most quietly interesting examples of layered religious heritage at any single Karnataka heritage siteHow 5 Senses Tours brings the complete Chitradurga Fort experience to life for international travellers through full-day private guided tours from Bangalore and through the six-day Bewitching Ruins Trail that connects Chitradurga to the UNESCO World Heritage ruins of Hampi, the Daroji Sloth Bear Sanctuary and the extraordinary Chalukya cave temples of Badami, Aihole and PattadakalExperience Chitradurga Fort With 5 Senses ToursThe passage in the rock where Onake Obavva stood is still there. It still has her name. Onake Obavvana Kindi. Standing beside it, understanding how small it is, how completely it concentrated the entry of soldiers into a single unavoidable chokepoint, makes the story simultaneously completely credible and completely astonishing.The seven walls are still standing. The nineteen gateways with their...
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
まだレビューはありません