your bridge home
True Valor
He designed a wall thirty-six kilometres long and wrote a technical work on raga classification, in the middle of a two-front war.
There is a nine-storey tower standing inside Chittor fort, thirty-seven metres of carved sandstone, and it was built to be read.
Every surface of it carries sculpture. Inside the stairwell as well as out.
The deities, the avatars, the weapons, the musical instruments. And the names of the things depicted, carved beside them. It functions as an encyclopedia in stone, and people have climbed the inner staircase to look at it for five and a half centuries.
Rana Kumbha put it up between about 1458 and 1468, to mark a victory.
And the interesting thing about the man is that the victory is the least of what he is worth knowing for.
Rana Kumbha ruled Mewar from 1433 to 1468. And he inherited it in the worst possible way.
His father Mokal was assassinated. Kumbha came to the throne as a young man, with the killers still at large and the neighbours reading weakness.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.