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As the world celebrates lizards, the living dinosaurs of our modern world today, my thoughts go back to the time I visited Sinhagad (Lion’s Fort), the famous hill fortress near Pune.
The subject of legends and ballads, I still recall the sight that greeted me at the summit: A bust of Tanaji Malusare, the loyal friend and trusted lieutenant of Chhatrapati Shivaji, who established the Maratha Empire in the Indian subcontinent in the 17th century.
Central to the legend of how Tanaji won the fortress for his friend and king, is Yeshwant (or Yeshwanti in other versions), the ghorpad (Marathi), godha (Sanskrit) or goh (Hindi) that he used to scale the vertical walls of the fortress which was where a Mughal garrison commandeered by Udaybhan Singh Rathore, a Rajput, was stationed.
What was this animal? Was it an iguana? Or a Bengal monitor lizard? Could it have borne the weight of a full-grown man?
Many academics in the past had erroneously identified the animal mentioned in the legend as an ‘iguana’. Not just the legend but scholars have even confused the representations of such a creature in Indian art and sculpture with the iguana.
Elora Tribedy, a field-archaeologist and assistant professor, affiliated with the School of Historical Studies at Nalanda University, addresses this confusion in her 2023 paper, Small Lives Mattered: Relocating and Reassessing Godha, the Indian Monitor Lizard, in Indian Art and Literature.
She noted that “several previous scholars in the art-historical assessment of sculptures of Parvati-Gauri, have identified Godha as iguana or alligator-crocodile in an uncritical way”.
This, she added, was “due to the lack of a comprehensive and specific academic discussion on this reptile (Bengal monitor lizard)”.
Tribedy makes it clear that the animal depicted in Indian art (and by extension in the legend of Sinhagad) could only have been a Bengal monitor.
That is because the iguana is not native to India. Moreover, iguanas “have protruding eyes near the throat, thinner skin attaching mouth with the body and prominent fans on the body”. These physical features are completely absent in the depictions of Godha in the images of Parvati-Gauri, says Tribedy.
A number of sources tell us how Tanaji dexterously used Yeshwant in his escalade of the Killa Kondana, as the fortress was known before the battle.
“The same night Tanaji and the army went to the gate known as the Kalyan Gate. There Tanaji took out of a box Shivaji’s famous ghorpad Yeshwant, which had already scaled 27 forts. He smeared its head with red lead, put a pearl ornament on its forehead and worshipped it as a god. He then tied a cord to its waist and bade it run up the Dongri Cuff. Half way the ghorpad turned back. Shelar thought this an evil omen and urged Tanaji to abandon the enterprise. But Tanaji threatened to kill and eat the ghorpad if it did not do his bidding. Thereupon Yeshwant climbed to the top of the cliff and fastened its claws in the ground,” writes the British administrator, Charles Augustus Kincaid in his work History of the Maratha People (1918).
His son, Dennis Kincaid, also an administrator and author, writes an even more elaborate account in his work, Shivaji: The Grand Rebel (1937).
“That night, a cold clear February night, Tanaji and his men stole up to the foot of the walls, which, naked and smooth, without crevice or foothold, rose,” he writes.
However, Dennis Kincaid identifies Yeshwant as an ‘iguana’, rather than a Bengal monitor.
“Tanaji ordered a servant to bring forward a box which he carried on his shoulder. He laid it on the ground and out came a ghorpad, the hill-iguana of western India. These iguanas are so surefooted that they can ascend a smooth and vertical surface, and so strong that they can, as the Marathas proved, bear the weight of a man. This was a ghorpad of especial size and strength. It was called Yeshwant.”
He writes further: “Tanaji began to praise and flatter Yeshwant. He painted Yeshwant’s head with red lead as if it were the head of an image in a temple: he hung his own pearl necklace round Yeshwant’s neck and bowed to Yeshwant as if to a prince. Then he tied a rope ladder around Yeshwant and told him to run up the wall. The ghorpad obeyed and darted up the sheer face of stone. But half-way up Yeshwant stopped and began to shudder. It was a hideous omen. Tanaji’s men clustered round him and begged him to abandon the enterprise. “The ghorpad’s fear is a sign of your own death,” they urged. But Tanaji laughed and said, “I have given my promise, I cannot turn back.” Then he turned and shouted up at Yeshwant, “Get on up, you wretched lizard, or I’ll cut you up and serve you in a stew.”
Yeshwant, in natural alarm, ran up the rest of the wall and disappeared over the stone crenellation. The rope-ladder dangled down the fifty feet of wall, concludes Kincaid.
In his 1993 book, The Marathas 1600-1818, Stewart Gordon also accepts that Sinhagad “was taken by scaling very difficult walls by means of rope ladders in a night raid which culminated in hand-to-hand combat inside the fort”. But he does not mention a ghorpad.
Charles Augustus too concedes an alternative scenario. “A less romantic but more probable story is to be found in the Sabhasad Bakhar. According to the author of that chronicle, Tanaji and his brother Suryaji surprised Sinhgad without divine assistance and with a force of only a thousand Mawal infantry. The garrison consisted of seven hundred Rajputs, who defended themselves gallantly until over five hundred had been killed or wounded in the attack.”
But the moot question is: Can a Bengal monitor bear the weight of a man?
“In Indian folklore, the monitor lizard is popularly known for its strong claws and firm grip (Udumbu-pudi in Tamil) and it is used as a toolkit for the upward climbing of stiff walls. The Ghorpade clan in Maharashtra claims an ancestral connection with Tanaji as a reason behind their skill of climbing walls like monitor lizards,” writes Tribedy.
Others do not discount the possibility. Gerry Martin, a noted herpetologist, says that these lizards are “immensely strong and once inside a crevice could easily hold strong and help infiltrate an otherwise secure fortress”.
Rahul Alvarez, wildlife photographer, also gives a scientific explanation.
“Wedged into a burrow an adult monitor is almost impossible to dislodge since the lizard inflates its body by filling its lungs with air and locks its claws on to the inside of the burrow with a vice like grip. So the legends of monitor lizards with ropes tied to their waists being used to scale high walls might very well be true since wedged in securely in this manner an adult monitor could easily hold on to the weight of a climbing human for a fair bit of time,” he notes.
So Tanaji’s use of Yeshwant may have been possible. Ultimately though, what mattered was that the fort was won. Although, as Chhatrapati Shivaji so poignantly remarked when he heard the news of the fortress’s capture, “Gad Aala Pan Sinha Gela” (The Fort is won, But the Lion is gone).