ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the way that geological formations and topological contours have helped shape—while also being shaped by—processes of memory-making and practices of commemoration in urban India. The chapter’s entry point into this problematic is the Western Ghats mountain range, and specifically the town of Mahad, Maharashtra and its environs. Nestled into a plateau in the foothills of the Ghats, Mahad is a historical port and market town. Also, it is surrounded by two prominent locations that are intertwined with the contours and geologies of the Ghats: the hilltop Raigad Fort, capital of the seventeenth-century king Shivaji; and the Gandharpale Caves, a Buddhist monastic site carved into the stone of the Ghats around 2,000 years ago. The disparate timescales of these sites, both embedded in the volcanic rock of the Ghats, are brought together in very contemporary contestations over caste, religion, and belonging. Ancient histories of Buddhism, for instance, have acquired new significance with the rise of Ambedkarite Buddhism, of which Mahad has become a significant hub. The chapter seeks to explore these contestations and their connections with the geological through the notion of topographies in both literal and metaphorical senses. Following the insight, present in anti-caste thinking and other scholarship, that there are important histories of imperialism before British rule, the chapter is a preliminary exploration of the ways that these histories resonate in the present through the reproduction of ideologies, the creation of urban centers and peripheries, the circulation of commodities over land and sea, and the materiality of stone and water in an era of climate change.
