Height: Shrivardhan 820 m | Manaranjan 818 m District: Pune / Raigad border Region: Karjat tehsil, Sahyadri
About The Mountain
There are two forts at Rajmachi. They stand on adjacent summits of the same ridge, Shrivardhan at 820 metres on one end, Manaranjan at 818 metres on the other, close enough that you can see one from the other clearly, separated by a saddle of open grassland that in the monsoon fills with wildflowers and in the dry season turns gold and rustles in the wind off the Konkan. Together they are called Rajmachi. The name belongs to both, and to the plateau between them, and to the whole landscape of that particular ridge above the Ulhas river valley.
Rajmachi sits on the Pune-Raigad border, above the Bor Ghat, one of the most important passes through the Sahyadri in this stretch of the range, the route that connected the Konkan coast to the Deccan interior through the landscape immediately south of Mumbai. The railway line that runs through the Bor Ghat today follows, roughly, the same path that trade and pilgrimage traffic has followed for centuries. From the Rajmachi ridge, both sides of the ghat are visible, the Konkan descending to the west, the Deccan plateau rising to the east, the pass between them a notch in the landscape that everything moving through this part of the range had to use.
The approach to Rajmachi from the Konkan side, through the village of Lonavala and down the ghat to Kondivade, passes through a landscape that carries its own layer of ancient significance: the Karla and Bhaja caves. These are among the oldest Buddhist rock-cut monuments in India, carved from the basalt of the Sahyadri escarpment in the second and first centuries BCE, their interiors elaborately worked into chaityas and viharas, the pillared halls and monastery cells where monks lived and practised and left behind inscriptions that still survive in the rock. The Karla chaitya, with its enormous carved facade and its interior that uses the natural curvature of the rock to create an acoustic that no modern concert hall has quite replicated, is among the most extraordinary things in the Sahyadri.
These caves are not on Rajmachi. They are on the escarpment below it. But the path from the caves to the forts is the path that the Buddhist monks of that era would have used when they moved between the trade route below and the heights above. Rajmachi and the Buddhist cave heritage of the Bor Ghat are part of the same landscape, the same history of a mountain that has been understood as significant for more than two thousand years.
The plateau between the two forts holds a village, Rajmachi village, a small settlement at altitude that has lived on this ridge for as long as the ridge has been inhabited. The village is reached from the Lonavala side by a trail that is one of the most popular overnight trekking routes in the Sahyadri, close enough to Mumbai and Pune to be accessible, high enough to feel genuinely remote, beautiful enough in the monsoon to generate the kind of photographs that bring the next season’s walkers. But the village was there long before the walkers came, and the ridge was sacred long before the village was built.
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The Name
Raj means king, the same root that gives us raja, that runs through the names of dynasties and mountains and rivers across the subcontinent. Machi means a platform, a watchtower, a raised position, specifically the kind of elevated platform from which a king or a commander could survey the landscape below. Rajmachi: the king’s platform. The place from which kings watched.
The two forts on the ridge carry names that are themselves meaningful. Shrivardhan, the one who increases auspiciousness, who causes good fortune to grow. Sri is the goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and good fortune. Vardhan is the one who causes to increase. A fort named Shrivardhan is a fort named for the growing of good fortune, an auspicious name for a defensive position, combining the language of military necessity with the language of sacred well-wishing.
Manaranjan, the one who pleases the mind, who brings joy to the heart. Mana is mind, heart, the interior self. Ranjan is that which delights, that which brings pleasure. A fort named Manaranjan is a fort that its namers understood as a place of genuine pleasure, pleasure in the view, perhaps, or in the feeling of having reached it, or in the quality of the wind and the light and the grassland that sits between the two summits.
Two forts named for auspiciousness and joy, on a ridge called the king’s platform. The names hold together a sense of what this place was understood to offer: the elevation of the king’s gaze, the good fortune of Lakshmi, and the delight of a high place in a beautiful landscape. The military purpose is in there, a platform for watching is a platform for controlling, but it is dressed in the language of beauty and good fortune rather than in the language of war.
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The Stories
Rajmachi carries two distinct layers of story that sit side by side in the landscape without quite touching: the Buddhist heritage of the approach and the Hindu sacred geography of the ridge. They belong to different centuries and different traditions, but they share the same basalt and the same pass and the same understanding that this stretch of the Sahyadri is a place where the sacred and the strategic have always found each other.
The Monks and the Mountain
The Buddhist caves of the Bor Ghat region, Karla, Bhaja, Bedsa, Kondane, were carved during a period when Buddhism was one of the dominant religious traditions of the Deccan, patronised by the traders who moved through the ghats and by the local rulers who understood the value of having monasteries at the key points on the trade routes. The monks who lived in these caves did not live in isolation. They lived at the intersection of the sacred and the commercial, their monasteries were resting places and storehouses and banks for the merchants moving through the ghat, and the merchants’ donations funded the carving of ever more elaborate facades and ever deeper halls into the escarpment rock.
The inscriptions in the Karla caves record the names of donors from across the ancient world, merchants from the western Deccan, from the coastal ports, from as far as the Konkan fishing communities. They gave money and materials for the carving of the caves, and in return their names were carved into the rock alongside the figures of the Buddha and the bodhisattvas. This is the sacred economy of the ancient trade route: the monk provides the spiritual merit, the merchant provides the material means, and the mountain provides the rock in which both are preserved.
The path from the caves to the Rajmachi ridge is the path these monks would have walked when they went to the heights above the ghat, for the view, for the solitude that the caves’ proximity to the trade route sometimes prevented, for the particular quality of sky and distance that a high ridge provides to those whose practice requires open space and long perspective. The ridge carried, in those centuries, the same quality that draws people to it today. The landscape does not change its essential character between the second century BCE and the present. The monks who climbed from the caves to the ridge found what today’s trekkers find: height, wind, the Konkan on one side and the Deccan on the other, and the profound satisfaction of being above the pass that everything and everyone else had to go through.
Shrivardhan and the Goddess of Prosperity
The name Shrivardhan invokes Sri, the goddess Lakshmi in her most ancient form, the quality of auspiciousness and good fortune and beauty that the tradition associates with her presence. Before Lakshmi became primarily the consort of Vishnu in the popular tradition, Sri was a quality of the world itself, the lusciousness of a fertile field, the beauty of a full harvest, the feeling of a place where things are going well and the ground is generous. A fort named for the growth of Sri is a fort whose builders were thinking about the quality of the place as much as its defensive value.
The view from Shrivardhan on a clear day justifies the name. The Konkan below is green in a way that the Deccan above rarely is, the moisture that the western escarpment catches and the laterite soil that holds it produce a landscape of a particular lushness. Looking west from Shrivardhan is looking at a landscape that the tradition associates with Sri, the fullness of the earth, the generosity of a well-watered place. The fort was built here for strategic reasons, but it was named for what it could see.
Manaranjan and the Pleasure of Height
Manaranjan, the delight of the mind, is a name that the experience of the ridge confirms in the most direct way. The saddle between the two forts, covered in monsoon wildflowers in July and August, is one of the most consistently beautiful pieces of landscape in the Sahyadri. It is not dramatic beauty, not the vertiginous drop of Kokankada or the impossible angle of the Harihar staircase. It is the beauty of a wide, open, high place where the grass bends in the wind and the sky is available in all directions and the world below is visible but comfortably distant.
It is said in the local tradition of the ridge that the saddle between the two forts was a place where the rulers who held Rajmachi came to rest, not to administer, not to inspect the defences, but simply to be in the landscape. The king’s platform offered the view necessary for governance. Manaranjan offered the view necessary for the recovery of the spirit that governance depletes. The two forts are, in this reading, two different relationships with the same ridge: one for watching, one for restoration.
The Pass and Its Keepers
The Bor Ghat has been one of the principal routes through the Sahyadri for as long as the Sahyadri has been a barrier between the Konkan coast and the Deccan interior. Armies have moved through it, traders have moved through it, pilgrims have moved through it, and the railway that now runs through it carries millions of passengers a year between Mumbai and Pune. Whoever held Rajmachi held the pass, could watch the movement below, could control the access, could extract the toll or deny the passage that every ghat route made possible.
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj understood the Bor Ghat forts as essential nodes in the Sahyadri network, Rajmachi among them, its twin summits commanding the pass from above. The fort’s history in the Maratha period is the history of understanding this ridge not simply as a defensive position but as a key in the lock of the western ghats, a position whose holding or losing determined the freedom of movement between the coast and the plateau.
The Buddhist monks who carved the caves below the ridge two thousand years before the Maratha period were making the same calculation from a different tradition: this pass is important. The people who move through it need what we offer. Let us be here, in the rock, at the place where the movement happens. The monks and the fort builders arrived at the same ridge by different routes and for different reasons and left different marks in the landscape. But the landscape that drew them both is the same landscape, the pass, the height above it, the view in two directions, the sense of being at a hinge point in the Sahyadri.
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Why It Still Matters
Rajmachi is among the most visited overnight trekking destinations in the Sahyadri, and that popularity has brought it the complications that popularity always brings: trail erosion, waste management challenges, the gradual replacement of solitude with company. The village on the ridge receives visitors throughout the year and manages its own relationship with that traffic, hosting campers, providing food, living its own life alongside the flow of people who come for the landscape and the altitude.
What the visitors find, regardless of the complications, is what the ridge has always offered. The saddle between the two forts in the monsoon is still the saddle in the monsoon, the wildflowers still there, the sky still available, the Konkan and the Deccan still visible on their respective sides. The quality of a high place on a pass through a significant mountain range does not degrade with visitors the way a forest trail does. The landscape absorbs the attention it receives and returns it in the form it has always returned it.
The Buddhist caves below the ridge are a reminder that the tradition of finding this landscape significant is more than two thousand years old. The monks who carved Karla and Bhaja were not the first people in this ghat, they found an existing trade route and an existing pattern of movement through the mountains and placed their monasteries at its key points. Before the monks there were the traders. Before the traders there were the first people to find that this notch in the Sahyadri was the easiest way between the coast and the plateau.
The king’s platform has been a king’s platform for a very long time. The monks came before the king. The traders came before the monks. The pass came before all of them. And the ridge with its two summits, Shrivardhan watching the Konkan, Manaranjan watching the saddle between them, has been holding its position above the ghat through all of it, named for auspiciousness and joy, carrying in those names a sense of what the people who held it understood the place to be: not simply strategic, but genuinely, unreservedly good.