In 1767 Ahilyabai Holkar moved her capital to Maheshwar and ruled for close to thirty years from a fort set above the Narmada, a queen remembered not for what she took but for what she left behind: temples, wells and roads raised the length of India, from Kashi to Somnath. Her fort still stands yet, and the town beneath it has altered remarkably little.
Within the walls are her palace, her private shrine, the swing upon which she is said to have sat, and a life-size figure of the queen upon her throne. A part of the fort is a hotel now; the remainder receives visitors, and an hour spent there is an hour well spent.
Below, the ghats descend into the river in long flights of stone, broken by carved pavilions and by the great stone elephants that guard Ahilya Ghat. At first light they belong to the pilgrims; at dusk, to lamps set adrift upon the water. The Rajarajeshwara and Kaleshwara temples stand within the fort complex, and midstream upon a rock the river has not shifted in three centuries the small shrine of Baneshwar Mahadev keeps its own counsel. Boats leave the steps throughout the day, and the town is best understood from the middle of the river.
Maheshwar is also where the Maheshwari sari began. Ahilyabai commissioned the first of them in the 1760s as gifts of state, and two and a half centuries on the looms are still working, a few hundred metres from the water. At Rehwa Society, within the fort walls, the cloth may be watched upon the loom and bought from the hands that wove it; the society trains and employs the weavers of the town, and is a large part of the reason the craft survives at all. Allow rather longer here than you imagine you will need.
Downstream at Sahastradhara the Narmada breaks upon rock into a thousand streams, and the passage there is made by boat. The town is at its most beautiful in the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset which is why film-makers have returned to it for decades and at its most joyful at Kartik Purnima, when the Nimar Utsav fills the ghats with music and the river with boats.
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