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I saw some of the jewelry “traders” in Jaipur’s Johari (Persian jawaheri, meaning Jewelry) Bazaar. They stood outside their shops asking passerby “Hello, what do you want?”
When we climbed our bus we were swarmed with peddlers hoping to sell their cheap souvenirs. Our guide stopped them at the door.
We sat under the framed pictures of the likes of Jackie Kennedy (in 1962) and Prince Charles and his wife Diana. They were guests of the dashing Jaipur royal polo players.
The sales clerk put a lighter’s flame to the fuzz of the carpet to demonstrate that it was so tightly woven that it would not catch fire. I was more interested in the working conditions of two women spinning the yarns; they were sitting on the ground in the store’s backyard.
Named after the oldest Mughal garden (Babur’s in Agra), this Rambagh (from Persian Aram bagh, meaning garden for rest) had been the residence of the Maharaja of Jaipur from 1925 to 1957.
We were taken to see a fabric block printing center “to learn more about the textiles that are so representative of this area,” as our tour guide said.
Women gardeners in green uniform were watering the lawns; a man in white uniform and red turban strolled around waiving a flag to shoo away birds.
Of especial interest today was “a sundial that can give the time to an accuracy of 2 seconds”. It looked like an unusual modernist sculpture with stairs going toward celestial entities.
Next to it was a structure with small chambers for all months of the Zodiac, each symbolized by a descriptive tile [84]. For Pisces, the tile showed a fish. In the chamber for Gemini, the tile depicted duality by a man and a woman who was playing ektar (Persian for one-string) an instrument normally used for sacred music.
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