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Our tour guide explained, “We have been using jeeps after an elephant killed his mahout (rider) recently.” He took us to see how the mahouts were tying the new baby elephants to chains so that they “get into a sate of mind not to run away.”
We arrived in the central courtyard of the Fort as braver tourists were disembarking from their elephants.
It was Mirza Raja Man Singh I who in 1569 began the construction of the Amber Fort, which I was going to see now. Our guide’s name was Mr. Singh (Sanskrit for lion, denoting warrior caste Kshatriya ties), which he said “means a Rajput warrior.” The walls of the old Fort ...
Before Jaipur, rulers of this area lived in Amber Fort up on the hills a few miles away. They were from the Kachwahas, a Kshatriya caste clan claiming lineage from the Sun Dynasty (Surya), who came here in the 11th century. When the third Mughal Shahanshah Akbar-e Azam (Persian for Emperor Akbar the Great), expanded his empire (1556-1605) south from Delhi, these Kachwaha Rajputs formed an alliance with him to safeguard their territory.
Today the view from windows on both sides was of tourists looking up and the peddlers they attracted...
A few steps away was a milk market. Skeptical Jaipur buyers first dipped their hands into the tin containers of milk to make sure that the sellers had not “diluted it with too much water.”
The royal women, unseen, could view the everyday life and processions of the city in the streets below through the arabesque of the building’s 956 small windows. One thing we know they saw was another such viewing structure right across the street. On a smaller scale, this one was for the commoner women of the town.
That was in 1727. Now those elements can be uncovered only with difficulty in the maze of extraneous additions such as the tangled webs of electricity wires, not to mention the crumbling walls, the street traffic of vehicles and animals of diverse variety (camels...
One addition, in 1799 by Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh, however, has become the landmark of Jaipur. It is Hawa Mahal, a five-story building, only one-room deep, in the center of town where the Maharajas’ women, “languishing in purdah” (according to a local guidebook, Majestic Jaipur, p 16) would come from their sequestered quarters for protected viewing.
Jaipur also makes claim to the title of the oldest surviving planned urban center in northern India. Maharaja Sawai Jai (Victory) Singh II who named the new city after himself, employed a scholar to design it as conceived in Shipla Shastra, the ancient Hindu architectural treatise. The grid consisted of seven blocks of white buildings separated by tree-lined wide boulevards. It was a walled city with seven gates. Arched shop-fronts added the Mughal architectural influence.
We climbed to the roof of the hotel to take a better look. We saw a groom on a white horse in the middle of several wedding attendants and a few musicians. On the other side of the roof the view was that of a sprawling city, which filled up the valley almost all the way to the hills...
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