Jaipur in a Day
I booked my Friday trip to Jaipur online after discovering that the Taj Mahal – a portion of which serves as a mosque – closes to visitors on that day of the week. Since I did not want to visit Jaipur or Agra over the weekend for fear of encountering a horde of tourists, my window for scheduling both day trips shrank considerably, and I realised the need to slot Jaipur very early.
My trail of logic
happily coincided with the weather. The brilliant sun in Jaipur contrasted the
thick fog in Delhi, which joins the pollution of houses and exhaust pipes to create
Delhi’s vicious smog-creating cycle. Four to five hours southwest of the
capital, Jaipur finds itself in the more arid region of Rajasthan, a fact
betokened by the orange landscape covered in bushes and a sparse sprinkling of
trees. Of course, these geographical facts did not stop me from fretting in the
morning about the prospect of fog ruining my trip. It accompanied us for most
of our ride, during which I found myself deeply admiring the calm confidence of
the driver as he cut his way through the milky air. The citizens of Delhi have
developed a modus vivendi with these bad weather conditions, leaving their
hazard lights on and pre-emptively honking whenever they approach other
vehicles.
After picking up my
guide in a touristy breakfast parlour outside Jaipur, we proceeded to our first
stop: the viewing platform across from Amber Fort. Like many anglophone
tourists before me, I incorrectly assumed that the building’s name is an
English translation of the Indian name, or else simply an appellation derived
from its colour. As the guide explained, however, the place simply is called
Amber, and the name has nothing to do with English at all. The viewing platform
finds itself right by the road, offering a panorama of the complex from across
the lake. Since the weather has lately been dry in Jaipur, one could tell that
the water surface lay significantly below its usual level.
I quickly developed a
liking for the guide, a kindly man in his fifties with a broad black moustache
and ears overrun by an almost equally thick coat of hair. He seemed to know not
only all the other guides and officials, but also the best spots for
photography in every place we visited. Throughout the day, his lessons on
Jaipur’s history gradually solidified in my head, and they were driven home in
the throne room of the City Palace, where paintings of all the important
Maharajas lined the walls in chronological order: the Maharaja who founded
Jaipur, the tall and corpulent Maharaja who built Amber Fort, the normal-sized
Maharaja who built several palaces, the second impressively corpulent Maharaja
who did not do anything significant and was a bit crazy, the eccentric Maharaja
who painted the city pink, the Maharaja who only drank water from the holy
Ganges River and brought two giant silver pots of it on his trip to the UK, and
the polo-champion Maharaja who ceded his authority (though far from all his
real estate) to the newly founded Indian Republic.
We visited all four
courtyards at Amber Fort, stopping to observe various details. Its architecture
is a blend of Indian and Persian influences, with pillars featuring elephants
and floral motifs alongside more Islamic geometrical patterns. Everything in
the palace, my guide pointed out, is geared towards making the living quarters
habitable in the hot summer months: its altitude, its orientation, and even its
halls of pillars coated with a cooling stucco. My guide also told me that in
the summer, wet screens made of sandalwood were hung in the arches to chill the
air while perfuming it.
After leaving Amber
Fort, we stopped the car by another manmade lake to take in a quick view of the
Jal Mahal – an island palace. The Jal Mahal is inaccessible to the public, and
I can understand why. I can only imagine the chaos that would erupt if boats
were allowed to besiege the site.
With ample time until
lunch, the guide took me to see the workshops of a stoneworker and a woodblock
printer. I imagine many tourists appreciate these visits, as they can inspire
souvenir gift purchases, and indeed the many other tourists seemed to be
enjoying themselves. The pressure to buy was too high for me, however, and
after caving in once at the stoneworker’s (why not buy a Christmas present
eleven months in advance?), I rather awkwardly bowed my way out of the printer’s
fabric shop. Lunch followed shortly thereafter at a reassuringly touristy
restaurant, where I tried Rajasthan-style aubergines with a side of garlic naan.
As the waiter did not hesitate to stress upon my paying, his service was not
included in the charge.
After lunch, another
quick roadside stop followed by the Hawa Mahal, also known in English as the
Palace of the Winds for its many windows. Emblematic of Jaipur, it is a broad
pink beehive of angular balconies, their roofs coalescing into a gently rounded
shape. It stands at an important junction in the old town and in the proximity
of some of Jaipur’s most impressive gates, but given the traffic I could
understand why we did not explore the streets on foot.
Having thus ended up
in the heart of Jaipur, we proceeded to Jantar Mantar, one of the five sites
built up by Maharaja Jai Singh II (the founder of Jaipur) to house an
impressively giant collection of astronomical instruments. As my guide
demonstrated to dramatic effect, one of these structures measures the local
time (offset from Indian Standard Time by 40 minutes) to the accuracy of one
minute, and the large version allegedly even to the accuracy of a second. The rest
tracks the movement of the stars, the angle of the sun, and many other things I
did not quite understand in ways I did not quite comprehend.
Finally, we explored
the City Palace, which is at present half-museum and half-home to the royal
family. Taking advantage of this duality, one princess has installed several
billboards by the structure, beaming next to her supporters and BJP-leader
Narendra Modi as part of her 2024 campaign. I saw a number of remarkable items
at the palace museums, including the aforementioned gigantic silver pots and the
huge outfit belonging to the seven-foot-tall Maharaja. We also visited the
workshop of the resident artists, my guide taking care to make this choice a
voluntary one. Once again, I caved under the pressure, this time yielding before
the patient demonstrations of a painter with an exquisitely twirly moustache
(an adornment whose artistry practically matched that of his delicate works).
The ride back to Delhi
was longer than our hassle-free passage in the morning, as our return coincided
with the evening rush. Adding to the experience, many Delhi drivers including
mine have the strange habit of cracking the window open in the middle of
traffic jams, which is precisely as unpleasant as it sounds.
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