A Day in Jaipur

The facade of Hawa Mahal, Jaipur's most iconic image.

A view from the seventh story of Hawa Mahal, looking out on Jaipur's Old City.

Maybe Maharajah Jai Singh was trying to overcompensate, or he may have really just loved astronomy. This impressive sundial sits at the heart of Jantar Mantar, the observatory park built by Jai Singh in the late 1500s.

Jenna expressed a bit of confusion over how some of the instruments displayed in Jantar Mantar actually worked. To her, it looked more like an exercise park.

The central courtyard of City Palace. The tall cream-colored building in the background is the actual residence of Rajasthan's current maharajah.

A giant silver jug used by a former maharajah to transport holy Ganges water during one of his trips to Europe. It is purported to be the largest silver object in the world.

Standing with a 'guard' at City Palace. After the photo, he leaned over and whispered, "Ten rupees, sir?"

The Rajasthan state flag is made from the flags of the Rajputs’ conquered enemies. Nothing better symbolizes the proud militancy of this state’s fearsome history, a history as bewildering and circuitous as the family tree of any European royal family.

This history came more to life for Jenna and I on our second day traveling through Rajasthan, when we toured through the Old City of Jaipur, the state capital and still the residence of Rajasthan’s royal family. Jaipur’s Old City—more so than Old Delhi or London’s historic City district—is clearly defined by a well-preserved stone wall that surrounds a bustling maze of bazaars and palaces. All the buildings within the Old City are painted a distinctive pink color, giving the city its iconic name: the Pink City. (It is rumored that the Rajput maharajahs who built Jaipur wanted the city to rival Delhi’s famed Red Fort, which was made of red sandstone. However, Rajasthan suffers from a lack of that material, so they built out of normal stone and painted the buildings a color emulating red sandstone.)

Jaipur’s Old City must be overwhelming and chaotic for the hundreds of Western tourists who descend upon her everyday, to tour the historic sites and wade through the many shops and stalls. Luckily, Jenna and I long ago grew accustomed to the sensual overload of an Indian market. Still, Jaipur is a heady conglomeration of sights and sounds.

Not for nothing is the city known as India’s ‘shopping capital’. Cramped little shops the size of American bathrooms line the Old City’s narrow streets. Small alleyways shoot off in arterial sluices and merchandise is thrown literally everywhere—on the sidewalk, in the street, hung upon the walls, stacked atop low stone eaves. It is about as close to ‘one-stop shopping’ as India gets. You can find in Jaipur anything your souvenir-hunting heart would desire: lush Persian rugs, highly polished silver trinkets, necklaces and jewelry made from semiprecious stones, bags and chappals fashioned from camel leather, ornately glazed clay pottery, thick Rajasthani blankets, and pristine white khadi cloth. It is impossible for the novice to tell the difference between what is genuine and what is fake, but it almost does not matter, so different are these products from anything you could find in the West.

Away from the hustle and bustle of the market is the City Palace complex, a sprawling site that Jenna and I visited late in the morning. The Palace’s exhibits told the fascinating story of Jai Singh II, a Rajput ruler who founded Jaipur in the late 1500s and built the palace. It is still home to Rajasthan’s royal family—the aged maharajah, his wife and two adult children. They serve a purely ceremonial role in state politics but still do a lot of charity work around Rajasthan.

Next door to the palace was Jantar Mantar, an odd outdoor park filled with giant Medieval devices used to measure the movement of celestial objects. It was built by Jai Singh II around the same time as the City Palace and resembles a modern-art theme park. A three-story tall triangular tower in the park was used as a giant sundial.

Finally, we stepped through Hawa Mahal, probably Jaipur’s most recognizable structure. From the outside, it is a seven-story tall façade of pink stone, crenellated with windows and pockmarked with stain glass. It looks like a giant pink wedding cake. But from the inside, it is a more complex and substantial palace, which was built in the 1700s specifically for the women of the maharajah’s court. In those days, the women of Rajasthan observed strict purdah. That is, they could not be seen by outsiders…ever. The maharajah of the time built Hawa Mahal as a place for the women of his court to reside in privacy. They could look through the windows and stained glass partitions of Hawa Mahal’s exquisite façade out onto the streets of Jaipur and not fear being observed themselves.

It was a whirlwind day through Jaipur’s historic district. Naturally, we ended it with some shopping. To make Jenna walk through the ‘shopping capital’ of India without stopping to browse and buy would, I think, have been torture.