Saturday 30th December Part 2: Jaipur

This seedy drinkers’ den is filling up, and I must sip my beer slowly to justify my continued presence here. I’ve already had a brief supper break – a fair to middling half tandoori chicken and plain naan – and have hinted at the fact that I’ll have a coffee later. Having already spent far more than an hour and, excluding supper, nearly Rs 100 on describing our time together in Udaipur, and given that my train back to Udaipur is in two and a half hours’ time, I need to pick up the pace. I cannot linger in Jaipur describing everything in painstaking detail, so some sketches will have to suffice. It is a huge place, and the new city gives an impression of size and connection with the business world that Udaipur lacks. The buildings along the main roads of the old town, as well as some in the new, are painted a dark salmon colour, as befits the “Pink City”. The old town is a bustling, chaotic, absorbing place full of little shops and stalls and swarms of cycle rickshaws, all laid out in a roughly rectangular grid, the planned creation of Jai Singh II who transferred the capital of his Rajput kingdom from Amber, only 11km away. We visited Amber fort on our third day (27/12), an interesting and pretty place which is full of tourists, but not a patch on Chittor or Kumbhalgarh or indeed Agra fort which we later saw. More impressive is Jaigarh, on a hill above Amber palace, still strictly part of Amber fort. This has grand views of the surrounding rugged hills and is more fort-like in character than Amber, although equally full of tourists and cars. We had also hired a car and driver for the occasion and on the way were able to visit a gorge called Galta, whose lower portion was lined with elegant temples and tanks. We left our driver drinking tea and followed the path up to the top where we got fantastic views of late afternoon Jaipur, many of whose landmarks were by now familiar.

Amber Fort: L-R Carol, JG, Rosemary

   We had arrived two days earlier on Christmas morning, fresh off the night train from Udaipur. After a leisurely breakfast at our hotel, the fairly luxurious Umaid Mahal, we had the traditional present distribution in To and Carol’s room, displaced thousands of miles from our living room in Exeter. Conventional Christmas activities were, unsurprisingly, thin on the ground, but we had an interesting day. This included visiting a fascinating astronomical observatory – or at least a collection of large astronomical macro-instruments – called the Jantar Mantar, which we had fun exploring. To’s knowledge and patience were absolutely invaluable here in helping us figure things out. We also visited the City Palace Museum that has a fascinating collection of documents, such as Sanskrit texts and Persian translations, and miniatures. Christmas dinner, of course, could not be missed although the evening meal we had at Cinnamon, the Indian restaurant at Jaipur’s Taj Group Jai Mahal hotel, was unlike any Christmas dinner I have ever had. In fact it was quite unlike any meal I have ever had. As soon as we arrived, setting the tone by travelling two per rickshaw, we knew we had come somewhere special. The hotel was a kind of fairy-tale of cupolas and Christmas lights, set around a terrace that fronted a long courtyard garden, occupied by an upper-crust Jaipuri Christmas party. We found the appropriate restaurant without much difficulty and where ushered by suave waiters to a wonderful low table in a candle-lit alcove where we had to sit cross-legged. We ordered beer and then wine (this time the real European deal – Merlot!!) and all had the non-vegetarian “Degustation” menu, a series of exquisitely refined dishes – chicken, mutton biryani, indescribably rich dal, various devastatingly beautiful naans and rotis… these words cannot do justice to the sheer gustatory bliss and delightful ambience we experienced in this carefully-constructed world of top-end hospitality. Suffice it to say it was a lovely way to spend Christmas evening, notwithstanding a slight pocket of wistfulness I’d had all day in the absence of our good old family Christmases in Exeter, replete with tree, roast duck and the prospect of a week with the extended family in Norfolk.
   Having browsed through a fairly light-hearted history of Jaipur (Jaipur Nama by Giles Tillotson) and picking up information from the forts and the City Palace, I got something of a feel for Jaipuri history and its cast list: Man Singh I, the Maharaja of Amber and darling of Akbar, whose army he led against Udaipur’s Pratap Singh in the battle of Haldi Ghati (see entry 3/12/06), also acting as Akbar’s Governor of Bengal; Jai Singh II, the founder of the new city of Jaipur; Ishwar Singh, who built the Ishwari minaret (which we climbed on Christmas Day) and later killed himself by snakebite after endless problems with the Maratha armies of the Deccan; his half-brother Madho Singh I, who was enormously fat; and Madho’s son Sawaj Pratap, who seems to be have been something of a pansy, judging by his pink dresses on display in the City Palace Textile Museum and his architectural legacy – the Jal Mahal, a water palace that can only suffer from comparisons with its more famous counterpart in Udaipur, and more importantly the Palace of the Winds, or Hawa Mahal, Jaipur’s poster child.
   We viewed this extraordinary building several times from the roof of a jewellery shop. This, of course, ended with recriminations from the formerly friendly Kashmiri shopkeeper who had let us up hoping to nurture our gratitude into a visit to his shop, in which we had minimal interest. The palace is, in fact, much more impressive from the outside, as it is little more than a façade, although it has lots of amusingly tiny windows from which you can peep onto the road in a throwback to the buildings’ original function as a zenana, or harem, where the ladies of the Maharaja’s family could discreetly watch the royal processions in the streets below without breaking purdah. My most cherished memory of our visit to the Hawa Mahal is something quite simple and very personal. Leaning out over one of the balconies, the four of us stood watching the road and talking, maybe for half an hour, as other visitors came and went. It is surprising how something as ostensibly little as this, that perhaps might be dwarfed by architectural splendour (however effete), can remain an unbelievably precious memory.

Hawa Mahal

   There are so many other Jaipur memories that should be extracted from the jumble and aired here, but time is winning and my coffee has been drunk. If I have portrayed it as an inferior Udaipur then I haven’t done my job properly. The two are utterly different – Udaipur, calm and serenely charming, Jaipur vast, busy and teeming with self-important street life. Moreover, we all felt a great deal of warmth for the place and had lots of fun exploring it, although Carol’s prowess at crossing its busy roads was far superior to mine. On our second night we went to see a soppy film called Vivah, in an outrageously opulent cinema called the Rajmandir, which Jaipur is extremely proud of. After all the hype, the auditorium was a bit of a let-down – it wasn’t too many million miles away from the cinemas of Udaipur, although it was certainly larger, brighter, cleaner and more well-behaved. On our last night we had a meal out so completely different to that of the first that it is worth mentioning. The Ganesh Restaurant was simply a bit of the old city wall, converted into a square terrace with five or six tables. The very friendly manager and waiters allowed us to watch the food being prepared in a little pit round to the side, and the results were delicious. Totally unpretentious, proper “no frills” food and atmosphere – although that of course is a bit of an effect as, while not specifically aimed at tourists, it plays successfully to their expectations of down-to-earth homeliness in a way that a truly cheap, strip-lit joint with wooden benches and dirty metal tables in a functional canteen with tacky calendars and posters of waterfalls would not.