2011 Biking Rajasthan

We loved Jodhpur's old city spice shops (and food): cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, poppy seeds, lentils, nutmeg, black pepper, molasses, and more.

And loved Jodhpur’s Mehrangarh fort, which was never conquered despite many attacks and sieges. When the current Maharaja’s ancestor selected this spot for his fort, he evicted a hermit from the mountaintop who put a curse on him, saying there would never be enough water to sustain the fort’s occupants. A “bold man” offered to be sacrificed, by being buried alive in the fort’s foundations, to mitigate the curse, and to this day the royal family has a relationship with his descendents.

On the walls near one set of massive gates, were “handprints” commemorating some of the widows who had committed sati (self-immolation) on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands. Our audio tour tape praised the women, describing how, when a maharaja died, wives and concubines, dressed in their wedding finery and watched by family members and musicians, would sit in silence as they died. I must say I thought the “silence” unlikely, but need to do more reading. In 1731 six wives and 58 concubines were burnt alive when the maharaja died; the last royal sati from Mehrangarh took place in 1840.

The current maharaja inherited the throne in 1952 when his father died unexpectedly. He was aged just four and came to “power” post-independence. He had no dominion over which to rule, but had some status still. By the time he grew up and returned from his studies (philosophy and economics), it was 1972 and Indira Ghandi had changed the constitution to strip maharajas of even this, forcing him to “rethink his role” – according to his voice on the audio tour tape.

On the outskirts of Jodhpur we visited the small museum in one wing of the Umaid Bhawan Palace, now a superb (apparently, we weren’t allowed in) hotel. The palace was built by the current maharaja’s father shortly before his death and prior to independence as a “job creation project”. The palace, begun in 1929, is Art Deco in design and took 3,000 workers 15 years to complete. The royal family today lives in one wing. No mortar was used in construction, the hand hewn blocks of sandstone simply interlocked. The blocks were too heavy to manoeuvre to perfectly align the interlocking “bits”, so were first placed on blocks of ice and correctly positioned as the ice melted.