Amber Fort

Akram, the same guide we used in Delhi, picked us up at 9am to take us on a full day tour of Jaipur. It was a very packed day of learning both the history of Jaipur (and by proxy Northern India) and modern Indian politics.

We started out by driving into old town Jaipur, the part that is famously known as the Pink City. Even though it's not pink at all! The nickname comes from when Prince Albert visited Jaipur in 1877 and one if his aides wrote down that the old town was pink and the name just stuck. Maybe he was colorblind? Anyway, the color is actually terra cotta. The whole old town is uniformly this color, with seven richly decorated gates all around. Quite beautiful.

We took a quick spot just to take a picture of the facade of Hawal Mahal (the Wind Palace), but more on this in a later post. Our main destination for the morning was the Amer Fort.

The Amber Fort is named from the city of Amber, which itself is believed to be named for the Hindu goddess Amba (coincidentally its color is somewhat in the realm of amber). The fort and wall around it was initially built in the 12th century, and the wall grew to encircle the entire valley, and is quite reminiscent of the Great Wall of China (although obviously several thousand miles shorter and much later in history). Wikipedia refers to this as the Amer Fort in Amer, but all local references we've seen say Amber.

While the fort was initially built in the 12th century, a new, modern, palatial expansion was began by Man Singh at the end of the 16th century. Turns out that Man Singh was the general of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. Rajasthan (the state of which Jaipur is the capital) was autonomous from the Mughals, but they had very close relations (two Rajasthani princesses married Mughals). Man Singh didn't live to see the palace completed, so work was continued by his descendents... including his grandson, Jai Singh I, who also was a general for the Mughals.

The fort is an interesting mix of Persian, Mughul, and local Rajasthani architecture. For instance, some columns had Islamic detail bases (flowers and geometry) but Hindu tops (eplehants). It's called a fort, but it served no military purpose - there was an actual military fort nearby - it was mainly a palace.

The fort contained multiple beautiful gardens in the Persian style, and had two main gates. The sun gate (facing east) was reserved for the royals, who actually typically entered on elephant back. In fact, many tourists take that route today. We just walked, and took pictures of the elephants instead, many of which were elaborately decorated and even had painted toenails! The moon gate (facing west) was for commoners to enter to petition and see the royals.

The main section of the palace had two main royal residences and was ingeniously laid out. The winter palace was on the east side and mirrored - so as to capture the maximum amount of heat from the sun. We chuckled as our guide described temperatures falling as low as 9 degrees celcius (48°F). Must be nice. On the other hand, in the summer, temperatures can reach an absurd 47 degrees celcius (117°F) - so the summer palace was constructed facing west, which was a direction blocked by a hill so it got far less sunlight. Additionally, it was all white marble, and had a built in air conditioning system and water cooling. High tech for the 17th century!

In the back of the fort were 12 distinct apartments for Man Singh's 12 wives. They were constructed in such a way to ensure that none of the wives knew which one he was visiting. Sneaky sneaky. Throughout the fort were many screen windows - windows with hexagonal open tiles so that the wives could peek out at the commoners without being seen, since they weren't actually allowed to venture out much.

After several hundred years of rule over Amber, one ruler, Jai Singh II, decided that he had much grander ambitions. He decided he needed to build his own city, which he naturally named after himself: Jai's City, or Jaipur. The city be built is the part we now call the Pink City - which was founded in 1727. But this man was also interested in a lot of other things, like math and astronomy and even urban planning - so the city is carefully designed and laid out on a symmetric grid. He even was very careful to place specific occupations at specific points. There is a block for bangle creators, and a block for cloth weavers, and so forth. He also built his own astronomical observatory (see next post).

We ended up spending about 3 hours at the Amber Fort, and learned an enormous amount about it - of which this post is just a fraction. But it was a great place to visit.Read more