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Dhundhar & Shekhawati · Arid Northwest

छोटी-छोटी बातें

A city that assigned streets to trades, and it stuckThe 1727 plan allotted the new city's streets by occupation, and nearly three centuries later Maniharon ka Rasta still sells lac bangles, Khajane Walon ka Rasta still cuts marble images, and Johari Bazaar is still where stones are traded. Very few planned cities anywhere have had a land-use scheme survive that long without enforcement.
The instruments are big for a reasonJai Singh built his observatories in masonry because brass instruments of the period were too small to read finely — the error scales down with the instrument, so he scaled the instrument up. The Vrihat Samrat Yantra is a 27 m gnomon and resolves local solar time to roughly two seconds, which is a design decision, not a flourish.
The Hawa Mahal is one room deepIts famous facade is a screen added to the back of the women's quarters — five storeys of pierced windows, in places barely deep enough to stand in, built so that women observing purdah could watch the street. The perforations also pull air through, which is what the name refers to.
A pottery with no clay in itJaipur blue pottery is quartz powder, glass, fuller's earth and gum. It cannot be thrown, only pressed into moulds, and it is fired once at low temperature. The technique arrived from Persia through Central Asia and the Mughal courts, and survives at working scale essentially nowhere else in India.
A king with a darkroomSawai Ram Singh II was a working photographer with his own studio and chemicals. Because he was the ruler, his glass plates include portraits made inside the zenana that no other photographer of the period could have taken — an archive that exists only because of who was holding the camera.
Five buildings, then leaveA successful Shekhawati merchant was expected to build five things in his home town — a haveli, a temple, a memorial chhatri, a well and a caravanserai — and to have all of them painted. He then went back to Calcutta. The building programme was a statement of standing to a community he had largely stopped living among.
The frescoes date themselvesUp to about 1860 the pigments are local minerals and vegetable colours; after that they are cheap imported synthetics, and the blues and reds change abruptly. The subjects change with them — Krishna and the Ramayana give way to trains, motorcars, gramophones, telephones and Europeans in hats, painted by artists who had seen photographs of them and nothing else.
The best-preserved paintings are on tombsFrescoes in the chhatris — the domed cenotaphs — have survived better than those on the havelis, for the plain reason that nobody lived in them, nobody added a bathroom, and nobody repainted the frontage to advertise a shop.
A town founded by a business quarrelRamgarh was founded in 1791 by Poddar merchants who left Churu after falling out with its ruler. They took their trade with them, built a new town from nothing, and it became for a time the richest in the belt — a settlement whose founding document is effectively a commercial dispute.
Money that moved without movingThe hundi let a Shekhawati firm accept cash in Calcutta and pay it out in Churu against a piece of paper and a reputation, with no bank and no legal enforcement. The parta — a same-day profit-and-loss note sent up to the head of the house — kept the whole network legible. Both are older than the institutions that replaced them.
The turban that went to ChicagoAjit Singh, ruler of Khetri in the Torawati hills, was the patron who suggested the name Vivekananda to the monk who used it in Chicago in 1893, and who paid for the passage and supplied the saffron turban of the photographs. A copper-mining thikana in Shekhawati is a load-bearing part of that story.
A salt lake with a railway on itSambhar has no outlet, so everything that flows in evaporates and the salt stays. It has been worked for over a thousand years, is served by a narrow-gauge line running out across the pans, and is a Ramsar-listed wetland that fills with flamingos when the monsoon is good. It is an industrial site and a bird sanctuary at the same time, which is a difficult thing to manage and is managed accordingly.
A prosthetic foot from a Jaipur workshopThe Jaipur foot was developed at a Jaipur hospital in the late 1960s by the surgeon P. K. Sethi with the craftsman Ram Chandra Sharma, using vulcanised rubber and local workshop methods. It was designed for people who squat, walk barefoot and work in water, which imported designs were not, and it is given away rather than sold. Sethi received the Magsaysay Award in 1981.
A sati shrine and the lawThe Rani Sati temple at Jhunjhunu, endowed by merchant families of this belt, commemorates a woman held to have committed sati. The Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act of 1987 prohibits the glorification of sati, and the courts have restricted the temple's annual observance accordingly. The building remains a major community shrine, and both of those facts are part of the same account.

Dhundhar & Shekhawati की छोटी-छोटी स्थानीय बातें — रीति-रिवाज़, अनोखी आदतें और वे चीज़ें जो किसी गाइडबुक में नहीं मिलतीं। (14)