Dhundhar & Shekhawati · Arid Northwest

People

Name	Years	Field	Known for
Man Singh I	1550–1614	Ruler and general	Ruler of Amber and one of Akbar's senior commanders, who built the Amber palace and led the Mughal force at Haldighati against Maharana Pratap in 1576. His career is the alliance strategy that this region took and Mewar rejected, and both regions' architecture reflects which choice was made.
Sawai Jai Singh II	1688–1743	Ruler, astronomer and planner	Founded Jaipur in 1727, built five masonry observatories across north India, and had a set of astronomical tables compiled and presented to the Mughal emperor. He tested imported European tables against his own instruments and found them wanting, which is why the instruments are the size they are.
Vidyadhar Bhattacharya	—	Planning and architecture	The Bengali-origin official who laid out Jaipur's grid, working from the shilpa shastra proportions and the site's constraints together. The two displaced wards on the north side are his solution to a hill that would not move, and the plan is why the city was inscribed as World Heritage.
Sawai Ram Singh II	1835–1880	Ruler and photographer	Had the city painted pink in 1876 for the Prince of Wales's visit, founded the Maharaja's School of Arts, and was a serious photographer whose glass-plate negatives — including portraits made inside the zenana, which no outsider could have taken — survive in the City Palace collection.
Sawai Madho Singh II	1861–1922	Ruler	Travelled to England in 1902 with two silver urns of Ganga water made for the voyage. They are each cast from thousands of melted silver coins and are recognised as the largest silver vessels in the world; they stand in the City Palace.
Kripal Singh Shekhawat	1922–2008	Ceramics and painting	The painter at the centre of the revival of Jaipur blue pottery from the 1960s, who brought a miniature painter's drawing to a body that had been reduced to a few repeating motifs, and trained the generation of workshops now working in the city.
Ghanshyam Das Birla	1894–1983	Business and public endowment	From Pilani, and the most consequential figure of the Shekhawati merchant migration's second generation. He built the industrial group from Calcutta and put a substantial part of the proceeds into institutions in the town he came from.
Jamnalal Bajaj	1889–1942	Business and the freedom movement	Born at Kashi ka Bas in the Sikar tract and adopted into a merchant family at Wardha, he became treasurer of the Congress and funded much of the movement's working infrastructure. Gandhi described him as a fifth son.
Gayatri Devi	1919–2009	Public life and education	Maharani of Jaipur, who founded a girls' school in the city in 1943 at a time when almost no daughters of the local elite were formally educated, and later won a Lok Sabha seat from Jaipur with one of the largest margins recorded anywhere.
Bhairon Singh Shekhawat	1923–2010	Politics	From a village in the Sikar district; three times Chief Minister of Rajasthan and later Vice-President of India, and the political figure through whom Shekhawati's rural politics reached the national stage.
Kanhaiyalal Sethia	1919–2008	Literature	Poet in Rajasthani and Hindi from Sujangarh in Churu district. "Dharti Dhoran Ri" is the poem most Rajasthanis can quote, and his work is the strongest twentieth-century case for Rajasthani as a literary language rather than a dialect.
Durga Lal	1948–1990	Kathak	A dancer of the Jaipur gharana whose technical clarity in tatkar and layakari made the school's case nationally against the more widely known Lucknow style. He died at forty-two, mid-career.
Devendra Jhajharia	Born 1981	Athletics	From a village in Churu district; javelin thrower and the first Indian to win two Paralympic gold medals, in 2004 and 2016, having lost an arm to an electrical accident as a child.

People from Dhundhar & Shekhawati who shaped its history, arts, science, sport and public life. (13)