Mewar · Arid Northwest

The small things

A god as head of stateThe rulers of Mewar did not style themselves sovereigns. The sovereign was Eklingji, the Shiva of Kailashpuri, and the Maharana governed as his Diwan — his deputy. The formula appears in charters and land grants, not only in devotional language, which means the state's own paperwork records a deity as the principal and the ruler as an officer.
A Bhil thumb on the ruler's foreheadThe accession rite of the Maharanas involved a Bhil of the Oondri lineage marking the new ruler's forehead with blood drawn from his own thumb. The state emblem shows a Bhil and a Rajput flanking the sun. Neither is ornamental — the dynasty's hill campaigns depended on Bhil manpower and Bhil knowledge of the country.
Three jauhars, stated plainlyChittorgarh fell three times, and the chronicles record a jauhar on each occasion — 1303, 1535 and 1568. The women of the fort burned themselves rather than be captured, and the men then rode out to be killed. These are historical events with dates, and the fort is where they happened; the fourteenth-century one has since accumulated a large legendary apparatus, mostly deriving from Jayasi's Padmavat, written in Awadh in 1540.
The zinc came firstAt Zawar, south of Udaipur, zinc was produced by downward distillation in banks of small clay retorts — thousands of them, discarded in heaps that are still there. The method predates any European description of zinc smelting by centuries. It is the oldest known industrial zinc production anywhere, and it is in a hill valley in Mewar.
Every lake is a damPichola, Udai Sagar, Rajsamand, Jaisamand, Fateh Sagar — all of them embankments across seasonal drainage. Jaisamand's dam was finished in 1691, Rajsamand's begun in 1662 as famine work. Mewar's water is engineered, not found, and the region's political geography follows the engineering: capitals sit downstream of bandhs.
A famine relief project that is also a bookThe embankment at Rajsamand carries the Raj Prashasti, a Sanskrit court history cut across a series of large marble slabs and generally called the longest stone inscription in India. The labour was paid famine relief, and the state took the opportunity to publish itself on the retaining wall.
The temple that is a houseNathdwara's building has no spire and no sanctum in the usual sense. In Pushtimarg practice the deity is a child living in a household, so the structure is a haveli with a kitchen, a dairy, a wardrobe and a daily timetable, and the eight darshans are the hours of his day. The town's shops keep those hours too.
A cloth calendarThe pichwai hung behind Shrinathji is changed by season and festival — thin white for summer heat, quilted and dark for winter, a specific subject for each of the year's set days. That schedule is what created a hereditary painting workshop at Nathdwara, and it is why the same compositions recur for three hundred years. The craft received a Geographical Indication in 2023.
The god goes home with the buyerMolela's potters make hollow relief plaques and sell them at the village. Bhil, Garasia and Gameti buyers from across southern Rajasthan and Gujarat carry them home and install them as the shrine of a whole settlement. The maker's craft is registered and documented; the shrine's location usually is not.
The opium beltChittorgarh, Pratapgarh and Neemuch across the state line form part of the small tract where opium poppy is legally cultivated in India, under individual licence and against a fixed delivery quota. It is one of the few places in the world where a farmer grows opium legally on a smallholding, and it sits alongside an older social custom of taking opium in water at weddings and settlements, now restricted.
Forty days that cost a harvestA Gavri troupe performs for forty consecutive days, ten to fifteen hours a day, walking between villages — through the tail of the monsoon, which is the busiest part of the agricultural year. Performers go barefoot, sleep on the ground and observe a full set of abstentions. A village takes it on once every four or five years, because it can only afford the lost labour that often.
The painters signed their workMewar is unusual among Indian painting schools in that its artists are named and its manuscripts dated — Nasiruddin at Chavand in 1605, Sahibdin through the 1620s to the 1650s, Bagta and Chokha at Devgarh a century later. That is why the school can be argued about with dates attached instead of by connoisseurship alone.

Small local details of Mewar — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)