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THE BUILDING OF JAIPUR
“The town is built in a style of unusual magnificence….I doubt whether at the time it was built there were many cities in Europe which could compare with it.”
Louis Rousselet, the well-known 19th-century French traveller
“…the good people of America builded their towns after this pattern, but knowing nothing of Jey Singh, they took all the credit themselves.”
Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Marque, 1899
THE LAKE PALACE AT UDAIPUR
“Udaipur….must lie, I think, within a magic circle, for it is a place of utter enchantment….it seemed as if with every step we were being drawn into another world, a world imagined in an oriental fairy tale.”
Roderick Cameron, London 1958
RAJPUT TRAITS
“The Rajpoot worships his horse, his sword and the sun, and attends more to the Martial Song of the Bard than to the Litany of the Brahmin. A pledge once given by the Rajpoot, whether ratified by the ‘eating opium together’, ‘an exchange of turbans’, or the more simple act of ‘giving the right hand’, is maintained inviolable under all circumstances.”
Lieutenant-Colonel James Tod (1782-1835),
Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, 1829, London
THE PALACE OF BUNDI
“It has been written ‘the coup d’oeil of the castellated Palace of Boondi, from whichever side you approach it, is perhaps the most striking in India. Whoever has seen the Palace of Boondi can easily picture to himself the hanging gardens of Semiramis.’ This is true – and more too. To give on paper any adequate idea of the Boondi-ka-Mahal is impossible. Jeypore Palace may be called the Versailles of India; Udaipur’s House of State is dwarfed by the hills round it and the spread of the Pichola lake; Jodhpur’s House of Strife, grey towers on red rock, is the work of giants; but the Palace of Boondi, even in broad day-light, is such a Palace as men build for themselves in uneasy dreams – the work of goblins more than the work of men.”
Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Marque,
Pub. H.M.Caldwell Co., London,1899
PADMINI OF CHITTORGARH
“…..She was the fairest of all flesh on earth, her fame was sung through the land by the poets, and she became, in some sort, the Helen of Chittor.”
Rudyard Kipling on Rani Padmini of Chittorgarh
FOLLOWING THE PATH OF RAJPUT HONOUR
“Was it not always said that, in the hour of birth, the eyes of a boy were set upon a knife and those of a girl upon a lamp – for the man must leave life by the way of the sword and woman by that of fire.”
Sister Nivedita, Studies from an Eastern Home,
Pub. Longmans, Green and Co., London 1913
THE SPLENDOUR OF PEAFOWL
“The gorgeous peacock is the glory of God, said a Sanskrit verse, and in a country of pageantry and colour it is only fitting that the peacock has been officially proclaimed as the national bird of India.”
E.P. Gee, The Wildlife of India, Pub. Collins, London, 1964
DESERT OF RAJASTHAN
“If the North African desert could be likened to a leopard’s hide, spotted with oasis, the Marusthali Desert was more like that of the tiger, of which the long stripes would indicate the expansive belts of sand, elevated upon a plain only slightly less sandy.”
Lieutenant-Colonel James Tod (1782-1835),
Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, 1829, London
MEHRANGARH FORT, JODHPUR
“….he who walks through it loses sense of being among buildings. It is as though he walked through mountain-gorges.”
Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Marque, 1899
CHITTORGARH FORT
“I gazed until the sun’s last beam fell on the ‘ringlet of Chittor’, illuminating its grey and grief-worn aspect, like a lambent gleam lighting up the face of sorrow.”
Lieutenant-Colonel James Tod (1782-1835),
Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, 1829, London
A PIECE OF VENICE
“Take a lake about the size of Orta, with lower hills and of a lighter colour; put the walls of Verona on the lower hills with a fort or two, add islands smaller than those on Lake Maggiore, covered with marble pleasure palaces and domes….Pile up half a dozen French chateaux on the side and end with a piece of Venice.”
Lord Northbrook, the 19th-century British viceroy describing Udaipur city
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