| Q: You spent several of your formative years in India living with a Rajput family, and returned in later years to study and do research. What are some of the ways in which you have witnessed change in India over the years? |
| A: It is a cliché to say that the rate of change in India in the last decade and a half has been staggering. But, for those who travel regularly to India, the reality behind that cliché is powerful. The built environment in urban centers has been reshaped multiple times in that brief period. It is hard not to feel nostalgic for what has passed, but the traveler to India still sees the past everywhere. One can sense Indians living in the speedy change of the present even as they also live with a connection to the past through their families, native places, locations of worship, and historical memory. This is a contradiction, and anyone thinking of visiting India should be prepared for the welter of contradictions that will confront them.
You mention the Rajput family that I grew up with as a youth in India—their ancestors became key ministers in the Jaipur court. But, those ancestors arrived in the cosmopolitan thriving metropolis of Jaipur from the provinces. They came, three brothers, in classic storybook fashion, to make their fortune in the big city. I have observed the continuity and change of Jaipur and the entire country through their eyes as well as mine. They have preserved their aristocratic patrimony and lifestyle, even as they have adapted to the end of princely India. They now use their property as a springboard for businesses that allow them to reproduce their traditions in family, food, sport, and leisure. |
| Q: Can you explain the use of a mandala (a symbolic pattern) as the basis for the planned city of Jaipur. |
| A: Jaipur was a precocious entry among the planned cities of world history. Almost a century and a half before Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, Maharaja Jai Singh imagined an urban organization with wide boulevards and public spaces. Jai Sing and his famed town-planner, the Bengali Brahman Vidhyadhar, relied on principles of the classic text the Vastu Shastra to structure their designs. In Hindu kingdoms, political power was often imagined to be organized as a mandala. In Jaipur, the sovereign and the presiding deity (Govind Dev, an avatar of the god Vishnu) were located at the epicenter of the urban mandala. Gates, squares, and neighborhoods were allocated around the mandala. Walking through this mandala, the architectural historian Giles Tillotson explains, “the pavements of Jaipur seem to say to your feet that things are as they are, not because men—or even Maharajas—have so decreed but because we all participate in an order that is nothing short of cosmic.” |
| Q: How did the Hawa Mahal (Palace of the Winds) in Jaipur earn its name? |
| A: Jaipur’s magnificent Hawa Mahal got its name due to its unique design. Its fine scalloped lattice work is a mix of Mughal and Rajput designs, and it now stands as the icon for the Pink City. In Hindi, hawa means wind; mahal means palace. Ladies of the court who were in purdah—requiring them to hide their faces from all men but their husbands—used to sit behind the lattice and watch the city drama below. |
| Q: Varanasi is a city of great antiquity, steeped in myth and legend, brimming with temples and ghats, and sacred to both Hindus and Buddhists. Can you help our travelers grasp the depth and breadth of this complex and holy city? |
| A: Varanasi is both open and inscrutable—another Indian contradiction. Sacred geography is a fundamental part of Hindu religious consciousness. Most points of sacred geography are topographical features. Varanasi is special because it is so important to Hindu pilgrims even though it is a city. As Mark Twain wrote of Varansi, "Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together." Its importance is linked to its location on the Ganges River and its situation in the breadbasket of India (the state of Uttar Pradesh). It has many names: Benares, Kashi, Varanasi. Most important are the city’s terraced stone river-side ghats where Hindus from all over the country and the world come to bathe. The Hindu cremation ritual is also undertaken there as floating funeral pyres are launched from the ghats. But urban and political decay in the 1980s, accompanied by accumulating river pollution has plagued the city in the 1990s. Growing wealth and environmental consciousness have mitigated this somewhat in recent years. A holy city, a university town, and a thriving metropolis in India’s heartland, Varanasi captures much of India’s past and present in one location. |
| Q: Our travelers will visit the World Heritage Site at Fatehpur Sikri, an extensive (two mile long by one mile wide) complex considered by many to have been the pinnacle of Mughal architecture. How do you account for the richness of architectural expression here and in the Taj Mahal, as well as throughout the temple cities that we will be visiting on this visually stunning tour? |
| A: Fatehpur Sikri must be seen to be believed. The Mughal Emperor Akbar imagined Fatehpur as an emblem of the way in which he hoped to organize political power and cultural expression in his empire. The Mughals had been itinerant raiders from the West Asian steppe and Persia. Their aesthetic was, consequently, a synthesis of the places they had been. When they settled in India in the 16th century under Akbar’s grandfather Babur, they began assimilating local design elements with their Persian and West Asian sensibilities. Delicacy and power are the themes that impress the viewer both at Fatehpur and at the Taj Mahal. These themes are reflected in the political and social culture that produced the famous Mughal miniature painting and that put in place a system of political administration which persists in atavistic forms to this day throughout the Indian subcontinent. Salman Rushdie has made Fatehpur the setting for half of his recent novel The Enchantress of Florence, and one can understand why.
What starts out at Fatehpur in the 17th century reaches an apogee in the Indo-Scercenic style of architecture and ornamentation seen in the Jaipur City Palace. When Mughal syncretism met the Hindu syncretism that pervaded pre-Mughal Indian architecture and design, a new form was born. The traveler in North India will encounter these three design forms (Mughal, Hindu, and their synthesis) everywhere. In North Indian architecture, sculpture and ornamental design frequently incorporate arches, domed cupolas, scalloping, undulating shapes (both geometric and in the human and animal forms), visually rhetorical repetition, color, exuberance, and subtlety in ways that will constantly surprise and delight the viewer. |
