Jodhpur - Day 8

In the morning, it was time for some local site seeing. I headed for the Jaswant Thada which is a memorial in memory of Maharja Jaswant Singh II. It's made out of marble, and here is a link with more info:

Link to Jaswant Thada

The pic below is the memorial for the wife.

 

This pic is different memorials for other relatives and generations. The more affluent the person the bigger the memorial. What is interesting is that there are still relatives that exist, and when they die, the body is burned in a sacred location on the grounds. Apparently there are no relatives today that are worthy of even on of the smaller memorial stones, but being consumed by fire to ashes in this sacred place is still an honor.

 

Of course the main memorial is much bigger than the others.

 

As you can see, the main memorial is made all out of marble with intricate hand crafting all around. Because marble is semi-translucent, the sun filters through the stone into the inside burial area. Even today people still come to pay respects in hopes for good fortune.

 

The next site was a visit to Mehrangarh fort. It's one of the largest forts in India, and it's 400 feet above the city. This link goes into a lot of detail on the history of the fort and what is inside.

Link to Fort Mehrangarh

 

Notice the blue houses in the pics below. These are Brahman houses. I was also told that painting a house blue made it cooler in side. I guess Brahman's are the privileged few who can afford visual air conditioning.

 

There were a lot of rooms, and the link will help explain them. Here is a pic of one of them to give you an idea.

 

After the fort tour, I headed to a garden temple where the wives of the Maharja would go when it was hot. There were canals for water around the garden and many shade trees for keeping cool. Again, a lot of intricate carvings were on all the structures.

 

After the temple, I stopped by a few shops and came across a major exporter of fabrics which are created by local tribes and villages. Here is a sample of the work which is all done by hand. This export office was one of the largest I've seen. It was eight stories high, and it was full of stuff going out to different places around the world.

I promised the owner to give him a plug on my site. So, as promised.

Maharani Art Exporters is the name of export house, and the e-mail contact is maharanitextile@sify.com. If you are in Jodhpur and you want to buy something to take back to friends or for yourself, this is the place to go. Forget all the other export shops locally or in other cities, as the best deals are here because of the huge volume. I spent a few hours there just looking at things, and I never bought anything. So, window shopping is fine.

At this point, I called it a day, and I headed back to my hotel. In the morning, I stopped by the palace of the Maharaja which had been converted into a luxury hotel.

 

I was told that this palace was built before the Taj Mahal, and it inspired the architects of the Taj. So, the locals call this the mini-Taj. Right now, I'm still a number of days away from visiting the Taj Mahal. So, if this is a miniature version, the Taj must be enormous.

My destination this morning is to get to Mt. Abu where there is one of the best Jain Temples in India.