Royal Rajasthan with Rare Aerial and Archival Photographs

India has much to offer the observers and visitors – from the fabled Taj Mahal to rivers and mountains and religion – but nothing quite matches up with their experience of Rajasthan. Rajasthan, truly, is a place that could only have existed in someone’s imagination – a vast, arid desert across which erupts a spiny ridge of hills – simultaneously remote and desolate. Who then were the people who lavished this wilderness with such forbidding fortresses, built its fairytale palaces, lived (and continue to live) with such honour and respect for the past? Royal Rajasthan, with stunning aerial photographs of Rajasthan and rare archival images from the private collections of princely states, attempts to unravel the majesty and continuity of the traditions established by the kings and princes and which their descendants still hold on to as a pillar of their common culture. The result is a small nook of the world where even as times have changed, the magic of yesteryear exists, not in memory but in its present reality. Jaisalmer was founded in 1156, which makes it more than 852 years old – one of the oldest lived-in forts of the world. When Rawal Jaisalji, its founder, was looking for an auspicious place to build a new fort to withstand intruders, he came across a hermit called Eshaal who directed him to build it in a place Lord Krishna had predicted after the battle of Mahabharata. What helped also was that it was located on the trade route starting from Afghanistan into Sind via Jaisalmer all the way up to China. If the route lay like a Pearl Necklace, Jaisalmer was right at the centre of it. Jaisalmer merged with India in 1949 after the partition of India in 1947. In spite of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, wooing these desert states, they chose to merge with India. At that time Maharawal Giridhar Singhji also requested his Muslim subjects to stay on in Jaisalmer, to which they readily acceded. He also gave all the money in his treasury then – a not inconsiderable Rs. 35 lakh – to the government. Which is why the betrayal by the government of our order, and the subsequent loss of incomes, was a shameful episode in our more recent history.