Spice routes and stonework
Robert Cowan
It is six hours now since we started out from Jodhpur and still the Ambassador is bouncing down this coccyx-cracking desert road with no end (or anything else) in sight. We had been warned. ‘Jaisalmer is one of the remotest cities in India,’ the guidebook had said, ‘but well worth a visit.’ My rear end was warning that nothing could be worth this much agony.
But then, of course, the miracle happened. Something seemed to flash on the distant skyline. ‘There it is,’ shouted the driver with a mixture of elation and sheer bloody relief, and there, indeed, it was: a mountain seemingly moulded from 24-carat burnished gold.
As the Ambassador lurched ever closer, the mirage slowly started to take physical shape. The golden mountain, it gradually became clear, was in fact an immense solitary rock on top of which sat the most fantastical sandcastle ever created. In the late afternoon light every stone burned with a volcanic intensity. And, boy, are there stones here! The curtain wall of this mountain fortress stretches for three miles. Behind it, another pie-crust crinkled wall is protected by 99 bastions. And behind that, rising with neck-snapping steepness, are domes and towers and turrets, all catching and holding the reflections of the setting sun.
Jaisalmer could come straight from a sword-and-sorcery epic: the lair of a rascally bandit king. Which is pretty much what it was in its earliest days. The westernmost city in India, it straddles the old spice route as it crosses the Thar desert into what is now Pakistan. The caravans that started in the deep south of India, laden with pepper and cardamom, sandalwood, turmeric and ginger, would have to pass through here. And if they wanted to carry on in safety to Persia and beyond, they would dutifully pay their ‘taxes’ to the Rawals (princes) of Jaisalmer. Judging by the extent of the fort and the opulence of the havelis, the merchants’ mansions, it was a lucrative business. God knows how any spices ever reached Europe if every warlord en route took his tithe, but then it explains why pepper was once more valuable than gold.
The city was founded on the mountain top in 1156 by the Rawal Jaisal, who started the construction of the fort. He’d probably still recognise it. Once through the massive but rather welcoming walls, the city is a warren of narrow streets that open unexpectedly into little chowks, or squares, from each of which another half-dozen or so passages lead. There are temples, palaces, grand merchants’ houses and hovels side by side. And as this is India, the stroller has to jostle for space with children, donkeys, chickens, cows — camels even — and young men on motorcycles. Tours through the palaces, havelis and museums inevitably end up on the flat roofs, each of which produces yet another stunning view over the city, its fortifications and the desert beyond.
Outside the fortress walls, the rest of the town has a slightly less cramped air. With more space and fewer slopes, the houses are more spacious and squarer, though still tightly packed so as to block out the burning sun.
The rarest commodity of all here is wood, not that you’d notice. In other houses in other cities, where screens, lintels, arches and frames might be made from timber, in Jaisalmer they are made from the most intricately carved and pierced stonework. Not an inch anywhere is left unembellished. Figures, flowers, geometric patterns seethe across every piece of sandstone. The havelis, in particular, are breathtaking works of art: walls, doorways, balconies, cupolas, windows yes, even the windows — are all made from the most delicate fretwork.
If the masons showed a certain elegant restraint when they went to work on the havelis, in the temples they had a riot. The city is renowned as much for the exuberance of its Jain temples as for their number. I’m afraid, though, coward that I am, that I kept more of an eye on the dark stone floors than the fancy arches or the painted and garlanded idols. The Jains, bizarrely, like the idea of having a cobra slithering free in their temple precincts, so daily put out saucers of milk. The sacred snakes might not be inclined to bite the feet that feed them, but could you be sure they’d be so considerate of a shoeless tourist?
Sadly, over all this magnificent stonework hangs a rather large cloud. Most of Jaisalmer’s buildings were put together without mortar: the stone blocks were simply cut to shape and fitted together. But in recent years the rainfall of the area has started to increase (some blame global warming but many in the city say it’s due to the Delhi government’s attempt to ‘green’ the desert by seeding it with plants and shrubs), causing erosion and decay in the joints of the stonework. Given the age of the buildings and the soft nature of the sandstone, this is quite a problem. Water (and worse: there are very few drains or sewers) has also been seeping into the foundations of the buildings and a couple of the outer bastions have collapsed.
Beyond the city, to British eyes, there’s not much evidence of excessive rainfall. Most of the surrounding country is desert and parched scrub, with some occasional but spectacular sand dunes. A short drive away is Bada Bagh, the local Valley of the Kings. This is where the long line of Maharawals have their memorial monuments. As Hindus, on death, their bodies are cremated but then a chhatri, or canopied cenotaph, is erected in this appropriately desolate valley, which is remarkably reminiscent of Luxor apart from the line of wind turbines that loom incongruously on the crests of the nearby hills.
Further out, there are a number — 79 in all — of stone-built villages that were abandoned 200 years ago. The deserted streets have a sinister, Mary Celeste air about them. Cattle wander among the houses, crows peer inquisitively from rooftops, and there’s a distinctly creepy feeling that the original inhabitants might return at any moment. Not that it’s very likely. The villagers — wealthy Brahmin traders and farmers — did a mass overnight flit when the grasping chief minister of the then Maharawal upped their taxes once too often.
These days, the princes are rather more benign. I stayed in the Jawahar Niwas, a former state guesthouse belonging to the Maharawals, just ten minutes from the fortress gates. Its cool and airy rooms have a suitably regal elegance about them, the large pool is a godsend after a day in the desert and, best of all, the Maharani personally supervises the menus.
The remoteness of Jaisalmer has probably been its salvation. With the spice route long since abandoned and the city just too far from the ‘golden triangle’ to attract mass tourism, it retains its ancient character as almost no other — just take a cushion when you set out from Jodhpur.
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