Journey

The Thar — the desert and its towns

Stops (17)

1. Lodurva · Bhati capital to the 12th century

   Lodurva on the dry bed of the Kak, the Bhati seat before Jaisalmer, sacked by Mahmud of Ghazni and again later, after which Rawal Jaisal moved to the defensible ridge. What remains is a Jain temple group rebuilt in the seventeenth century around a carved stone kalpavriksha, and the Moomal and Mahendra ballad of the Thar is set here.

2. Jaisalmer Fort · the living fort

   Jaisalmer, a fort of yellow sandstone on a ridge above the desert, built by Rawal Jaisal in 1156 and still densely inhabited — one of very few living forts anywhere. It stood on the caravan route between the Indus and Delhi, and the Bhati revenue came from taxing what passed through. Piped water introduced in the 1990s has been destabilising the bastions since.

3. Kiradu temples · 11th–12th century

   Kiradu's five surviving temples in the scrub west of Barmer, with carving as fine as anything in Gujarat, and no settlement around them at all. A folk story explains the emptiness with a curse; the causes were thirteenth-century raids and a falling water table. Desert temple architecture is as good as the plains' and has almost no audience.

4. Osian temples · 8th–11th century

   The Osian temple group north of Jodhpur, some fifteen Pratihara-period temples including the Sachiya Mata and a Mahavira that is still a working Jain tirtha. It is the largest early medieval temple cluster in the Marwar desert, and it stood on the same caravan road that later made Jaisalmer and Bikaner rich.

5. Kolayat · the desert tirtha

   Kolayat, a walled tank in the open desert west of Bikaner, held to be where the sage Kapila, to whom the Samkhya is attributed, performed his austerities. The Kartik Purnima fair brings one of Rajasthan's largest camel markets, and a philosophical lineage being seated in the Thar rather than in a Gangetic school town is instructive in itself.

6. Junagarh Fort, Bikaner · never taken by siege

   Junagarh at Bikaner, built between 1589 and 1594 by Rai Singh on flat ground rather than a hill, with a moat and a double wall, and never taken in four centuries. The interest is inside: lacquer, gold leaf, Chinese tiles and Venetian glass accumulated over three hundred years out of the caravan trade between Gujarat, Sindh and the Punjab.

7. Karni Mata, Deshnoke · the rats

   Karni Mata at Deshnoke, where several thousand rats live in the sanctum, are fed, and are protected absolutely — food they have touched is distributed as prasad. It is the most literal expression anywhere of a prohibition on harming animals being enforced as an institution, in a temple the Bikaner rulers held as their tutelary shrine.

8. Khejarli · 1730

   Khejarli, where three hundred and sixty-three Bishnoi are said to have been killed protecting khejri trees from the Maharaja of Jodhpur's woodcutters, Amrita Devi and her daughters dying first. Abhai Singh stopped the felling and granted the villages protection, and the Chipko movement of the 1970s cited the episode directly.

9. Khichan · from the 1970s

   Khichan, where some twenty thousand demoiselle cranes winter each year, fed by the villagers on grain from a walled feeding ground the community pays for. It began with one couple scattering grain for a few dozen birds. The birds cross the Himalaya to get there, which is the highest migration of any bird.

10. Ramdevra · the shared shrine

    Ramdevra, the samadhi of Ramdev Pir, a fifteenth-century Tanwar Rajput venerated by Hindus and as Ramshah Pir by Muslims, and above all by Dalit and Meghwal communities across Rajasthan, Sindh and Gujarat. He refused caste distinction at his own table, and the Bhadrapada fair brings well over a million people on foot across the desert.

11. Tanot Mata, Jaisalmer · the border shrine

    Tanot Mata, a few kilometres from the Pakistan border in the far Thar, which the Border Security Force has administered since 1965 — the troops maintain the worship, and the temple displays shells said to have fallen around it without exploding. A goddess shrine run by a paramilitary force is what a religious site becomes when a frontier is drawn past it.

12. Pokhran · 1974 and 1998

    The Pokhran range, where India tested a single device in May 1974 and five in May 1998. The desert here is empty enough and the granite deep enough, and the fort town two dozen kilometres away learned of both from the radio. Ramdevra, one of the largest pilgrimages in western India, is twelve kilometres away.

13. Mānganiyār & Lāngā · the hereditary musicians

    The Manganiyar and Langa of Marwar and Jaisalmer, hereditary musician communities attached to patron households by obligation rather than by wages, Muslim by faith and singing Hindu devotional and genealogical repertoire for Rajput and Bishnoi patrons. The kamaicha and the algoza belong to them, and the patronage that fed them has largely gone.

14. Pattu weaving of Jaisalmer and Barmer · the pit looms

    The pattu weaving of the Meghwal and Muslim weavers of the western Thar, sheep and camel wool worked into blankets and shawls with extra-weft bands in madder, indigo and black — made for a desert winter and a dowry rather than a market. The named patterns signal district and community, and a malani pattu can be read by anyone from the region.

15. Shekhawati painted havelis · the painted houses

    Several thousand painted merchant houses across the Shekhawati towns, the largest concentration of painted architecture in the world, with subjects running from Krishna to steam trains, motor cars and Queen Victoria — because the Marwari families paying for them were trading in Bombay and Calcutta and sent back what they saw. Most stand empty and the paint is going.

16. Gori Temple, Nagarparkar · 1375–76

    The desert does not stop at the border, and this is what is on the other side of it. Gori Parshvanāth is a Shvetāmbara Jain temple in Tharparkar, its inscription dated 1375–76, fifty-two subsidiary cells around the main shrine and painted figural cycles on the dome and corridor vaults. Those frescoes are among the oldest surviving Jain wall paintings anywhere, since fourteenth-century Jain painting is otherwise known almost entirely from manuscripts. The community that kept it had mostly left by 1947, which is why the paint is still there.

17. Karoonjhar Mountains · the only rock in the Thar

    A granite ridge rising about three hundred metres out of the sand at Nagarparkar, and the only outcrop in the Pakistani Thar — which makes it the only part of the desert that holds surface water, shedding monsoon runoff into rock pools instead of losing it to sand. That is why a settled Jain merchant community could build in stone here, and why the Churrio Jabal Durga Mata shrine and the Rana Rajput forts gather round the same hills. A Sindhi saying has it that Karoonjhar rains gold, which in a desert means water.

Sources

• Wikipedia