Place · palace screen facade · India
Hawa Mahal, Jaipur
Also known as Hawa Mahal, Jaipur, Sawai Pratap Singh's honeycomb
A five-storey screen of nine hundred and fifty-three jharokhas built in 1799 by Sawai Pratap Singh on the City Palace's street frontage, so that the women of the zenana could watch processions without being seen. It is one room deep, has ramps instead of stairs, and is a facade rather than a building.
- Date
- 1799
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.924, 75.827
Worth knowing
The lattice was designed so that moving air accelerates through the small openings and cools the rooms behind, which is where the name comes from. Pratap Singh is said to have taken the tapering silhouette from the shape of Krishna's crown, and the whole structure is built without a foundation of its own, resting on the palace wall.
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyCity Palace, Jaipur
The Hawa Mahal is part of the City Palace's zenana wing, built onto the street frontage in 1799 so that the palace women could watch processions without being seen. It is one room deep, has ramps instead of stairs, and is a facade rather than a building — which is the clearest surviving statement of how Rajput court architecture organised who could look at what.
- Site withinJaipur
Hawa Mahal, Jaipur sits inside Jaipur and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Hawa Mahal”. Archaeological Survey of India monument records; Giles Tillotson, Jaipur Nama (2006).
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