Place · living desert fort · India

Jaisalmer Fort

Also known as Jain Bhandars, Jaisalmer Jain Bhandars

A fort of yellow sandstone on a ridge above the Thar, built by Rawal Jaisal in 1156 and still densely inhabited by several thousand people — one of very few living forts anywhere. It stood on the caravan route between the Indus and Delhi, and the Bhatti rulers' revenue came from taxing what passed through it.

See Jaisalmer Fort on the map, with its connections →

Dynasties & capitalsTrade, ports & money

Date: 1156 onward
Function: Military & resistance
Confidence: Established / referenced
Location: 26.912, 70.912

Worth knowing

Within the fort the Jain jnana-bhandars preserve one of India's oldest palm-leaf manuscript libraries, including texts that survive nowhere else. Living inside the walls is also the fort's conservation crisis: piped water introduced in the 1990s has been saturating the soft rock beneath the bastions, and several have collapsed.

Connections (8)

Shared site withThanjavur Saraswathi Mahal
The Saraswathi Mahal at Thanjavur and the Jain bhandars at Jaisalmer are the two largest surviving pre-print manuscript collections in India, and they come from opposite institutions — a royal library assembled by Nayaka and Maratha rulers in the Tamil country, and merchant-funded Jain repositories in a desert fort, some of them kept in sealed underground rooms. Between them they preserve a great deal that exists nowhere else.
Shared sacred geographyVallabhī
The Śvetāmbara Jain canon was fixed by council at Vallabhī in the fifth century, and the bhandars at Jaisalmer, Patan and Cambay are where the copies were kept and recopied on a schedule for the next eight hundred years. Jain libraries are the single largest reason early Indian manuscripts survive at all, and they preserve Buddhist and Brahminical texts whose own traditions lost them entirely.
Patronage networkMānganiyār & Lāngā
Jaisalmer and the desert around it are the Mānganiyār country, and the jajmani tie that organises them ran up to the Bhati rulers of the fort as well as down to Rajput and Charan village households. A musician family holds the right to be called and paid at its patrons' births, marriages and deaths, and keeps their genealogies; the patron cannot dismiss them and they cannot serve anybody else. It is a contract in music, inherited on both sides.
Power passed toLodurva
The Bhatis moved their capital from Lodurva to the Jaisalmer ridge in the twelfth century after Lodurva had been sacked twice and its river had dried. It is the cleanest desert example of a capital chosen for rock rather than water: Jaisalmer's fort has been continuously inhabited for eight hundred years, and Lodurva is a Jain temple group on a dry bed.
Site adjacencyKuldhara
Kuldhara sits 25 kilometres west of Jaisalmer Fort, within the broader Jaisalmer princely-state desert geography. The abandoned Paliwal Brahmin village was one of 83 Paliwal settlements across the Jaisalmer-Barmer belt that were allegedly abandoned overnight after conflict with the Jaisalmer state's diwan Salim Singh Mehta. The village sits in the Thar desert in Jaisalmer district and is part of the Jaisalmer fort-and-village tourism circuit.
Site withinSalim Singh ki Haveli, Jaisalmer
Salim Singh ki Haveli sits within the Jaisalmer old city, 300 metres east of the Jaisalmer Fort's First Fort Gate. Along with Patwon ki Haveli and Nathmal ki Haveli, Salim Singh ki Haveli is one of the three iconic havelis that form the Jaisalmer-fort-and-haveli architectural ensemble, each built by prominent 18-19th century Jaisalmer merchants and administrators.
Site withinPatwon ki Haveli, Jaisalmer
The 1805-1860 Patwon ki Haveli cluster sits within the Jaisalmer old city, 500 metres east of the Jaisalmer Fort's First Fort Gate. Built by Guman Chand Patwa and his five sons from their brocade-and-opium trading fortune, the five-haveli cluster forms the largest private architectural complex in historic Jaisalmer, part of the Jaisalmer-fort-and-haveli ensemble.
Site withinNathmal ki Haveli, Jaisalmer
The 1885 Nathmal ki Haveli sits within the Jaisalmer old city, 400 metres east of the Jaisalmer Fort's First Fort Gate. Built by Diwan Nathmal under Maharawal Bairisal Singh, the haveli's asymmetrical facade carved independently by the two brothers Hathi and Lulu is one of Jaisalmer's architectural signatures, part of the Jaisalmer-fort-and-haveli ensemble alongside Patwon ki Haveli and Salim Singh ki Haveli.

On these journeys

Sources

Wikipedia, “Jaisalmer Fort”. UNESCO World Heritage nomination file for the Hill Forts of Rajasthan (2013); INTACH Jaisalmer conservation reports on the fort's drainage.

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