Place · Rathore fort & city · India
Mehrangarh & Jodhpur
Mehrangarh stands on a sheer rock a hundred and twenty metres above Jodhpur, founded by Rao Jodha in 1459, with seven gates in succession and the Rathore palaces built along the inner face of its walls. It is one of the least altered great forts in India, and Marwar's caravan revenue paid for everything inside it.
- Date
- 1459 onward
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.298, 73.018
Worth knowing
The blue lime-wash of the old town below was originally a Brahmin quarter's marking and is now the whole city's signature; the pigment also deters insects. The Jaswant Thada cenotaph below the fort is cut in marble thin enough to glow when the sun is behind it, and the fort's museum holds the howdahs, palanquins and cradles of the household.
Connections (6)
- Contemporary capital withUdaipur & the City Palace
Rathore Jodhpur and Sisodia Udaipur are the two great Rajput courts of the Mughal period and they took opposite positions: Jodhpur accommodated and supplied generals to the empire, Mewar held out and paid for it in sieges. Mehrangarh is one of the least altered great forts in India; the Udaipur City Palace grew by accretion around a lake after Chittorgarh fell to Akbar in 1568.
- Patronage networkPābūjī kī Phaḍ
Pabuji was a Rathore, of the same clan that ruled from Jodhpur, and the phaḍ tradition belongs to the Marwar countryside that Mehrangarh dominated — sung for Rabari camel-herders and Thori and Nayak patrons rather than at the court itself. The story turns on Pabuji dying to protect a herd of cows he had promised, which is a pastoral morality rather than a dynastic one, told about a member of the ruling house.
- Patronage networkShekhawati painted havelis
The Marwari merchant families who painted the Shekhawati havelis made their money on the caravan routes the Rathore state taxed from Mehrangarh, and then in Bombay and Calcutta once the railways came. The frescoes of trains, cars and gramophones are what the money saw at the other end. Both the fort's revenue and the houses' paint come out of the same desert trade.
- AnalogueGurugrām (Gurgaon)
Gurugram and Jodhpur are the two clearest cases in the repository of a place-name outlasting everything it referred to: a village named for a Mahabharata teacher that is now a corporate district, and a Rathore fort name that is now a colour of paint. Indian toponyms preserve claims about the past long after the settlements that made them have been replaced.
- Site withinUmaid Bhawan Palace, Jodhpur
The 1929-1943 Umaid Bhawan Palace sits within the Jodhpur city, 3 kilometres from the Mehrangarh Fort citadel. Built by Maharaja Umaid Singh as the Marwar royal residence (still the Jodhpur royal family's home with 70 rooms as a Taj Hotels luxury hotel since 1972), the 347-room Indo-deco palace extends Jodhpur's historic royal architecture into the mid-20-century.
- Site withinJaswant Thada, Jodhpur
The 1899 Jaswant Thada sits within Jodhpur, 500 metres east of Mehrangarh Fort. The marble cenotaph complex built by Maharaja Sardar Singh for his father Jaswant Singh II is called the 'Taj Mahal of Marwar' and houses the cenotaphs of successive Marwar Maharajas, extending the Jodhpur Rathore royal necropolis across the modern era.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mehrangarh”. Mehrangarh Museum Trust catalogues; Giles Tillotson, The Rajput Palaces (1987).
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