Place · unfinished hilltop palace · India
Sajjangarh Monsoon Palace, Udaipur
Also known as Monsoon Palace, Sajjangarh Monsoon Palace, Udaipur
Sajjangarh on Bansdara hill above Udaipur, begun in 1884 by Maharana Sajjan Singh, who intended a nine-storey astronomical observatory from which to watch the monsoon clouds gather over the lakes. He died at twenty-five and it was left unfinished; what stands is a shell with the best view in Mewar.
- Date
- 1884
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 24.594, 73.640
Worth knowing
The building has a rainwater-harvesting system cut into the hill to supply it, because there is no water at that height. The wildlife sanctuary that now surrounds it was the Mewar family's hunting preserve, and the palace was used as a shooting lodge rather than as the observatory it was designed to be.
Connections (2)
- AnalogueTaragarh & the Garh Palace, Bundi
Bundi's Chitrashala and Udaipur's Sajjangarh are the two ends of Rajput palace-building: a painted chamber programme finished to the last inch in a valley town, and an ambitious hilltop pavilion abandoned when its twenty-five-year-old patron died. Both were built after fortification stopped mattering, and what replaced it was painting in one case and a view in the other.
- Site withinUdaipur
Sajjangarh Monsoon Palace, Udaipur sits inside Udaipur 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, “Monsoon Palace”. Rajasthan State Gazetteer, Udaipur district; Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation records.
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