Place · Indo-Saracenic palace · India
Ujjayanta Palace, Agartala
The 1901 Indo-Saracenic palace of the Tripura Manikya dynasty at Agartala, built by Maharaja Radha Kishore Manikya (ruled 1897-1909) in Jaipur-and-Mughal pastiche style with Chinese tile roofs. The Ujjayanta Palace is the easternmost major Indo-Saracenic royal palace in India and the finest surviving monument of the Manikya dynasty (1280-1949). The Tripura court under Radha Kishore and his successor Birendra Kishore (1909-23) extensively patronised Rabindranath Tagore — Tagore made seven visits between 1899 and 1926, dedicated his novel Rajarshi (1887) and the play Visarjan to the Tripura kings, and received the court's financial support when Visva-Bharati at Shantiniketan was under strain. The palace became the Tripura state secretariat in 1949 and the Tripura State Museum in 2013.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.840, 91.280
Connections (2)
- PatronageSantiniketan
The Tripura court under Bir Chandra Manikya recognised Tagore's work when he was still in his twenties and supported him for decades, including funding Śāntiniketan. A small princely state in the north-east was an early and durable patron of the poet who later declined a knighthood from the empire. Tagore visited Tripura seven times and dedicated work to its rulers; the Ujjayanta Palace he stayed in is now the state museum.
- Patronage networkKharchi Puja
Kharchi shows what the Manikya kings did with the religion of the people they ruled. The fourteen deities of the Tripuri are worshipped by a Chantai priest of the indigenous line, not a Brahmin — but their temple at Old Agartala was built by a Manikya raja in 1770, and the dynasty that commissioned it also commissioned the Rājmālā, a Sanskritised chronicle tracing itself to the Mahābhārata. The palace at Agartala is the later, more European face of the same arrangement.
Sources
History of India — Wikipedia
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