When is a Palace not a palace?
After the miracles of our Ayurvedic therapy sessions yesterday, we were up for some sightseeing.
The Monsoon Palace
We started at the Sajjangarh Palace about 5km from Udaipur on the peak of the Aravalli hills at 3,100 ft above sea level and the hills you see in the pictures below are the oldest fold mountains in the world.
The palace was intended to be a multi-storey observatory for watching the monsoon rains but work came to a halt when the 25 year old Maharana who commissioned it died in 1884. The work wasn’t wasted though as the palace featured as the residence of the evil villain, Kamal Khan, in Octopussy.
The Royal Palace, Udaipur
Never was the saying that history belongs to the victor more true than of the Royal Palace in Udaipur.
Back in the day, marriages of political expediency across royal families were as much a feature of Indian royal life as they were of European royalty. Due to a ‘bureacratic mix-up’, at one point the daughter of the Maharaja of Udaipur was offered for marriage to both the prince of Jaipur and the prince of Jodhpur at the same time.
Both princes arrived to claim their bride and both set up camp outside the Royal Palace. The Maharaja obviously couldn’t pick one prince over the other as that would cause offence. Clearly there was only one way out. The princess would have to die.
To be fair to him the Maharaja wasn’t a cruel man and he didn’t have it in him to kill his daughter. So instead he asked her to take her own life, assisted by the ladies of the palace. Twice she took poison and survived. The third time she took morphine with the poison and died.
History records that he was a wise and compassionate man and that his daughter happily sacrificed her own life for the good of the realm.
Dave and Annette in India and Nepal 