A Road Less Travelled

Overshadowed by its more popular cousin Jaipur, the blue town of Bundi in Rajasthan is finally getting its share of limelight.

- Kalpana Sunder

THE KING resplendent in a saffron Mughal robe and a turban, sits on a horse, holding a flower in his right hand, and controlling the reins of his horse with the left. The scabbard and sword are all too realistic, transporting me to an ancient battlefield. Lord Krishna plays his flute, gamboling with gopikas. Gleaming panels of tikri—the Indian word for mosaic work, where using scalpels, hand-cut pieces of mirrors are inlayed into frescos—adorn the ceiling and the walls. Even the floors narrate the story of crusading elephants in tempered red, black, and white in an art form called izara.

Rudyard Kipling mentioned in his Letters of Marque published in 1899, “...but the Palace of Bundi, even in broad daylight, is such a palace as men build for themselves in uneasy dreams—the work of goblins rather than of men.”

A medieval fortification snakes across the hillsides, indigo, and white houses spill across the ground, and water reservoirs glisten in the setting sun. We drove through lush green poppy, striped groundnut, emerald paddy, and golden cornfields; guava and pomegranate orchards, with flocks of swallows soaring overhead in perfect symmetry. We crossed sandstone mines stacked endlessly with rock slabs and forests of Khejri trees. In the battlement shades, where soldiers once stood, hundreds of langurs nurse their young ones, eyeing us curiously, as we strode past in the afternoon sun.