Jaipur and the Vastu Purusha Mandala

	Jaipur and the Vastu Purusha Mandala
Home \| Rajasthan \| Ajmer \| Taragarh \| Bikamer \| Jaipur \| Udaipur \| Jaisalmer \| Jodhpur \| Mount Abu \| Pushkar

The Pink City's overall design follows some of the strictest principles of town planning ever devised.

Meticulously laid out in accordance with rules set down in ancient texts, the grid plan actually forms a giant magical diagram, or mandala, designed to infuse daily human life with the overarching harmony of the cosmos.

No one knows for sure from where the tenets of the old architectural texts, or Vastu Shastras originally derive, but they're thought to have provided the blueprints for the now lost cities of the Vedic age, three thousand years ago. Since this time, Hindu buildings, from humble hermitages to giant temple towns like Madurai, have traditionally followed the proportions and lines of mandalas.

At one level, these sacred diagrams represent the laws governing the universe; at another, they are abstract depictions of the Hindu creator god, Brahma, in the form of the primeval being, Parusha.

Simply put, the architects and town planners saw a parallel between their work and the creation of the earth and of existence by Brahma.

In the Vastu Shastras , it is written that towns should conform to one of 32 possible mandala patterns. These basic outlines can then be divided and subdivided into smaller sectors, or padas , in sacred sequences of 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64 and 81, each corresponding to a different part of Brahma's body.

Under the guidance of his chief architect, the Bengali brahmin Vidyadhar Chakravati, Maharaja Jai Singh decided Jaipur would be in the form of the Vastu Purusha mandala, whose form bears an external resemblance to the Indian horoscope, with twelve squares for the different signs of the Zodiac.

Being a capital city of a temporal ruler, this grid had to be rectangular, not square (as with sacred precincts), while the padas (known in Rajasthani as chowka , or squares) were assigned to specific castes and sub-castes.

This explains why, to this day, the bazaars and residential districts of the Pink City remain strictly divided according to caste and occupation, with brahmins in the north, kshatryas (Rajputs) in the east, vaishyas in the south and shudras in the west, and different sectors or streets for cloth merchants, dyers, weavers, silversmiths, shoemakers and so on.

Streets were built to prescribed widths, and houses to regulation heights. Notable exceptions were the lofty maharaja's palace, which occupies the most central position in the pada most closely associated with Brahma, the Brahma-sthana .

Although a lot of painstaking planning clearly preceded the construction of Jaipur, no blueprints have survived. Chakravati's explanatory notes disappeared when the same philistine descendant of Jai Singh who ditched the grid plan sold off chunks of the maharaja's legendary library to be used as wrapping paper.