Udaipur City Palace

	Udaipur City Palace
Home \| Rajasthan \| Ajmer \| Taragarh \| Bikamer \| Jaipur \| Udaipur \| Jaisalmer \| Jodhpur \| Mount Abu \| Pushkar

Udaipur's fascinating City Palace stands molded in soft yellow stone on a rocky promontory on the northwest shore of Lake Pichola, its thick windowless base crowned with ornate turrets and canopies. Eleven constituent mahals (palaces), constructed by successive maharanas during the three hundred years that followed the foundation of Udaipur in 1559, and characterized throughout by their exemplary workmanship, together form the largest royal complex in Rajasthan.

Part of the palace is now a museum (daily 9.30am-4.30pm; Rs100, Rs100 extra for camera, Rs300 extra for video), entered through Toran Pole from the massive courtyard where elephants once lined up for inspection before battle. Although guided tours (Rs70 for a non-Indian language) are not compulsory, they do serve to illuminate the chronology of the palaces, the significance of the paintings, and details of the lives of the maharanas.

Everywhere you look the marble and granite walls are laden with brilliant miniature paintings, decorated with tiles or overlaid with spangling mosaics of coloured glass and mirrors, and each room glows with sunlight filtering through stained-glass windows. Narrow low-roofed passages connect the different mahals and courtyards, creating a haphazard effect, designed to prevent surprise intrusion by armed enemies.

Each of the three large peacocks (mor) set into the walls of the seventeenth-century Mor Chowk, placed there by Sajjan Singh two hundred years after the palace was built, is composed of 5000 pieces of glass, glittering in green, gold and blue. The pillared apartments that face Mor Chowk are adorned with scenes from Krishna legends, a favourite theme of the paintings in the Zenana Mahal, the women's quarters.

With alcoves, balconies, coloured windows, tiled walls and floors, these are the most splendid rooms in the palace. Other chambers include Kanchi-ki-Burj , decorated throughout with a mosaic of mirrors, and Chandra Chowk (Moon Square) which although right at the top of the palace manages to enclose its own garden - it rests on the crest of a hill that rises in the heart of the palace. Krishna Vilas , an apartment full of miniatures, honours a nineteenth-century Udaipur princess who poisoned herself to avoid the dilemma of choosing a husband from the two rival households of Jodhpur and Jaipur.

Adjoining the palace, the dusty Government Museum (daily except Fri 10am-5pm; Rs2) displays clothes, unlabelled relics and a stuffed and decaying two-headed deer. It's worth passing through to the last room to see a good selection of temple statues, dating back to the eighth century, but otherwise the museum does not merit a detour.