Royalty and modernity

One of the chief reasons that I love visiting Jaipur by road is because of the midway point, Behror. Across the road from the motel that is an almost mandatory stop for tea, is a hill. Quite low as hills go, this one looks like a single piece of rock. Steep enough to be the delight of rock climbers, it is surmounted by a fort. As the land around Behror is completely flat as far as I can tell, I continue to be fascinated by the thought process of a person who would build his home atop the only hill in the area, that too, when transporting materials must have been painfully inconvenient, to say the least.

Royal Rajasthan, by Pramod Kapoor and Kishore Singh, with a foreword by Maharawal Brijraj Singh of Jaisalmer and with rare aerial and archival photographs, goes a long way of making sense of that fort in Behror. Publisher Pramod Kapoor's collection of archival photographs of Rajasthan's royalty has most obviously not been exhausted by this book. The introduction on the back sleeve says as much. It is even more obvious that author Kishore Singh has enough material up his sleeve to write a definitive book on the subject, which is confirmed on the back sleeve. Here's hoping that their next collaboration is for a lavishly illustrated volume that takes us for a behind-the-scenes dekko at royal family lives and details of everyday living.

As it stands, Royal Rajasthan is a fabulous gift to present a foreigner who visits India. Rajasthan is the most photographed and written-about state in modern India and it is tough indeed to manage the feat of eschewing cliches, both in pictures as well as in text. This book carries it off with aplomb. Many of the pictures are indeed archival and of those that are not, most are of royalty. The rest are made up of never-seen-before images that have obviously been taken from a small aircraft, because aerial shots of Chittorgarh, the little town at Pushkar with the lake at its centre, the camel fair at Pushkar and the town of Shekhavati and simply of a flock of sheep as they move through a sandy desert "" are some of the best images in the book. Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, affiliated to Corbis, the photo agency, has taken all the aerial photographs: his travels around the state would have made a welcome sub-text but we are not told anything about him at all, or how he managed a trip or trips around Rajasthan in an aircraft, taking photographs as he went along.

However, it is the text that is remarkable. Singh, himself a Rajput, possibly from the very class that he writes about so evocatively, has the unique ability to distance himself from the subject of the text, notwithstanding that he is part of the subject. Thus, in the very first chapter, he outlines the daily routines of a few of the maharajas. In a few sentences, he establishes the fact that all of them are still thought of as rulers even while their kingdoms have leap-frogged into the modern age. They all run schools in their state, look after their heritage hotels, interact with Hollywood actors and actresses and dash to Delhi to watch polo matches and book launches. A few pages into the book, it is apparent that Singh knows far more than he has written about. The extraordinary thing is that the text flows smoothly, without any of the irritating jerks that mar writings by specialists who know far more than they have been commissioned to write.

Admirably, he has not given in to the common failing of assuming that the Rajputs are an anachronism in modern India, who have nothing but their forts and their memories to keep them occupied. Indeed, he even suggests that the abolition of the privy purses turned out to be for the good of the community "" something that no other writer, Indian or otherwise, has ever expressed.

The introduction to Kishore Singh says that he is constantly threatening to write the definite book on Rajasthan's royals. Dare we hope that the day will be sooner rather than later?

ROYAL RAJASTHAN

Pramod Kapoor and Kishore Singh
Roli Books
192 pages; Rs 2,975