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Kipling's Bundi |
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Hotel Haveli Braj Bhushanjee invites you to explore the rich heritage and
culture of BUNDI . Your every moment will be caught and held in its
history. Bundi is a dream remembered. Nestling at the footsteps of a
large craggy hill, Bundi, named after Bunda Meena ,was established by
Rao Deva in 1241 A.D. The large dominating complex of fort and palaces,
hugging the steep hillside, is mainly made of two- Garh-Palace and
Taragarh-Fort.
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The vast and confusing
creamy stone and stucco buildings climb up the burnt rocky hillside_ "an
avalanche of masonry ready to rush down and block the gorge " as Kipling
wrote-a stern substructure began in the 13th century and then flowering
into series of palaces, with a fretted skyline of cupola, loggias and
canopies. The grim battlemented walls march out to encircle not only the
town but the surrounding hills, and end at the impregnable Taragarh fort
on the top which provided a final refuge. |
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Highway road from Kota, Ajmer, Jaipur and Udaipur no longer runs
through the crowded center of the town. Instead it gives you a
series of spectacular panoramas around, then across the town up to
the fortress, and finally the classic view of the fortress-palace
rising above its lake. The view over the town makes a remarkable
cubist picture, with intense blue-whites and gray-whites small houses
broken only by sad-colored stucco of mysterious larger structures. |
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There are no intrusive
modern buildings, so nothing competes with the great palace complex on
the hillside which watches over the town.
James Tod wrote about Bundi in his celebrated Annals and Antiquities of
Rajasthan (1829) "The coup d'oeil of the castellated palace of Bundi, from
which ever side you approach it, is perhaps the most striking in
India". Bundi is, in a sense, a palace - town and as befits a center
famous for its paintings in 17th and 18th centuries, the town still gives
the feeling of having been the seat of a court.
It is sufficient not to
mention more about this town except to quote what James Tod has
written(1920) : "It is an aggregate of palaces, each having the name of
its founder; and yet the whole so well harmonises; and the character
of the architecture is so uniform, that its breaks or fantasies appear
only to rise from the peculiarity of the position, and serve to diversify
its beauty..... Whoever has seen the palace of Bundi, can easily picture
to himself the hanging gardens of Semiramis."
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