The price and the payoff
The Kachwahas had held Amber since the 12th century, but the turning point came in 1562, when Raja Bharmal gave his daughter in marriage to the young emperor Akbar — the first major Rajput house to do it. His grandson Man Singh I became the greatest of Akbar’s generals, commanding imperial armies from Kabul to Bengal and fighting fellow Rajputs at Haldighati — on the Mughal side, against Maharana Pratap of Mewar, whose story you heard in Udaipur. The arrangement scandalised the prouder houses and made Amber immensely rich. Man Singh began the present palace in 1592; Jai Singh I added its most refined parts in the 17th century. The result deliberately mixes the two worlds it straddled — Rajput plan and Mughal ornament, Hindu iconography under Persian-style mirrorwork.
By the 1720s the kingdom had outgrown its hill. Jai Singh II — general at thirteen, and a serious astronomer his whole life — laid out a new capital on the plain in 1727, on a nine-square grid drawn from Hindu architectural manuals, with streets wide enough for processions and separate quarters assigned to each trade. Jaipur was arguably the first planned city of early modern India, and it worked: it drained the old capital within a generation. The pink came later — the old city was painted terracotta-pink for the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1876, and the colour has been mandatory inside the walls ever since.
Amber: what you walk through
The palace rises in four courtyards. You enter at Jaleb Chowk, the soldiers’ court, and climb to the Diwan-i-Aam, the many-pillared public audience hall. The centrepiece is the gate beyond it: Ganesh Pol, painted floor to parapet in florals and gods, the private apartments’ front door. Behind it lies the Sheesh Mahal, the mirror hall — walls and ceiling set with thousands of convex mirror pieces, built so that a single candle, reflected, would light the room like a night sky; guides will demonstrate with a phone torch. Facing it across the garden court is Sukh Niwas, the pleasure hall, with an ingenious piece of engineering: water channelled down a carved marble chute and through the room, cooling it by evaporation — desert air conditioning, 17th century. The fourth courtyard is the oldest, the zenana, where Man Singh’s twelve wives had twelve identical apartments joined by concealed corridors, arranged so the raja could visit any of them unobserved by the others.
From the ramparts you look down on Maota Lake and the Kesar Kyari — a formal garden laid out in the lake itself, once planted with saffron — and up to Jaigarh, the plainer military fort on the ridge above, connected to Amber by fortified passages and holding the Jaivana, one of the largest wheeled cannon ever cast. Go at opening time (8:00): the fort fills with tour buses by mid-morning, and the light on the lake side is best early. The climb from the road takes ten to fifteen minutes on foot; jeeps run the same route. Elephant rides up the ramp are still offered — animal-welfare groups have documented persistent problems with them, and they are easy to skip. Two to three hours covers the palace properly.
Six hundred metres away: Panna Meena ka Kund
Downhill from the fort’s gate, in the lanes of Amer village, is a square stone tank with staircases running up all four of its walls in criss-crossing zigzags, each flight mirroring the one beside it. It is a sixteenth-century kund — a stepwell, built so that the village could reach the water whatever the level, and could climb back out on a different stair from the one it came down. The geometry is the whole point: from the rim it reads as an Escher drawing that happens to be four hundred years old, with small octagonal pavilions at the corners for shade.
It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it is the shortest detour of the trip — but you now have to look rather than climb, since walking on the steps was stopped to protect them and the people on them. If you saw Agrasen ki Baoli in Delhi on day 4, this is the same idea in its village form: the same problem of a dry country, solved as architecture rather than plumbing.
The Pink City: three buildings
Day 9’s city circuit centres on three sites within walking distance of each other. The City Palace, still partly occupied by the former royal family, is a sequence of courtyards and museums — textiles, armoury, two silver urns of Ganges water (the largest silver objects in the world, made so Madho Singh II could take holy water to London in 1902) — pleasant rather than unmissable. Jantar Mantar next door is the one to take slowly: Jai Singh II’s observatory of 1734, a garden of enormous masonry instruments including the Samrat Yantra, a 27-metre sundial accurate to about two seconds. The instruments still work, and a guide who can demonstrate them earns the fee — without explanation it reads as abstract sculpture. It is a UNESCO site, the best preserved of the five observatories Jai Singh built.
The Hawa Mahal, the honeycomb facade on the bazaar street, is a five-storey screen of 953 small windows built in 1799 so that the women of the court could watch street processions unseen. It is essentially one room deep; see it from the street (the café terraces opposite have the classic view), and only go inside if time is loose. Your evening in Jaipur is Dhanteras, the first night of Diwali week — the bazaars around Johari and Bapu Bazar are decorated and lit city-wide, and Jaipur’s Diwali illuminations are reckoned the best in India. That, as much as any monument, is worth being on the street for after dark.