How Mughal service paid for a painted palace
The Hadas were a small clan with a small kingdom. What they had in abundance was courage on the battlefield, and the Mughals paid well for it.
When Rudyard Kipling visited in 1887 he described the palace as more like something seen in an uneasy dream than the work of human beings. It is still that strange: dark stairways, sudden sunlit terraces, painted rooms that open off courtyards you did not know were there.
Up on the ridge: for their first two and a half centuries in the valley, the Hada rulers of Bundi lived in Taragarh Fort.
Everything changed in 1569: Rao Surjan Hada surrendered the great fortress of Ranthambore to Akbar after a long siege and joined the Mughal nobility.
At a glance
- Built
- Mid-eighteenth century; palace from the early 1600s
- Built by
- Rao Raja Umed Singh
- Open
- Hours change; we check on the day
- Allow
- Two to three hours with the palace
- Best time
- As the palace opens; October to March
- Photography
- Without flash, generally welcome
- Getting there
- On foot, up the ramp through the Hathi Pol
- Imperial commanders: Bundi's rulers fought for the emperors in the Deccan, Afghanistan and beyond, and brought back money, titles and a taste for the painting and architecture of the imperial court.
- Down the hill: from the early 1600s the court moved down from the fort. Rao Raja Ratan Singh, who served the emperor Jahangir, is usually credited with beginning the Garh Palace in its present form.
- A hillside village of pavilions: each ruler who followed added rooms, terraces and gateways higher or lower on the slope, so the palace grew piece by piece rather than as one planned building.
- The Chhatra Mahal: named for Rao Chhatrasal, who died fighting for Dara Shikoh at Samugarh in 1658. Others added the women's apartments, gardens and terraces.
- The last great work: Rao Raja Umed Singh came to the throne in the middle of the eighteenth century, when Bundi had been fought over by its neighbours and briefly lost.
- A garden palace: he won his kingdom back, ruled until about 1770, and built the Ummed Mahal around a courtyard whose walls his painters covered with murals.
- The ascetic king: Bundi tradition says that in later life Umed Singh gave up the throne and lived as a wandering ascetic.
- The patrons who followed: painting continued under his successors. Rao Raja Bishan Singh, who signed the treaty with the East India Company in 1818, was a notable patron of the arts.
- Further reading: our Bundi guide and our journal piece on Kipling in Bundi tell the wider story.
Through the Garh Palace, gate by gate
The Garh Palace is best walked uphill, in the order the court would have used it, from the public gate to the private garden at the top.
Facts to know
- Start
- A steep cobbled ramp
- Main gate
- The Hathi Pol
- Public hall
- Ratan Daulat, the Diwan-e-Aam
- Oldest murals
- Badal Mahal, early 17th century
- At the top
- The Chitrashala and its garden
The ramp
Built for elephants: you start at the bottom of a steep, cobbled ramp made for elephants and horses.
- A defensive design: it climbs between high walls and turns sharply, to slow down attackers.
- Take your time: the stones are worn smooth and slippery.
- Changing views: the palace looks different at every turn, first a wall of brackets and balconies, then a glimpse of the blue town, then the elephants of the gate.
The Hathi Pol, the elephant gate
The elephants: two stone elephants with raised trunks stand above the arch of the main gate.
- Why elephants: they were the tanks and the limousines of a Rajput court, symbols of royal power, and every visitor entering the palace passed beneath them.
- Look up: the brackets and the small balconies around the gate were the eyes of the palace, where guards watched who came in.
The hall of public audience
The Ratan Daulat: inside the first courtyard is the Diwan-e-Aam, or hall of public audience, where the ruler heard petitions and received nobles.
- What survives: a marble throne of the Hada rulers, and old torch holders set into the walls.
- Picture it at night: lit by flames, crowded with nobles in turbans, smelling of incense. This was the public face of the kingdom.
The Chhatra Mahal
Its name: Rao Chhatrasal, who ruled in the mid-seventeenth century.
- Elephant brackets: pillars with elephant-shaped brackets, sometimes called the Hathiya Sal, and views over the rooftops of Bundi.
- The stone: hard and greenish, it does not carve into lace the way the sandstone of Jaisalmer does.
- So the style is: bold and sculptural rather than delicate.
The women's palace and the Badal Mahal
The zenana: above and around the Chhatra Mahal lie the apartments where the royal women lived, with painted walls and screened windows.
- The cloud palace: the Badal Mahal holds some of the oldest and finest murals in Bundi, usually dated to the early seventeenth century.
- Its ceiling: petal-shaped panels, peacocks and Krishna.
- Open or closed: parts of the palace, the Badal Mahal among them, open and close for conservation. Our guides check before each visit.
Up to the Chitrashala
Apart at the top: the Chitrashala sits away from the main palace, around its own small garden.
- Sudden light: the approach is quiet, the garden is green, and after the dim rooms below the light feels bright.
- The back gate: from the back of this court a gate opens onto the steep path to Taragarh.
Local tip
On a good day our guides can show you rooms most visitors never see. Go with one who knows the keepers, and ask before you climb.
What the Chitrashala walls show
Our grandmother could not read, but she could read a wall like this one. Every panel tells a story that Rajasthani children once knew by heart.
Facts to know
- Main hero
- Krishna, the blue-skinned god
- Patrons
- Vaishnava rulers of Bundi
- Favourite weather
- The monsoon
- Picture cycles
- Ragamala and barahmasa
- Also shown
- Court, city, hunts, elephant fights
Krishna and the gopis
The hero: Krishna, the blue-skinned god who grew up among cowherds in Braj.
- The stories: stealing butter, playing his flute under the trees, hiding the clothes of the bathing gopis, the milkmaids of the village, and dancing with them in the moonlight.
- Why so often: the Bundi rulers were devoted Vaishnavas, worshippers of Vishnu and his avatar Krishna, and their painters returned to these stories again and again.
The Ras Leela
Find the circle: a great ring of dancers on the walls and ceiling.
- The story: Krishna's dance with the gopis on an autumn night, in which he multiplies himself so that every woman believes she is dancing with him alone.
- Its meaning: in devotional terms, a picture of the soul's love for god. In painting terms, a brilliant excuse for a wheel of colour and movement.
Krishna lifting Govardhan
A favourite panel: Krishna holds up Mount Govardhan on one finger like an umbrella.
- The story: he shelters the villagers and their cows from the storm sent by the angry god Indra.
- Why Bundi loved it: in a town where the monsoon is everything, a god who protects people from the rain and also brings it was a natural favourite.
The rains and the seasons
Monsoon painters: Bundi painters loved the monsoon more than any other school in Rajasthan.
What to look for: dark clouds edged with white, zigzags of lightning, rain falling in silver lines, peacocks dancing.
- The longing: women running for shelter, or waiting on a terrace for a lover who has not come home.
- Ragamala: some scenes come from the ragamala, paintings that give each musical mode a picture and a mood.
- Barahmasa: others come from the barahmasa, the twelve months of the year, each with its own weather and longing.
The court and its processions
Among the gods: the court of Bundi itself walks these walls.
- Court life: rulers ride in procession on elephants, sit on terraces with courtiers, listen to musicians and watch dancers.
- The city painted: some panels show Bundi's walls, palaces and lakes, so you can look at a painting of the town spread out beneath your feet.
Hunts and elephant fights
Royal hunts: tigers and boar in thick forest.
- Elephant fights: a favourite courtly spectacle, and a reminder that this was a warrior house as well as a devout one.
- A forerunner: the hunting scenes lead to the great tradition of hunt painting that developed in neighbouring Kota, the other Hada capital.
How to recognise a Bundi painting
Once you know the signs, you can pick out a Bundi painting across a museum gallery. Here is what to look for.
Start with the colour: the Chitrashala glows with a cool, watery palette that no other Rajasthani palace quite matches.
Then the landscape: lush banana trees, mango groves, lotus ponds full of flowers and fish, rivers, birds and heavy rain clouds.
Hadoti itself: it is the landscape of this region, greener and wetter than the desert west.
Signs of the style
- Colour
- Deep greens, turquoise, blues, creams
- Accents
- Touches of red and gold
- Landscape
- Banana trees, mango groves, lotus ponds
- Faces
- Round, almond eyes, serene smile
- Grew from
- The late sixteenth century
- The women: round faces, small chins, large almond eyes and a slight, serene smile, often in profile.
- The men: turbans and sashes of the court.
- Gesture, not realism: emotion lives in a hand raised to a cheek, a glance over a shoulder, a figure leaning out of a window at a storm.
- Its roots: the school grew from the late sixteenth century, when Bundi's rulers joined the Mughal court and absorbed some of the imperial painters' refinement.
- A Rajput heart: it stayed devotional, romantic and full of feeling for nature.
- The Kota cousin: in the eighteenth century a related school developed at Kota, famous for its hunting scenes.
- Leave the debates to scholars: they argue about dates and attributions. In front of the wall, simply notice the rain, the lotus and the eyes.
- A living craft: a few painters in Bundi still work in the tradition, on paper and silk, grinding mineral colours and making fine brushes.
- Go deeper: our page on miniature painting explains how to tell serious artists from souvenir shops, and our journal piece on the murals of Bundi goes deeper into the style.
Reading one wall, the way our guides do
Stand in front of any panel for five minutes with one of our guides and you will notice he never starts with the story. He starts with the frame.
By the end of an hour most of our guests are reading the walls on their own, and that is the moment the Chitrashala stops being decoration and becomes a library.
Find the edges: most scenes sit inside painted borders of flowers, scrolls or simple coloured bands.
Read like a book: big walls are divided into rows, like pages laid side by side. Read each panel on its own before you take in the whole wall.
Five steps
- First
- Find the edges
- Second
- Find the most important person
- Third
- Look at the sky
- Fourth
- Watch the hands and eyes
- Finally
- Look for writing
- Stories in sequence: where a wall shows a long story, such as Krishna's childhood, the episodes often run in order, and one figure can appear several times in a frame.
- Size means rank: in Rajput painting, size and position show rank more than distance does. Gods and kings are larger, placed higher or set against a plain background.
- Spotting the great: Krishna is easy, because he is blue. A ruler usually sits on a raised platform, with a halo, a parasol or attendants with fly whisks.
- A calm sky: clear blue or cream means a calm day.
- A monsoon sky: a band of dark cloud with white curls and a zigzag of gold means the rains, and with them longing, love and reunion.
- A night sky: dark, with a moon and stars, often for a lover's secret meeting or the Ras Leela.
- Hands and eyes: Bundi figures rarely show emotion on their faces. They show it through a raised finger, a hand touching a cheek, a figure turning to look back.
- Look for writing: some panels carry short inscriptions in Devanagari script, naming a raga, a month or a story. Your guide can read them, and they often unlock a puzzling scene.
Fragile walls, and how to look after them
These murals have survived nearly three hundred years of monsoons, neglect and curious fingers. Every visitor now decides whether they survive the next three hundred.
Painted on lime plaster: the murals are fragile.
What harms them: damp from the monsoon, salts in the walls, smoke, sunlight and the oils from human hands.
The three rules
- Touch
- Never touch a painted surface
- Flash
- Never; it fades pigments
- Bags
- Never lean or rest them on walls
- Torch
- Warm, low beam, briefly, from a distance
- What you will see: in some places the paint has faded or flaked, and in others there are patches of restoration of varying quality.
- Ongoing work: conservation has been carried out in different parts of the palace in recent decades, and rooms open and close as it continues.
- Our guides hold every guest to the rules: however tempting the detail, hands stay off the walls.
- Say something: if you see someone else touching, flashing or leaning, a polite word is welcome. Most people simply don't know.
- Light, friend and enemy: the garden court is open to the sky, so the murals are best seen in soft daylight, when colours glow without glare.
- Darker corners: a small torch with a warm, low beam helps without harming the paint.
The best hour and season
Murals are about light, and the Chitrashala changes its mood through the day.
Come at opening: the light in the garden court is soft, the stone is still cool, and you will have the gallery almost to yourself for the first half hour.
After Taragarh: if you have climbed Taragarh at dawn, you can come down into the Chitrashala through its back gate just as it is waking up.
Facts to know
- Best hour
- As the palace opens
- Also lovely
- Late afternoon, low warm light
- Comfortable season
- October to March
- Monsoon
- July to September
- Rain on walls
- August
- Late afternoon: warm, low light, though you need to keep an eye on closing time.
- October to March: the comfortable season for exploring the palace.
- The monsoon: July to September is when the paintings make most sense, with dark clouds over the ridge, peacocks calling and lotus in the ponds.
- The trade-off: it can be humid in the rains, and some rooms may close.
- Month by month: our best time to visit Bundi guide covers the whole year.
Local tip
If you want to see the rains on the walls and in the sky at the same time, come in August.
How to visit the palace and the Chitrashala
The palace is a maze, the light is dim and the stories are many. A little planning turns a confusing hour into a memorable morning.
Take a guide who reads murals: the difference between pretty colours and understanding the Ras Leela, Govardhan and the ragamala is enormous.
Our guides: they know the walls panel by panel and never take commissions.
How long: two to three hours for the palace and the Chitrashala together, and an hour or more extra if you also climb to Taragarh.
Before you go
- Allow
- Two to three hours; more with Taragarh
- Footwear
- Shoes with good grip
- Carry
- A small soft-beam torch
- Tickets
- May be separate; we check on the day
- Access
- Steep ramps, no lifts
- Shoes: the entrance ramp and some stairways inside are steep, dark and polished smooth.
- Torch, never flash: a soft beam for dark corners, and never a flash on the murals.
- Things that change: tickets, opening times and which rooms are open. The Chitrashala may be ticketed separately from the palace.
- Monkeys: they live around the palace and fort. Keep food and water bottles in a closed bag.
- Limited mobility: steep ramps, uneven steps and no lifts make it hard going. Our accessible travel guide explains what we can arrange.
- Photography: without flash it is generally welcome. Rules for tripods and professional equipment change, so ask first. Our photography tips cover interiors and low light.
What most visitors miss
Most visitors walk round the Chitrashala once, admire the colour and leave. The walls reward a second look.
The ceilings
Look up: everyone looks at the walls, and few people look at the ceilings and the undersides of arches.
- What is there: circles of dancers, floral patterns and small scenes.
- Better preserved: they have survived better than the walls because no hands could reach them.
The small details
- Small life: fish in the lotus ponds, monkeys in the trees, a cat watching birds, a servant asleep in a corner of a court scene.
- A game for children: our guides set them a challenge to find five animals, and the adults usually end up joining in.
The town in the paintings
Find the city panel: one of the scenes showing Bundi with its palace and lake.
- Then look out: step to the edge of the court and look over the real Bundi.
- Little has changed: the palace still pours down the hill, and the lakes still fill in the rains.
The garden itself
Sit a while: on the edge of the garden, take in the court as a whole: green plants, painted walls, sky above.
- A pleasure palace: designed for the monsoon, and meant to be enjoyed slowly, ideally with music.
- The same idea: shaped the little Sukh Mahal pavilion on the bank of Jait Sagar, on our list of things to do in Bundi.
What to pair with the palace
The palace sits at the centre of Bundi. Everything else is above it, below it or a short drive away.
Facts to know
- Above
- Taragarh Fort, best at dawn
- Below
- Raniji ki Baori, 1699
- Baori walk
- About fifteen minutes
- Kota
- Forty minutes away
Taragarh Fort, above
- The perfect Bundi morning: climb to the star fort on the ridge at dawn and come down into the Chitrashala as the palace opens.
Raniji ki Baori, below
- The queen's stepwell: walk down through the blue lanes to the stepwell of 1699, about fifteen minutes from the palace gate.
- Why go: it shows how the women of the royal house gave water to the town.
Kota's palace and paintings
- Forty minutes away: the Garh Palace of Kota has a museum and painted rooms in the related Kota style, famous for its hunting scenes.
- Why both: they show how one family of painters grew in two directions. Read our Kota guide.
A painter's studio
- End the day: with one of Bundi's working miniature painters, watching how brushes are made and colours ground.
- Why it matters: it turns the murals from history into a living craft. See our list of things to do in Bundi for more.
Where to stay under the palace walls
Some of the best views of the Garh Palace are from the roof terraces of the havelis in the lanes beneath it.
No big palace hotel: you stay instead in small, family-run heritage havelis in the old town.
Haveli Braj Bhushanjee: painted rooms of its own, looking up to the palace.
Facts to know
- Palace hotel
- None in Bundi
- Style
- Small family-run heritage havelis
- Palace gate
- Minutes from the old town
- Most polished
- Bundi Vilas
- Bundi Vilas: a restored haveli set right against the palace walls, with the most polished rooms in town.
- Why it matters: from either you can walk to the palace gate in minutes, be there when it opens and come back for a rest at midday.
- Compare them: read our honest guide to luxury hotels in Bundi and our page on heritage havelis of Bundi.
- Plan the days: our Bundi itinerary links the palace, the fort and the stepwells, or travel through Bundi on our offbeat Rajasthan journey.
