Articles > A Place of Peace in a Warrior Goddess's Kingdom

The brothers Harsh and Nanda Singh look like Rajasthani versions of Crocodile Dundee. Nanda is wearing jack-boots and a Hawaiian shirt covered in sporting fish; Harsh, an Aussie Akubra with crocodile-skin hat-band and crocodile teeth. They are dashingly handsome with flashing eyes and stately moustaches and a welcome that melts away the six-hour gut-jumbling journey over pot-holes to get here.

This is Chhatra Sagar, a small, delightfully low-key family-run tented camp on a dam wall in rural Nimaj, half way between Jaipur and Udaipur. With only eleven tents it is well off the beaten tourist trail, there’s not a tour bus in sight and, despite the extravagant spectacle of the forts and palace hotels we’ve been staying in, it’s a relief to be met at the top of the dam steps not by a posse of heavily liveried doormen jostling for a tip, but by a pair of little owlets blinking down on us from their accustomed branch in a neem tree.

The setting is almost impossibly romantic. Our tents look out over a huge reservoir built a hundred years ago by Harsh and Nanda’s great-great-grandfather, Chhatra Singh, the Thakur of Nimaj. It is teeming with wildfowl and snapping turtles and within minutes our two children have leapt off the dam wall and joined them. Lunch beneath an open-air canopy is an exotic feast of local organic vegetables and curries made from lotus seeds and the fruit of the khejri tree, followed by curd with pomegranate seeds and wild honey from the bees-nest in the nearby tamarind. It all seems a million miles from the fume-choked chowks of Jaipur and the elephant crush of the Amber Fort and, at least at first, light years from the frenzy of feuds and warfare that has characterised the state of Rajasthan since legends began.

Rudyard Kipling described this vast desert region penned in by the Aravali Mountains as ‘the Cockpit of India’. The thirty-six royal houses of Rajputs that presided here in their majestic marble palaces thrived on a diet of gore and high-octane blood-lust, and fought as royal houses know best – brother against brother, son against father, committing the most sickening acts of butchery against each other at lunchtime and sharing a companionable hookah together in the evening.

Tales of Rajput heroism and treachery would make wonderful reading if they weren’t so labyrinthine. Only one man, Colonel James Tod - immortalised as a typical pert, bald-headed, sharp-nosed Englishman in court paintings of the City Palace in Udaipur, his horse rearing in obeisance to the Maharana - has ever attempted to trace all the advances and reversals, alliances and betrayals of the various Rajput dynasties and clans. But he is not the most elucidating of guides. My father-in-law, who dutifully carried the Colonel’s two-volume 1829 Annals & Antiquities of Rajast’han around every landmark on our two week trip concluded it was “about as penetrable as the weekend engineering work supplement to the West Coast rail timetable”. We’re still in a right old muddle about the warring Houses of Marwar and of Mewar.

But here, it seems, all that can be forgotten. We can sit back and let the cracking of muskets and the clashing of scimitars and the thunder of armoured elephants charging into spiked fortress-gates die away into distant confusion. There is nothing here to ruffle the mind other than the call of kingfishers and the playful darting of swifts. As dusk approaches a fire is lit and we sit around with G&Ts and freshly roasted papadums watching the first stars prick the sky. Pelicans drone back to their roosts like cargo planes; flying foxes swoop down over the water.

Then from the direction of the village comes a kind of jubilant ululation over a loudspeaker, followed by a sudden burst of Indian pop music. It sounds like a local rave rather than religious devotions but Harsh explains that this is the last night of Dashahara, the ten-day festival that celebrates the fearsome Goddess Durga’s slaying of the great buffalo demon, and this once-a-year revelry will go on until dawn. He makes no apology for the disturbed night ahead. This is one of the most sacred and important events in the calendar. It is the first festival after the monsoon - traditionally a period when warfare was suspended and fighting men went back to their villages to sow their crops and prepare the fields to receive the rain – so the timing is significant. Dashahara heralds passable roads and the beginning of the military season once again; the moment when rusting weapons are restored to dazzling lethality and laid before the Goddess Durga for her approval.

The celebration of the Goddess’s killing of the Buffalo Demon is primarily – at least elsewhere in the subcontinent – a symbolic act, the triumph of good over the forces of evil, the worshipper’s commitment to good intentions and right action over angry thoughts and black deeds. But in Rajasthan it is the practical, martial aspect of the victory that is the draw. Durga is the champion of warriors and kings, of blood and power, and every fort and palace in Rajasthan has a shrine dedicated to the Goddess protecting the entrance.

Nowadays it is illegal to carry arms but there is barely a family in Rajasthan that does not have a secret hoard of old muskets and pistols, or exquisitely crafted daggers and swords, handed down through the generations. Instead of worshipping them publicly at the temple as they used to, now they lay them before an altar to the Goddess in the privacy of their own homes and the priest comes to them to perform the puja. But the effect is the same. These weapons are now blessed and ready, should occasion arise, to take life.

It is also illegal now in India to perform blood sacrifice; but old traditions die hard and the Goddess is no respecter of political correctness. Tonight is the night when, in most of the Goddess’s temples across the state, black buffalos will be sacrificed, their heads severed with a single slice of a sword.

“In Rajasthan sacrifice is a rite of passage”, says Harsh, “killing the buffalo is the mark of a warrior; it accustoms a man to the taking of life, to the spilling of blood.” It comes as a surprise, though, to learn that Harsh and Nanda, with their quiet sophistication and dignified sense of reserve, both teetotal and sober-looking fellows performed this sacrifice with hot-blooded gusto at the age of eighteen, before a crowd of thousands in their mother’s village near Udaipur. “We both used our grandfather’s sword”, Harsh says, unruffled, “I remember I was very pleased that I had made a clean cut, that I brought off the head with one blow.” When I ask him if his son, now nine, will do the same, Harsh smiles, “That’s up to him.”

In the morning, bleary-eyed after a night filled with wild dreams and waves of pop music, I look at the brothers in a different light. There seems a hazy connection between the name Singh, which means ‘lion’ and serves as surname for almost every Rajput family, and the lion on which the great Goddess is borne into battle. Here the blood of ancestry and the glories of the past seem determined to defy modern castelessness and Acts of Congress. As Harsh drives us to the temple in his jeep, we pass turbaned shepherds who stop in their tracks and, with palms pressed together, make him as deep and honorific a namaste as they would had any of his glamorous forefathers passed by on a horse.

The village shrine of Magarmandi Mata, in a quiet patch of countryside, is deserted now except for a handful of craftsmen from the Archaeological Survey of Rajasthan working on its restoration. It is an exquisite Gupta period temple, 10th century or possibly even earlier, with pillars and architraves carved with sinuous gods and goddesses, flowers and vines, nymphs and elephants. It bears the scars of various sackings and pillagings from the waves of invaders who have passed through over the centuries – Mughals, Marathas, Pindaris - but mysteriously much of the building was buried under earth and remained untouched.

It was Harsh’s dam-building great-great-grandfather who finally excavated the lower terraces in the late 19th century and brought the almost perfect friezes to light. Tempted by their beauty, the great Thakur removed some of the sculptures to adorn the hunting lodge he was building on the top of his new dam wall, the site of our tented camp. But scarcely had he done so when he was tormented by terrible dreams of the gods, demanding to be returned to their residence. Chastened, he restored the stones to their rightful place and consecrated a new image to Durga inside the temple. The Goddess has been worshipped here ever since.

The only sign of last night’s revelry are bundles of fresh offerings stuffed into crevices and some discarded Green Label whisky boxes. Harsh bends down and kisses the top step and then the threshold of the shrine before offering his devotions to the image inside. Durga’s eyes gleam out from the shadows, from an amorphous mound of red and gold cloth. The walls behind her shimmer with pink and silver foil and reflect the glint of a trident. There is indeed an air of triumph about her, a menacing energy that raises the warrior spirit and warns us not to go away thinking that, even here, miles from anywhere, in the peaceful sanctuary of a wildlife reserve, can we be allowed to forget the power that fuelled the pugnacious history of Rajasthan.


Travel Facts

Best time to go to Rajasthan is October – March.

Chhatra Sagar is 110 kilometres from Jodhpur, 230 kilometres from Jaipur and 260 kilometres from Udaipur. A tent (with en suite bathroom!) sleeps two and the stay is inclusive of all meals and excursions from the property.

Also highly recommended for a taste of rural Rajasthan and a respite between the city sights is Rawla Narlai, a former hunting lodge with just 20 rooms, surrounded by small temples and situated at the foot of a dramatic 350 foot granite hill. Narlai is within easy striking distance of the spectacular Jain temples of Ranakpur.

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