Jaipur

Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan and the largest city in India's desert-fringed northwest — a place where the swagger of Rajput kings still shapes the streets. Founded on 18 November 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, it was one of the earliest planned cities of the subcontinent, laid out on a strict grid at a time when most Indian towns grew organically around a fort. As the water supply and defensive hills of the old capital at Amer grew crowded, Jai Singh II — an astronomer-king as much as a warrior — moved his seat down to the plains and commissioned a rational, ordered city built to last.

The plan was drawn up with the Bengali scholar-architect Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, who applied principles from the ancient Indian treatises of Shilpa Shastra and Vastu Shastra. The result divides the walled city into nine rectangular blocks (a nod to the traditional nine divisions of the cosmos), threaded by wide, straight avenues that meet at right angles and open into grand public squares called chaupars. This clarity of layout is precisely what earned the walled city its place on the UNESCO World Heritage List in July 2019, recognised as an exceptional example of town planning and construction in South Asia — making Jaipur only the second Indian city, after Ahmedabad, to hold that citywide status.

The nickname that everyone knows it by came later. In 1876 the city was washed in a warm terracotta pink — a colour long associated with hospitality — to welcome the visiting Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII). The old quarter has kept that rosy wash ever since, and the local municipal rules still protect it, which is why the bazaars, gateways and palace facades glow the same shade at sunset. "Pink City" is not marketing; it is a law of the old town.

Jaipur forms the third point of India's Golden Triangle — the classic first-timer's circuit of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur — and for most travellers it is the gateway to the whole of Rajasthan. Within a compact area you get hilltop forts strung along the Aravalli ridges, a working royal palace still part-occupied by the erstwhile ruling family, one of the finest astronomical observatories ever built in stone, and street after street of artisans hammering silver, cutting gemstones, block-printing cotton and stitching leather juttis.

What makes Jaipur rewarding beyond its monuments is that it is a living heritage city, not a museum. The bazaars inside the pink walls have traded jewellery, textiles and brassware for close to three centuries and still do. Elephants and camels share roads with app-cabs and a modern metro. You can spend the morning climbing to a fort for a sweep of the whole valley, the afternoon losing yourself in Johari Bazaar, and the evening over a fiery plate of laal maas. For a first taste of Rajasthan's colour, scale and hospitality, few places deliver as much, as accessibly, as Jaipur.