Delhi to Mandawa: Roads, Rituals and a Living Museum

Yesterday was a travelling day, and after a lousy night's sleep I snoozed most of the way. Lots of bumps, potholes and creative driving. I was glad I couldn't see out the front, because I'd have been a nervous wreck. You just have to trust the driver. 😅

We left Delhi around 10am in a much more comfortable coach, "Luxury Beyond Expections" (sic) according to the sign. The luggage was tied on the roof, but we were leaving Delhi, so rules were bent a little.

 

Lunch on the road

We stopped at a clean little roadside diner with dosa, a crispy rice pancake that you tear into pieces and dip in the soup. The dosa batter is fermented, and so is the yoghurt in the lassi, so hopefully my good bugs are getting a top-up, because there isn't much else fermented around. Lots of vegetables, though, I wish I could cook eggplant half as well, perhaps my kids would get why its such a great vege!  

Only three of us are younger than retirement age, but you wouldn't know it. Before getting back on the bus, we found a little toy train and took turns pushing each other around it. There was a lot of laughing, some puffing, and plenty of competitive pushing. Consider it our exercise for the day.

Little towns, big contrasts

We drove through lots of small towns with a big gap between rich and poor. There were unfinished buildings everywhere, and brick kilns with piles of bricks, so the ground here must be good for brick making. 

Monsoon season has just finished so most fields were being prepared for replanting.

Squeezing into Mandawa

Arriving was the real revelation. Our coach drove through streets so narrow that people barely moved aside. You'd swear we were driving over their toes. 

The hotel: a living museum

Then we saw the hotel, It was everything I was hoping for and more. Hotel Heritage Mandawa is a painted haveli, a merchant's mansion, and it's amazingly ornate. Every wall is decorated, and it feels like a living museum that you get to sleep in. Mandawa is known as an "open-air art gallery" for its frescoed havelis and was originally built by a Marwari merchant family (the Poddars) around 1853

A welcome to remember

We were greeted with drumbeats, a red dot (tilak) on our foreheads and a garland of flowers around our necks. They're traditional ways of honouring guests. Then we were handed a glass of rose syrup, a cooling welcome drink.

Dinner and a history lesson

At pre-dinner drinks, Bhooi gave us a history lesson on the old trade routes. Once the overland routes through the Middle East came under Ottoman control, European powers went looking for sea routes to India's spices and textiles.

In 1494, Portugal and Spain divided the newly "discovered" world between them in the Treaty of Tordesillas, drawing a line down the Atlantic. About a century later, Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal charter to the English East India Company in 1600, giving it a monopoly on English trade with the East. The Dutch East India Company followed in 1602, backed by the Dutch government.

At the time, India wasn't one country but a patchwork of kingdoms. Merchant caravans crossing Rajasthan paid heavy duties to the rulers of Jaipur and Bikaner, but the local lords of Shekhawati charged much less. So the caravans took the long way round, and the money settled in Mandawa. Later, British tariffs and new ports pulled the trade away, but the ornate architecture remains.