Travelogue: In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Durgacharan Rakshit travelled to most parts of India
An excerpt from ‘Journeys Across India’, by Durgacharan Rakshit, translated from the Bengali by Sarbani Putatunda.
Jaipur
We reached Jaipur in the morning and put up at the pilgrims’ inn of Thakur Fateh Singh, just adjacent to the railway station. Clearly Nature here is very different from what we had previously seen and were familiar with. It is a land of sands, and distant hills. There are fortresses surrounding the foothills.
We had our bath and went to visit Govindaji’s temple and the city. The entire city is surrounded by a boundary wall and as we entered the city gate, we saw a long and wide main road in front of us. All the structures, including the houses and the roads, are built of stones. The concept of brick structure seems alien here. We reached a point of the road where it got divided in four different directions—east, west, north, and south. The houses which stood on both sides of the roads were identically constructed and were made of red stones. None of them had balconies other than bay windows. The walls had decorative stone webs at the top. There were water taps all along the roadsides and there were gas lampposts. The royal palace was enormous in size. It occupied a large area of the city outskirts. To...
