The Architect of the grid city of Jaipur: Maharana Sawai Jai Singh II

“Architecture should speak of its time and place , but yearn for timelessness.” – Frank Gehry

“Jai Singh was clever and opportunist enough to survive the many shocks and changes that followed each other in quick succession.”- The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru.

The robust city of Jaipur, the capital of Amber during the late-18th century, was built by Maharana Sawai Jai Singh II. The grid city was built by the great Maharana by combining the ancient Hindu treatise on architecture- the Shilpa Shastra and plans of many European cities of the period along with his own ideas.

Rana Sawai Jai Singh II was a scion of the Kachchwaha Rajput clan. He was not only a great diplomat but also a great mathematician, astronomer and a town planner far ahead of his times. Within the context of Mughal decline during the late 18^th century , after the death of the Emperor Aurangzeb, general upheaval and confusion ruled the day. In this situation , Sawai Jai Singh sought to assert himself and his kingdom as an alternative , independent power base. The founding of a new capital city, in the late 1720s was nearly one part of a wider policy to establish Kachchwaha pre-eminence with respect not only to the shadowy Mughal Court but also against the other Hindu (including the other Rajput) courts. When he found that the advancing Marathas were too strong to be checked, he came to terms with them, on behalf of the Emperor at Delhi. A feudatory of the Mughals, he received the title of ‘Sawai’( one and a quarter) from Emperor Aurangzeb, who declared him a quarter superior to his forebear, Mirza Raja Jai Singh, after he captured the Fort of Vishalgarh from the Marathas in 1701 C.E.

Sawai Jai Singh’s accomplished diplomacy during the turbulent times, when the Persian invader, Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1739, and amongst other loot, carried away the famous Peacock Throne, had kept him in Aurangzeb’s good graces and he remained a favorite too with Muhammad Shah Rangila, the then reigning Emperor. It was on his instigation that the new Emperor abolished the Jiziya tax imposed on the Hindus.After bringing to the Emperor’s notice some astronomic imbalances that possibly affected the timings of Hindu and Muslim holy events, and expressing his desire to correct these, Jai Singh also received Imperial support for building his Astronomy Observatories at Delhi, Jaipur, Varanasi, Ujjain and Mathura.  He kept a table of the daily position of stars and after seven years sent several skillful persons along with Padre Manoel de Figuetredo to Europe to compare these tables with the European ones. He found that there was half a degree error in the table on the actual observation of the moon’s position. He attributed these errors due to the smaller diameters of the instruments used. Thus, on the basis of his own research, he published the astronomical tables and named them after his patron, ‘Zij- e- Muhammad- Shahi’( Muhammad Shah’s astronomical tables) in 1733. 

He found several brass instruments to be inaccurate. Thus, he constructed a few instruments of his own invention such as the Jal Prakash, the Ram Yantra and the Samrat Yantra. They were made of lime and stone. The Samrat Yantra at Jaipur is 90 feet high, 147 feet long and the radius of each quadrant is nearly 50 feet. It is a huge equinoctial dial with the hypotenuse parallel to the earth’s axis. The Ram Yantra was a cylindrical instrument used to study the altitude in azimuthal observations. The Jal Prakash was used to study the position of the sun and other heavenly bodies by observing the passage of the bodies across the point of intersection of the cross wires.

His thirst for knowledge made him seek assistance of the Portuguese King Emmanuel. He asked for a learned European scientist and also a physician to be sent to Jaipur. Thus, Pere Manoel de Figueiredo was sent with several books and instruments and the doctor who accompanied him was Pedro Da Sulva. Thus, Jai Singh was able to assemble the best astronomers and geometricians of the Hindu, Muslim and European worlds. He transformed several European treatises on plane and spherical trigonometry and construction and use of Logarithm into Sanskrit.

An excellent town-planner, he combined the plans of many European cities of that time along with his own ideas to build the city of Jaipur.  He selected the plain five miles south of Amber as his capital. The hills to the east of the plain would be a sacred spot known as ‘Galtaji’ that would be used as the retreat by the Ramanandi ascetics. He conceptualized the plan of the city on the Shastric paradigm of a Mandala. The point of intersection would be one of the city’s crossroads or Chaupar. The Pink City of Jaipur was built on the grid system with nine rectangular zones corresponding to the nine divisions of the universe and had different zones allotted to different professions, possessing 119 feet wide main streets that were perpendicularly intersected by 60 feet wide auxiliary streets, which were further honeycombed by 30 feet wide lanes and 15 feet wide by-lanes. Beautiful, harmonized buildings and shady trees lined the streets, and the city was well-provided with water conduits and wells. While walking through the streets of Jaipur, one is aware of the layout with broad streets laid on a grid-pattern with the centrally-located palace, resembling the Mandala design. 

The authors of Vastu Shastra translated this paradigm into a reality. The main street running from east to west has a Chand pol( Moon gate) and a Suraj pol( Sun gate) to mark the position of rising and setting of the sun. Thus the orientation of the city has its own sacred geography and natural topography. 

In the field of religion too, Sawai Jai Singh tried to assert his architectural astuteness in concealing the Govind Dev temple from the iconoclastic attack of the Mughals. He had installed an image of Shri Govind in Jaipur, which was originally housed in Vrindavan by his ancestor Raja Man Singh I. It was duly enshrined in Jaipur in 1735. The temple had an unusual design. Unlike the Shikhara-topped Nagara temples  and the more sophisticated Haveli-style temples, this building was organized like a garden-palace pavilion. This concealed the actual identity of the temple.

Considering the political turmoil prevalent during one of the darkest periods of Indian history, Sawai Jai Singh II’s remarkable initiative in such notable discoveries and building of world-class cities and observatories is indeed a semblance of the remarkable personality that he was. He rectified the calendar and predicted the occurrence of the eclipses. He was a man of cosmopolitan ideas and went against the social stigma attached to overseas travel, by sending emissaries to Portugal. He sparked the spirit of  scientific enquiry in India.

References:

• Building Jaipur : https://archive.org/details/buildingjaipurma0000sach
• A History of Jaipur by Jadunath Sarkar
• The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru

Parijat Banerjee

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I am a scholar in history with Masters from Presidency University, Kolkata. My hobbies include reading, writing articles, singing and recitation. At present, I am pursuing my B. Ed course in Education

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