The Serai, Jaisalmer

The Serai

Unheard of rain fall levels are greening the Great Thar Desert in Rajasthan where all was previously sand. The great fort of Jaisalmer rises today not from dunes but from a rough sea of hardy shrubbery. The sun nevertheless fights back with undying force; if it fails to dehydrate the land so dramatically as in the past it will certainly succeed in dehydrating you and visitors to the remarkable oasis that is The Serai tented camp are strongly advised to drink plenty of water, wear hats and layer on the sun cream. The temptation 'though is to drink more of the delicious range of cocktails on offer and, if the sun gets too much, to retire to a beautifully appointed tent or to the hedonistic luxury of the Spa for a massage with wondrous smelling natural oils. I may have been camping recently on a desert island with no visible amenities or even fresh water and thought it good entertainment but I could get a serious taste for really high class hotels and no cockroaches.

The 21 beautiful tents of The Serai are laid out round a desert garden where the sounds of water, from a reversed stepwell – you go up the steps to the water instead of down – blend with early morning birdsong. Little else breaks what seems an almost other worldly level of peace, especially for those flying in from the traffic mayhem of one of the great Indian cities, aside from an occasional chorus of twilight barking from the local farm dogs. Young staff in white uniforms, small, bright coloured turbans known as poths on their heads, silently lay white cushions on the sandstone seats at the entrance to tents in the early morning and dry steps after a gigantic thunderstorm during the night – the sun in any case is rising and will finish the  cleaning up job, thirstily sucking up the last drops of water.

All here is based on sand and white –  other colours: the olives and emeralds of a desert garden; touches of blue; cushions in the tent ‘s entrance sitting area, a woven rug in the bathroom: serve to accentuate the calm elegance of the overriding scheme that extends even to natural coloured warm shawls to hold off the always unexpected cold of a desert evening. Natural coloured leather covers a campaign style chest holding the mini bar, there is even a leather pouch for the rechargable torches that are barely needed to walk garden paths at night that are otherwise lit gently to detract less from the vast arc of starry sky.  Hurricane lamps hang here and there from trees and pick out the design of water courts and steps. The desk in the outer lobby of each tent is well supplied with a selection of the same antique leather bound books that make up the library contained in a huge circular bookcase in the bar where leather armchairs invite the idle or folding campaign chairs can be moved nearer to tables for a game of chess or an attempt at more focused and less soporific reading. There is writing paper too, sharpened pencils for the important travel journal ready in stone jars and always a bowl of saffron marigolds, potted sunshine.

Blessed warmth for those non-Indians who do not embrace any form of cold as a delightful novelty is provided in winter by healthy numbers of efficient radiators in bedrooms and bathrooms – thank god for not having to share with a husband who always turns everything off. Hot water bottles of course appear miraculously in turned down evening beds besides the excitement of purple tissue wrapped surprise presents left on pillows by all year Father Christmases.  There are a/c units against summer heat and the swimming pool, bright blue and icy cold in winter but welcome in summer in additon to the outdoor jacuzzis in some of the tents.

Everything works, from electric plugs to the most flattering mirrors ever - how clever to make everyone look tall, thin and glamorous and how fitting in this most glamorously low key place that runs like the best country house or the greatest of old-fashioned Italian hotels where service was what counted.  Of course, at The Serai, perfect service, invisible until needed when staff, seemingly with skills of bilocation miraculously appear, is the icing on the cake of wonderful design, management and the extraordinary engineering that has somehow floated, or so it appears, a dream hotel on 100 acres of sand. The sand has borne further fruit in an organic vegetable garden growing rocket, herbs, cabbages, carrots, and shortly oranges and artichokes besides a field of wheat and other ingredients to be translated in the kitchen into homemade herbed breads and almost anything you could want to eat from this continent to Europe and SE Asia. It all starts with eggs benedict for breakfast and, for those minded to diet, temptations go from bad to worse, although it would be quite easy to live here on the freshest and most delicious salads straight from the garden.

Tents are astonishingly private, spread well apart round the garden, only their roofs showing from the central path and little indication, except an occasional dining room, bar or evening camp fire encounter, of any other guests staying at all. There is space to breathe and more and expeditions to be made for those inclined.  Tea and a sundowner on the dunes means a drive, racing chinkara gazellles skittering away in the distance or nilgai, blue bulls, nervily standing to watch the jeeps approaching.  After that a camel or camel cart ride to a virgin sand dune that looks as if it has been raked, the perfect markings the product of wind and sun not man. It has to be said that for the novice or the unwary a camel ride can be unexpectedly bumpy - T E Lawrence didn't ride across Arabia without any practice. Once safely relieved of camel responsibility one is revived by sandwiches, cakes and biscuits, all home made of course and more importantly even than tea, pink champagne to match the glowing evening sky before a return in the final minutes of twilight to a welcoming bar, bath and dinner.

Visits to Jaisalmer city are also suggested entertainments and give a taste not only of the glories of the Rajasthan past but also the massive development of the past few years that will continue speeding the desert  into the future. Where once the city was inside the walls, now it spreads across the desert plains where windmills and pylons march across the land and every village is punctuated by mobile telephone towers all too closely clustered by the newly built stone houses of inhabitants who have not yet realised the perils of too close an association with the machinery of this brilliant means of communication.  Neither have the downsides of ever useful plastic bags yet fully been realised in India in spite of efforts in some districts - the rubbish is appalling and indestructible - the digestive systems of goats and camels may thrive on thorn bushes and god knows what natural rubbish but not on plastic and nobody including any government service finds its removal to be their responsiblity.

The intricacies of the stone carving of the great havelis and jain temples, the massive walls of the fort still make Jaisalmer worth seeing but this is a town now with other aspirations and ambitions that look to the future more than the past. Nowhere and nowhere better perhaps have those aspirations come to fruition than in the story of Lakshmi, the uneducated vegetable seller who threatened a a film maker with a mouli when he tried to photograph her 40 plus years ago.  That young woman is now a great grandmother, her son the Sarpanch, head of a village panchayat council and a man of stature and dignity whose children are university students or graduates in professions including medicine and dentistry.  Lakshmi herself is a strong woman not above threatening importunate photographers with a mouli still but these days not in earnest as she produces a feast of local food for friends, including that documentary maker of years before, that rivals the food in The Serai. O dear, the badri and ghee, the mirchi and the beans, desert fruit, the roti - I can taste it still.....

Development inevitably means losses that balance the gains, young people aspire to changing lifestyles. Village life revolves less round the cycle of seasons and agriculture leavened in the past only with home grown entertainments and more on the availability of communications, transport, education possibilities and daily involvement with wider contemporary issues, local and national. Old skills are no longer so valued and long held traditions here will become part of history, preserved only as distant folk memories and in museum cases.In the case of the ancient music of  the Rajasthan desert,  the hereditary skills passed down through the Manganiyar or  Langha communities, the Muslim musicians of the desert, may disappear in the rush to other entertainment and occupation and perhaps live on at best as taught skills for theatre performance.  Even the Whirling Dervishes of Egypt perform their rites more often these days as staged entertainment than as true religious ceremony. For now, as some of the great Manganiyar performers, like Sakar Khan, the honoured and revered Koraicha player, slip into old age, the music hangs on.  A firelit performance by a group of musicians at The Serai is an unforgettable and highly emotional experience that inexplicably affects the deepest corners of the mind and spirit and which one can hardly bear to end.

News - Travel and Food

Something different in travel and food: my new book, Picnic Crumbs......

.........is a  an anthology of anecdotes and amusing tales, past and present, of picnics and outdoor food and eating on the move which will delight, amuse and possibly appal its readers. Peppered with obscure and historical recipes from around the world, from Bear Steak to Elephant’s Foot, it is dedicated to anyone interested in food, travel and British eccentricities.


Published in July 2012, Picnic Crumbs is seasoned with original illustrations by award-winning figurative artist Peter Haslam Fox which convey the times and spirit of anecdotes from a wide range of writers, including culinary icons like Constance Spry, Elizabeth David and Claudia Roden. Moonlit alfresco banquets or sand in the sausages on blustery beaches; a British Rail ham sandwich back in the day, caviar on a plane; or sustaining soup garnished with dog hair in Siberia; battlefields to romantic evenings; the Summer Season and a lot of quite serious disasters - it's all a picnic of sorts.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Picnic-Crumbs-Gathering-Picnics-Provisions/dp/0957048130/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337793720&sr=8-1

Colonial residues.

The elegant white buildings that were the backdrop to Zoffany's 18th century portraits of East India Company officials, merchants and adventurers, their wives and servants, have been heavily overlaid by succeeding Calcutta life. Gracious facades nevertheless still stand here and there overlooking the Maidan, cool and calm among grimy brick, dusty steel and glass or shiny new office buildings and the hurly burly bustle of this highly populated city. Old arcades are filled with shops and street traders and it is hazardous to look upwards as much as one would wish in Kolkata to admire buildings both beautiful and extraordinary; it will inevitably mean tripping over a broken pavement or someone whose whole attention is to the task in hand. Under one of the oddest directives so far from Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, that may mean a man carefully painting municipal street furniture blue to fulfil her stated ambition to make Kolkata a blue city - why, nobody appears to know.



Bengalis are intensely proud of their past as leaders of Indian Nationalism. Images and effigies of Ghosh or Bose adorn every junction that is not already dedicated to Vivekananda or Tagore. It is sad, nonetheless that so much of the past continues to crumble away as it did under the long communist rule of West Bengal The nationalists are rightly celebrated but, like it or not, the art and architecture of the colonialists is part of the city's history and is worth preserving for that and for its own sake. It is hard to include the astounding Victoria Memorial in that bracket but since it exists as an extraordinary space, it could be better used than currently. God knows what a man of such aesthetic albeit imperialist sensibilities as Lord Curzon would have thought if he had ever seen his dream in all its weight. If he dreamt of another Taj Mahal he got instead a brute of a building that sank instead of soared - quite literally, given the unsuitability of its marshy site for so vast an edifice.

The collection of Zoffanys, Tilly Kettles and Daniells inside the building is splendid nevertheless and the viewer is all too splendidly isolated by determined barricading from getting close enough actually to see them without binoculars. A shocking waste that could easily be rectified. The historical exhibition from Job Charnock to the Nationalists and Independence is exhaustive and informative but begins to look tired and could do with a revamp. One hears that the whole edifice is riddled with such corruption, and I don't mean rust and mould, that it is impossible for anything sensible to be achieved - it is probably a miracle that the paintings are so well known and well documented that they have avoided quiet sales. Like or loathe its looks, The Victoria Memorial is a tourist draw for locals and foreigners alike and could could become remarkable among the great exhibition venues of the world.



On this occasion my main interest was in the rather grim bronze statue of Queen Victoria herself, outside on the approach to the Memorial entrance. I have been editing the Vicereine Mary Minto's Indian Journals and the stunning bronze panels by Sir Goscombe John on the statue's plinth were originally made to surround that of the equestrian statue of Lord Minto, Viceroy from 1905-10. When his daugher Ruby saw the finished piece in 1911 she remarked on the foreshortening effect of the panels on the whole and Lady Minto later donated them to the Victoria Memorial. The Minto statue has now been banished with other Viceregal bronzes to a happy if secluded resting place in the beautiful gardens of Flagstaff House at Barrackpore, the Viceroys' country retreat. Removing the panels, it must be said, did not have the desired effect, the proportions are all wrong and Minto, Grand National jockey 'though he had been, looks a sadly diminished figure on a cinderella rat of a pony.



Nearby Flagstaff House, once the Private Secretary's residence, the Barrackpore Government House crumbles, its near ruin an almost  defunct police hospital. Its now unkempt gardens stretching down to the river must have been an oasis for the Viceroys and a place for something like normal life after the barracks-like Government House in Calcutta where armies of underemployed staff did nothing to reduce the inconvenience. The Barrackpore gardens, like those at Viceregal Lodge in Simla, gave successive Vicereines the opportunity to pursue their gardening ambitions and decry those of their most immediate predecessors. A great shading tree that was the site for viceregal breakfasts still thrives, and, away from the hurtling buses on the main road outside the gates, it is easy to relax into the peace of this beautiful spot. Governor Generals and Viceroys seldom escaped their work altogether, however, judging by the regularly spaced telegraph towers still stand among the shacks and shops on the edges of the road between Government House and Barrackpore. The final one is immediately adjacent to the house and, since its removal from more public view,to yet another statue of Lord Curzon. He might not have minded in this setting that its plinth is the favoured spot for pi dogs basking in the sun.



These days, although it is easy to imagine the complications of life in Government House and to empathise with its critics like Bishop Heber, who wrote of 'columns in a paltry style' and 'three stories, all too low', it is impressive for the sheer scale of its ballrooms and banqueting halls and then for the occasional treasures of the past, especially amongst the holdings of the Governor's private library. Of all the great rooms, the most evocative of the past are the still-used council chamber, easily recognisable from hundred year old photographs and the ADCs ante-room, still containing a billiard table and echoes of mild inebriation, high jinks and cigar smoke. In the lower level entrance hall it is easy too to imagine the foggy winter gloom in these 'dreary catacombs' where, according to the Asiatic Journal, the ghastly effect was magnified by the bodies of blanketed palanquin bearers sleeping on the floor like the dead in their winding sheets.



And so back to the beginning, at least of the colonial city, where the visitor may soak herself in the essay like church wall and cemetery epitaphs to the shortlived heroes and suffering heroines of the past, from Job Charnock onwards. Just as size mattered so much in government buildings that stamped the footprint of an invading culture on India soil, the memorials in the cemeteries of Calcutta are on a monumental scale, often in inverse proportion to the length of a life. In the South Park Street cemetery, a child's mausoleum comes as pillared and porticoed as Greek temple. Charnock's mausoleum rests among the earlier and less magnificent graves of his contemporaries and other later notables in the church yard of St John's, the original East India Company Anglican Cathedral of Calcutta. The churchyard also contains Curzon's Black Hole of Calcutta monument, a surprising survivor of Independence given the opposing views of British mythmakers and some Indian historians on the whole episode. Inside the church a recently restored Last Supper by Zoffany glows above a side altar; the improbable models for the disciples, various worthies of his day, and Jesus, the Greek priest. The later, gothic St Paul's Church has since become the Cathedral of the Calcutta diocese of the Church of India, its wonderful stained glass windows by Burne-Jones commemorating another Vicereine, Lady Mayo.



The Bengal Club is another monument to an earlier and very different society. Like old British Clubs the world over it somehow retains an ambience of the past with bearers waiting to launder a shirt or bring tea and biscuits to huge lobbied bedrooms, these days well plumbed and airconditioned, whose balconies overlook the hawkers and shops of Russell street. Members and their guests nod to each other in passages and tea rooms; pre-lunch bloody marys are served in the bars and beautifully dressed women eat in the dining rooms under the forbidding painted eye of whiskered former members. In their day Indians and women were banned from membership - Indians could not even be guests.

At the Calcutta Cricket Club, a perfect green lawn is now surrounded by the high buildings of the modern city. Cricket and tennis go on outside and for cricket in India there is never a shortage of enthusiastic players and spectators. Inside, whisky drinkers sit in the chill of airconditioning at the old horseshoe bar drinking Islay and Jura malts, another reminder, with more solid memorials, of so many colonial Scots tramping throughout Indian/British history.

It is said that when Sir Colin Campbell was marching to relieve the siege of Lucknow in 1857, the rebel bugler, a former sepoy, all unknowing, sounded the only march he knew: 'The Campbells are coming'. A gossipy atmosphere of past and present stories of the Kolkata social merry go round plays out in the bar. One elderly man's wife was slapped by his mistress, a famous singer, in a restaurant many years ago and never went out again. Another aging roué has brought his wife with him to everyone's surprise - she looks miserable and one wonders who is proving what to whom at this stage of their lives. It is hardly obvious to the outsider but the glitterati and the literati mix less in Kolkata than they do in other great Indian cities like Delhi. As for Mumbai, both Kolkatans and Delhiites will tell you that they have no literati there, only business and Bollywood.

Who mixes with whom may be an issue but there is a sense of community in West Bengal that is unusually tangible and exemplified in its charitable institutions, whether a Muslim community group in the slums,a children's NGO like Future Hope, started in in the last 20 years by an English banker, or an older organisation like the volunteer run All Bengal Women's Union, founded by women leaders in the community to help women and children who had been raped, trafficked or were sex workers and had been abandoned by their families. The organisation now offers schooling to slum children and care for elderly women, with variably successful vocational training schemes for their younger sisters. It also has the best cafe serving genuinely and deliciously home-cooked Bengali food in the city for rock-bottom prices.

It is hardly comparable but the Indian Museum, another great white but fittingly proportioned building facing the Maidan, seems also to fulfil community needs. It is a popular place to go, not only filled with enforced school parties but by dallying young couples, determined groups of matrons, the casual wanderer and the curious tourist of any nationality. Its high rooms and verandahs are cool enough and it contains, after all, something for everyone, albeit one might regret the lack of judicious weeding out of the collections and wish for additional spit and polish in their presentation. It seems time-warped and therefore irresistible. In rooms redolent of 19th century collectors and little changed from those early days, this is Kim's Wonder House. Everything is here, from moth eaten Scottish stags heads to ancient religious relics and sculpted stone of whimsical design and poetic beauty,thousands of years old. Anything may be thrown in, apparently randomly,with the confused collections of enthusiastic and often amateur botanists, metallurgists and archaeologists of changing decades and diverse ethnic extraction. The Museum may be another colonial building but it is undoubtedly an Indian Museum containing a taste of every era of India's history, civilisations, tribes, invaders and settlers and seeming somehow to mirror the broad flood of life outside its doors.

Anish Kapoor in India

Anish Kapoor ‘s fame is belied by a somewhat shy and self-effacing manner that suggests he would be more comfortable by far back in his studio creating his extraordinary works than discussing them with his public – let alone making speeches on the subject. These days ‘though an artist of Kapoor’s stature is expected to share himself and to be a star, prepared to sell the man as well as his art, however consistently, as in his case, the art sells itself. So, at the opening of his retrospective exhibition in Mumbai last week, the artist did the proper thing: briefly greeting his audience partying in the garden outside the exhibition studio, thanking all those who had helped to create the show and leaving it to the spokespeople from the British Council and Louis Vuitton, the sponsors, further to interpret its importance and that of the return of the artist to his birthplace.

This year I have seen Kapoor’s solo exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, a bizarre juxtaposition of monumental contemporary sculpture and great 18th century rooms that often seemed overcrowded by the works on show. The most memorable pieces there, the great mass of silver spheres in the courtyard called ‘Tall tree and the eye’ that endlessly reflected the moving queues of people heading for the show; the bright pigmented pieces, disciplined bursts of colour reminiscent of Indian temple precincts with their stalls of carefully crafted pyramids of coloured mandala powders – the colours of the festival of holi and of India in general; the crowded room of ‘hive’ pieces, great piles of petrified writhing clay, seen out of the corner of the eye, almost to be living.

For me, the press grabbing red wax works, aside from the shock of the blast of the cannon firing wax balls at a wall, were of curiosity value only in this setting – how much mess could be made on a white wall or a great arched doorway? The impact of the cannon was clearer in the better fitting contemporary space of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao this summer where different mirrored pieces demanded the attention of the viewer and where we were lucky to arrive early to an almost empty museum space – a rare luxury and almost unheard of at a highly publicised and must see exhibition in London these days.

So my fascination in the Kapoor’s work has grown and has also become an inspiration for my daughter’s art ‘A’ level projects involving backdrops of the Guggenheim and Kapoor pieces for photographs of giant bright coloured jellies and heaps of insoluble food colour powder. It took, the Mumbai opening, however, to confirm me as a fully fledged Kapoor groupie, queuing to shake hands with the diffident and somewhat exhausted great artist at his second Indian opening in a week. Sonia Gandhi had already inaugurated the first part of the exhibition in Delhi saying ‘Few artists of our time have captured the imagination of the World as Anish Kapoor’.

In the Mehboob film studios in Bandra, Mumbai, Kapoor’s works showed at their most remarkable in a huge space with high roughcast walls and enough room for most of Bombay and Bollywood high society to meet and greet and show off, high fashion and sparkly images reflected endlessly in the artist’s curving mirrored walls, concave or convex panels and dishes, that reveal, change and consume the viewer; one minutely fractured to create a massive and magical kaleidoscope of its surroundings.

For the first time, unimpeded by the habitual barriers and health and safety hurdles of European galleries, the wax firing cannon not only had its audience jumping but also made sense – for some reason firing wax at roughcast walls is more effective than at smooth paint ‘though why, I cannot tell. The lack of barriers too, just a few polite young people watching out for the unwary or the clumsy backing into a shining surface, allowed a far more personal interaction with every piece and, one imagines, a closer view of the artist’s concept.

For me, overwhelmed by the richesse on show, the most desirable piece was the great spike or spire of polished mirrored steel, apparently pouring endlessly, mercury like, into the floor surface and drawing the eye magnetically from all corners of the room. Irresistible.

A Rajasthan Wedding

‘O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
the brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
and monarchs to behold the swelling scene’

Not in fact a battle but a royal wedding in Rajasthan; attended by former princes galore, at least one monarch and and another ex king, Gyanendra of Nepal. A scene swelling with the fabled colours of the Rajasthan desert and its peoples; gilded by the stars of Bollywood and international rock; a feast of images worthy of the muse and quite other worldly to those more used to lower key European weddings.

The marriage of the Yuvraj Shivraj, son of the Maharajah of Jodhpur, to Rajkumari Gayatri of Askote-Raj, may be one of the last great traditional weddings among the former royal families and was celebrated as such in a state where ‘Bapji’ Jodhpur, is still respected to a degree in keeping with his lifetime of work for Jodhpur and the state of Rajasthan. Noblesse oblige.
This wedding was a celebration too of the bridegroom’s astonishing recovery from an almost mortal injury in a polo match six years ago and an auspicious augury for a continuance in the status quo that few of the population of Jodhpur deeply invested in their historical traditions had dared hope for. Jodhpur was en fete.

For foreign guests, Indian weddings are always spectacular events requiring an unusual degree of stamina and, when among the warrior Rajputs at least, on whom whisky has no more obvious effect than mother’s milk, a hard head and a good liver. A wardrobe is required that extends far beyond the usual and re-usable wedding clothes lurking in the recesses of the spare room cupboard. This wedding, in two cities and multiple venues involved as many changes of clothes in a day as an Edwardian house party, with jewellery and baggage to match. O for a lady’s maid and a Louis Vuitton cabin trunk or two.

In truth, while the Edwardian women of the Raj may, like Lady Curzon in her peacock dress, have competed to some extent with the satins, silks, chiffons and brocades of formal Indian attire, contemporary western style clothing in its poverty of colour and embellishment is hard pressed to shine next to a myriad coloured nine yard turban or a shimmering sherwani with diamond buttons, costume that makes the most undistinguished suddenly regal, let alone a woman’s swirling traditional tinselled and bejewelled ghagra and odhni .

Better then for the foreigner just to relax and revel in a spectacular repast for all the senses. The cheerful discord of the pipes of the Rajputana Rifles combined with folk singers belting out their best known songs from the roof top alcoves of the Rambagh Palace in Jaipur heralding the evening arrival of the barat procession led by a painted elephant, tusks streaming with tinsel and unmoved by red carpet style banks of flash photographers, bringing the bridegroom from Jodhpur to his bride. The bridegroom himself arriving at the last, straight and beautiful, sitting in an antique carriage drawn by Marwari horses who struggled against ruts in ground made marshy by heavy unseasonable rain.

Private family and religious wedding ceremonies morphed into drinks and dinner, guests drifting like petals in the evening breeze, stopping to greet old and new friends or gawp at the world famous such as Mick Jagger and Sting or, and more covetously, the spectacular jewels adorning both men and women; groups ebbing and flowing around the green acres of the Rambagh lawns; the bharat followers remarkably fresh after an all night party on a special train from Jodhpur and an early morning breakfast at a desert tented camp.

A return train trip to Jodhpur the following day gathered up new guests from Jaipur and reunited the men’s bharat party with the women of the bridegroom’s family and their friends, who remained in Jodhpur in keeping with tradition. Any idea that the women had been other than enjoying themselves as hard as the men was dispelled the next day by the improbable sight of kitsch plastic palm trees adorning the Umaid Bhavan Palace gardens as a backdrop, from all accounts, to some serious female partying.

For foreigners, serious shopping too had to be fitted in somewhere and well oiled expeditions to the narrow lanes of the old city encouraged abandonment to the seduction of salesmen luring customers with soft as butter Kashmiri shawls, myriad coloured silks and embroideries reputedly designed for the great fashion houses of the World and being sold, naturally, at a snip of their real price.

The romantic tour de force of the festivities, a dinner and dancing in the Mehrengarh Fort that evening, transported us all to an earlier era. The steep, carefully lit, walk up to the Fort in full evening dress and for safety’s sake on the cobbles, discarded heels, rewarded by a mesmerised sense of timelessness induced by Zilla Khan’s exquisite sufi singing. More temporal desires finally overtaking the crowds in a determined post trance search for the bar at the end of the crowded ramparts as a wave of thirsty people flowed onwards and upwards, the blue city unfolding far below them. The magic was restored by dinner in the courtyard of the ancient and lately restored Zenana building, a fitting setting for a post prandial nautch performance and where the crowds, however many hundred, were dwarfed by the surrounding impenetrable walls. The Nautch was followed by rather less lithe performances on the discotheque floor where we danced or swayed about until dawn.

A sustaining breakfast at Raas, the latest jewel in the hospitality chain in Jodhpur, was followed next morning by much needed mid-morning trays of bloody marys passing generously round the vast halls of the Umaid Bhavan Palace to rejuvenate the jaded and over partied for the culmination of the wedding festivities, the grah pravesh, the arrival of the bride at her new home. The assembled company, once more in their most colourful and traditional costumes with cameras at the ready, watched a procession led by the horses of the Jodhpur Lancers, the bride, more mundanely, bringing up the rear in a white 4x4, to be greeted by her new family. The ceremonial followed swiftly and inevitably by a large and delicious lunch before the bump back to earth began for most of us with thought of trains and planes to catch and the whole greyer reality of daily life, outside this happy, rainbow bubble, to face once again.

The place to stay in Jodhpur

For a change I have been so far off my cockroach scale of hotels, staying in such blissful surroundings that I am still, back in freezing England, basking in the warm glow of remembered comforts. I have a photograph of the former Ras haveli in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, from 1907; the great Mehrengarh fort on its rocky hill, one of the most distinctive backgrounds in India; the cow in the foreground of the picture, one imagines, an ancestor of those that still cluster close to the gate of the erstwhile haveli, now the Raas hotel and one of the newest jewels in Rajasthan hospitality.

The hotel is both contemporary in architecture and wholly sympathetic to its 18th century shell and its surroundings next to an ancient step well, amongst the crowded streets and lanes of the old city. An almost aerial view looking down at Raas from the ramparts of the fort shows an oasis with moghul style ponds and cascades, a cerulean infinity pool picking up on the colours of the blue city and cooling patches of green in decorative and kitchen gardens. Green themes of a different variety are clear from above in the banks of solar panels supporting a steady supply of power for air cooling and winter warming and reliable gushing hot water.

‘There’s a place in Rajputana with a fort of old renown
And a liberal-hearted fine old king.
And the traveller who visits that most hospitable town
Hears a lot about Sir Pratap Singh’
(from Rhymes of Rajputana, GH Trevor, 1894)

Nikhilendra Singh, the great grandson of Sir Pratap Singh, Regent of Jodhpur in the late 19th and early 20th century and inspired proprietor of Raas, has left little to chance in this ideal hotel – there are few if any rough edges. The pavilion like dining room with roof top bar offers Indian and European menus of an elegant simplicity to match the carefully spaced linen covered tables, laid with regiments of perfect wine glasses, the better to taste the ever growing numbers of quality Indian wines. Stuffed owls, situated in high alcoves above the tables are one of the few signal failures at Raas, their theoretical object to scare off importunate pigeons whose cooing vibrates regardless through conversation, adding, as they perch cheerfully next to their glassy eyed predators, to the arcadian atmosphere.

Monsoon in Rajasthan has lately continued into the winter, making surprising changes in the Jodhpur desert and adding an unexpected element to high season travel in Rajasthan – gum boots may be required packing. Raas caters for those disinclined to get mud to the knees on shopping trips in the Jodhpur markets with indoor comforts, flat screen televisions in the rooms and a long list of available dvds. There are verandahs attached to rooms that overlook the inner courtyard for reading and relaxing or you can just lounge on your huge bed waiting for room service to keep up the steady supplies of drink and food to your room. Beauty treatments are available or a local tailor will create a new wardrobe or make well fitting jodhpur trousers to be shipped later to your home. There is a spa and a shop selling unusual jewellery, objets d’art and handcrafts a few steps into the courtyard – an umbrella and someone to carry it over you will be available on wet days for those with permeable hairstyles.

The streets of the City are endlessly fascinating, a photographer’s and, of course, a shopper’s paradise. At Raas you are cocooned from the bustle and noise outside by old walls and from the business of the hotel, should you so wish, by movable slatted stone jali screens that concertina shut across the verandahs. At the same time you remain part of the City and only yards away from the life of the market and the hurly burly round the old Jodhpur clock tower. Tuk tuk rickshaws are the best transport, weaving most easily between larger vehicles stuck in a morass of cows, motorcycles and a wedding procession or two – the hotel has its own decorated in Jodhpur blue - cars are best used only for longer journeys and need time to work their way through the streets to the hotel entrance to sweep you up to the Mehrengarh or to other parts of remarkable Rajasthan.

Like the state and perhaps Jodhpur in particular, Raas has a unique character created not only by its bricks and mortar, however beautifully designed, but most of all by its people. The colours of the state may be more muted in the uniforms and calming neutral colours in Raas accoutrements but the charm and flashing smiles of the staff are in keeping with its surroundings and make staying there as easy and friendly experience as staying in a private house whilst knowing full well that professionals are in charge and doing all to make your stay as close to perfection as possible.

A View of Kashmir

This piece was written in 2009 – things have not changed a great deal in spite of recent reports of curfews in Indian Kashmir. Travelers should not be put off. Things on the ground are seldom as bad or as dangerous as the media would have us believe and the Kashmiris, after all, are desperately keen to rebuild their tourist trade and will look after you.



For tourists prepared to ignore the dramatics of the world’s and especially the rest of India’s press stories, the divisions in the state of Kashmir and Jammu are not as obviously the great wound between India and Pakistan but more the difference between the lush and beautiful valley and it’s courteous and dignified people and the barren hills of the plateau of Ladakh. Leh, the capital of Buddhist Ladakh, only a handful of decades out of the relative isolation of an inaccessible kingdom in the Himalayas, has become, for its brief summer season, a tourist and trekking hub, with foreign tourists apparently outnumbering locals in the main bazaars of the town. In the winter, ‘though, carpeted in thick snow, the tourists and the traders from Jammu and Srinagar who cater to them return from whence they came and traditional Ladakhi life once again holds sway as sociable and fun-loving locals drink local beer, chang, and party with friends and family to survive cold so extreme that toothpaste freezes in the tube and changing clothes is out of the question.



Life in Ladakh in the past could hardly be said to be easy but the extraordinary contentment with a subsistence life that revolved around seasons, family, community and religious ritual and festival is still apparent in the villages away from from Leh where work and play continue for the moment with much the same rhythms as the past. NGOs these days struggle here as in every underdeveloped and poor area to improve health, education, nutrition, hygiene and high child mortality rates but awareness of other lives has not so far diminished the good humour and high spirits of Ladakhis. A passionate pride in home place and environment is habitual among Indians, indeed to the extent sometimes that the outsider is left wondering how on earth this vast country holds together at all even without politically inspired problems. In Ladakh this means that most Ladakhis who leave for work or education have return as their goal and remain at all times deeply rooted in their villages and mountains.

In the Kashmir valley too there is enormous pride in everything Kashmir has been, beloved of Mogul emperors and as much by the less glamorous invaders of the British Raj. The intensity of pride in the valley means a deep distrust of close neighbours, even the peaceful Ladakhis whose morality and honesty is questioned no less than that of plains’ Indians. Kashmiris are prickly, no doubt about it, but they have been so regularly and endlessly damned by the press and by ill-informed foreign politicians with little understanding and no experience of the people or situation of the valley, that they can hardly be blamed for that. As it is the extraordinary handicrafts of Kashmir, the exquisite shawls and carpets in particular have been ruthlessly exploited by greedy markets and traders, not, it has to be said, all outsiders, to the extent that there is little appreciation these days for pieces once understood as works of art and now merely as commodities. The Chiru antelopes that provided the fine wool for fabled shatoosh shawls for hundreds of years are almost extinct, the effect of an impatient market with no patience with rarity value. Factories in Lubhiana and elsewhere produce thousands of pretty enough machine made and cheap versions of shawls that would otherwise take weeks, months or even years to produce and ersatz versions of Kashmiri carpets are made on looms around the world.



There are those like the Kashmir Loom Company and other determined and foresighted businesses fighting with some success for continued recognition of the old skills that make a handmade shawl or carpet as much to be valued and understood as an old master painting. They are up against other problems as young people dismiss old family traditions and skills in favour of quicker, easier ways to make a buck. It is only to be hoped that the skills can at least be kept alive by the encouragement of a few and the discerning collectors who are their clients. It is hard ‘though, when a carpet made by hand over two years and involving the skills of a dozen craftsmen from 4 or 5 families sells wholesale for a couple of thousand dollars, the price only rising later by hundreds of percent for the retailer’s profit.

Tourism should once again be the other money spinner for the valley but the scare stories and the advice of foreign ministries and offices abroad have created impregnable barriers to most holiday makers. Good value, stunning scenery, excellent food, magnificent fishing, beautiful gardens, remarkable culture and unique shopping, do not, it seems, outweigh the conviction that every delight comes with attached explosions. As it is the houseboats on the Dal and Nageen lakes are fuller than they have been, young Israelis, against all advice of their government are the most apparent nationality both here and in Ladakh, but it is not enough. They are as a rule traveling on a freedom kick after compulsory military service and often more interested in cheap drink and dope than culture and carpets.



Since I was last in Kashmir, three years ago, there have certainly been changes and not only in the weight of motor vehicles in Leh. Perhaps the wheel is turning a little towards a greater optimism. The new, young and energetic Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, inheritor and emulator of a family tradition, is setting about the infrastructure of the state with a will. The precipitous road through the mountain passes from Srinagar to Kargil and on to Leh is being improved dramatically and even at a relatively early stage the journey time has been cut by some hours. The promotion of skiing and winter sports in Gulmarg and Sonamarg may become increasingly effective against the vast costs of skiing holidays in Europe and as the essential infrastructure for winter tourism grows. Other sports such as golf are being catered for with new international level courses – Omar Abdullah’s Father, Farouk, was not loved for his use of public money to build a perfect golf course in Srinagar at a time of extreme strife, shortage of housing and public works but such extravagance may pay dividends in time.

Meanwhile a razor wired and massive army presence causes the greatest depredations on the state and adds the most visual weight to the doomsayer stories we all read and hear so regularly. Less obvious than it was in Srinagar a few years ago, the people of the valley still detest this colonizing force and the cost of its existence. Whereas, in more laid back Ladakh, a hearts and minds approach of school building and fraternization has created a reasonably easy relationship, mistrust of the political and military centres of Hindu India combined with local pride does not allow any hope of a comfortable compromise in the valley. For the outside spectator the costs of its massive army, a permanent occupying and ill occupied force throughout Indian border territories, is, in the face of extremes of perpetual poverty in rural and urban India, mismanagement at best, immoral at worst.