Rajasthan Holidays

Population : 55 million
Area : 342,000 sq.km
Capital : Jaipur
Main language : Rajasthani

Rajasthan or Rajputana of old is the most colourful and exotic of all Indian states. A land which bore a race of people known for their bravery and their chivalry. Yes, the Rajputs. A clan which maintained a high code of honour and conduct for themselves and for others too. The Rajputs were a martial race with a surprising keen sense of beauty, art and culture. They received their inspiration from their own life-style, from birds and beasts, from the earth and the sky and the vast expanse of sand around them. Their colourful festivals and fairs reflect all that they assimilated from their surroundings.

Rajasthan has long been regarded as the real home for the Maharajas. It has sometimes been presented as an enormous site on which forts, palaces, and gardens, the relics of an erstwhile princely order have been frozen for the benefit of posterity and the tourist- as if in a mammoth open-air museum. A living experience of some of the splendour and way of life of royalty-staying in their palaces-turned hotels and even traveling as they did in special personal trains and coaches, the royal “Saloon”.

Rajasthan is all this and much, much more - a mosaic of landscape and terrain, each of singular beauty, whether it is the dunes of the desert, or the craggy, forested hills on which the formidable Ranthambore fortress perches, in the midst of what is today India’s best wildlife parks, or lake studded environs of Udaipur.

The people of Rajasthan are perhaps the most colorful in a land of color - their history, religion, music and dance; arts and crafts remain vibrantly alive and active. In India, nowhere else, does the long, continuous past so pervasively press on the present as it does in modern Rajasthan. This, perhaps, is the secret of its charm.