Jodphur-The Blue City

Well, I guess this entry will equal finally caught up. I am still in Jodhpur an still experiementing with different ways of spelling the cities name. Jodphur is known as the 'blue city', although its name apparently means 'land of death'. I like the euphemism they chose to 'repaint' the city. Anyway, the reason Jodphur is known as the blue city is that many of its buildings (especially in the old section of the city) Once again, I have pasted in the link to these photos.

http://www2.snapfish.com/share/p=210251182786655956/l=276824892/g=86844910/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

The reason they painted/paint the houses blue began from a caste perspective. The Brahmins (the highest caste) were the only ones allowed to paint their houses blue and did it because-----something with the material used to color the paint was holy (ok, i got lost somewhere in the audio tour). Nowadays, anyone can paint their houses blue (assuming they can find the paint). The other reason for painting the houses blue, which is more interesting, to me, is that people think the color blue is a deterrent to insects, and so they are using it for that purpose.

So, to back up, I took an overnight bus last night....and so am incredibly tired, especially as I wait for my 11:30 pm overnight train departure. I arrived in Jodphur at around six this morning. I had read that a trip to the blue city would not be complete without a 'village safari'. Probl

ematic, I know, but as a pseudo-scholar of community-based tourism, i thought i'd go for it. On the four hour tour (sorry, i just can't tell a lie, it wasn't three and gilligan wasn't there), we visited six villages, most of which were just one house in the middle of a scrub desert. The different houses were quite interesting, and I included several photos from them. The people lived under very "simple" conditions, in mud houses, where they were busy grinding millet (see photo). unfortunately, i didn't get too much more info as my guides english skills left something to be desired. All of the houses were part of the Bornoi sub-caste. This group is particularly interesting, because they believe that nature (trees and animals) are so sacred that they are worth dying for. We went to the site where two hundred years ago the maharaja had tried to chop down some trees. Local women protested, tying themselves to the trees (the origination of the chipko movement!). Unfortunatley, the raj's soldiers cut these women's heads off. As the story goes (I am slightly skeptical), people kept coming, until 363 local villagers had been killed while trying to protect the forest. Now the area is a little park, complete with Peacocks (see photo!).

Two of the other houses we visited were owned by weavers, who showed me their very interesting looms (and unabashedly continually tried to sell me rugs, luckily for me i learned my lesson last year!) (see photos). The last house we visited was owned by a potter. Here in rajasthan, pottery is used quite commonly for drinking vessels as it remains cool. In fact, the roadside lassi (yoghurt smoothie) stands use disposable terra cotta containers for their drinks, which i guess are then simply recycled into clay. This bloke was making these containers, an interesting process i got to watch.

Upon returning to Jodphur, I went up to Meharagangh (sp?) fort. An incredible feat of engineering, it is perched ontop of this rocky outcropping that rises above the old city. It too falls into the impressive ornate fort category, sorry i can't give too much more of an accurate description than that! It is an incredible fort, and was accompanied by an equally incredible walking audio tour of 'international standards' (something Indians are big on proclaiming, often falsely). For me the neatest part of the fort experience was seeing the outer walls and how it had a curvy entrance way (to prevent elephants from gathering full steam when they charged the gates).

After wandering around the fort I weaved my way through the incredibly narrow streets of the old city, at its bluest. It was really pretty, but most so from above where you get a birds eye view of how all the blue coalesces. The rest of the afternoon i have spent sleeping on a park bench, and on the internet, two quite different modalities of being, much in keeping with India. ON to jaisalmer!