Mehrangarh Fort, Jodphur

The solid “twack” of mallet against ball, the rumbling thunder of hooves galloping toward a goal, the cry of “my shot, my shot.” Sound drifts out of the past, shouts and female cheering underlain by the slightly deeper encouragement of eunuchs. It’s polo I’m hearing, the game originated by a Maharajah of Jodhpur to amuse himself and his ladies, played for the royal court. Here, in Jodphur, is where it began.

Court paintings show richly dressed women swinging their long mallets, horses at a gallop. In the style of the period, no emotion shows on chiseled faces, but arms saw on bits, skirts fly, action indicating anything but retiring modesty, point to an aggressive desire to win.

We are in the treasury, have passed through the massive gates of Mehrangarh, a monolithic giant rising like some great Gulliver from the Lilliputian city clustered at its feet, nevermind the other two million people flaring out in a vast wrinkled tapestry of urban sprawl across the plains. Before the two million were born, elephants made dust storms where they now live, beat their way toward, then up the endless ramps of the Mehrangarh, climbing, climbing, carrying royal parties to the palace, the intricately carved cap atop the wall-topped cliffs.

“Two-thirds of the inhabitants were women,” our guide says. “Can you guess why?”

An Indian family passes, smug in belonging, in personal ownership of the past – these gold-leafed pictures, this treasure belongs to them, to previous incarnations of their friends, relatives, perhaps even to their very selves. It is theirs, a warm, almost remembrance, a certainty to hug close as a cloak against the heavy smog of a cold night.

“Guess why?” Well, duh. With maharajahs who went in for a hundred or more wives plus another two or three hundred concubines, each having their own female servants, the wonder is that only two-thirds were women. Twenty thousand or more soldiers were garrisoned there, as well, but they seldom, if ever, had the opportunity of breathing the rarified air at the top of the mountain, of enjoying the cooling breezes that whispered through the fretted, intricately carved sandstone screens that composed the outer walls, of looking over the parapets at a world as remote and inaccessible as Tibet.

Life within the walls, for all the splendor of construction, the glitter of colored Belgian glass, the marvel of mirrored walls, would have been grim and crowded.

There was no privacy, of course. It probably wasn’t missed. Water would have been in short supply, the smell of unwashed bodies oppressive in the desert heat … even with the light breezes. Smoke from the cooking fires in the courtyards would have seeped everywhere. Excrement from animals and humans would have added to the mix and risen above the ladies’ perfumes.

Danger. The maharajah’s amusement room, where his ladies danced to entertain him, was spotted with strategically placed mirrors, set to allow him to see right hands – the hand that might hold an attacking knife. Obviously, no ruler trusted either his guards or his women.

You would think, though, that most women would think twice and three times about attacking their lord, suti being a prized custom in Rajasthan. Prints of little hands lined up in rows on a wall by one of the gates, imprinted as the doomed soul passed this point for the last time, memorialize the women who joined their husbands on their funeral pyres. Fresh silver paint applied to these old hand prints and chains of flowers indicate that modern reverence for this custom still exists although the last known suti was in 1949.

We lean over an extruding balcony, peering into space, a view the suti designees would have seen just before their last walks. Maybe, less walk and more sway, a gait supported by copious quantities of opium.

“They ate it for breakfast,” our guide comments with a matter of fact shrug. “It was how they lived. They were all addicted.”

No wonder this strong point, seemingly impregnable to pre-20th century weapons, fell on three separate occasions.