About visiting and wandering around Garh Palace looking around the old buildings, rooms and paintings
The beautiful series of buildings which make up Garh Palace are situated beneath Taragarh Fort on the northern edge of Bundi Town in Rajasthan, India. The palace was constructed initially in the 16th century and was added too over the following 200 years. It was built in several stages against the hillside and the view of it plus Taragarh Fort sat on the hill above makes for an incredibly picturesque view when seen from Bundi Town.
The ticket office is located at the end of the car park – entry is between 0800 and 1700 each day and the tickets cost 100 Rupees each for non-Indians. Also note that if they notice you have a camera they will grab another 50RS on top – more for video. From the car park and ticket office a wide cobbled path goes steeply up to the Palace’s entrance gate. This cobbled path needs to be walked up with some care as it is really slippery on the worn shiny cobbles – walking back down is even more difficult in places!.
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Similarly to the considerations when going up to Taragarh Fort, there are a lot of monkeys living around the Palace including red-bottomed monkeys. This breed of monkey can be quite agressive especially if cornered so visitors should be aware of this and avoid them. There is also quite a bit of talk from the “guides” about the possible presence of cobra snakes in some of the darker reaches of the Palace so again this should be a consideration when wandering around though this may be more about said “guides” wanting you to hire them. Perhaps using one of these local “guides” would be advisable anyway if worried about either of the above. A further reason to hire one of them is that much of the Palace is behind locked or closed doors. Most of Garh Palace is unavailable to visit anyway presumably because it is privately owned – however usually for a small tip one of the “guides” will unlock some of the rooms higher up.
The Palace could be considered to be much better from the point of view of looking at it from the outside – it really is in a poor state of repair in much of it’s interior. As mentioned monkeys roam the place and there are a huge number of bats living up on the ceilings etc., with the accompanying mess, droppings and smell to add to the fun.
There are a couple of parts of Garh Palace to particularly make a point of visiting. On the first floor up there is a very nice and airy collanaded area – the feature apart from the good views of Bundi Town from one side are the carved black elephant sculptures on the columns. Further up the Palace on the second floor there are a couple of rooms which contain painted ceilngs and so on – usually the doors into these rooms are closed or perhaps even locked.
Don’t miss taking a look at the paintings and frescoes at the Chitra Sala and Hanging Garden within Garh Palace in Bundi.
The entrance to Chitra Sala – which is also known as Ummed Mahal or even Chitrashala – is located just above Garh Palace gate and looking round it is included in the admission price. The Umed Mahal with it’s nicely designed hanging garden at the front – was constructed during the 18th century by Rao Raja Umaid Singh. Inside the Mahal’s pavillion the walls have been beautifully illustrated with paintings depicting scenes from the subsequent reigns of Raja Umed Singh and of Raja Bishan Singh. There are a variety of themes to the murals – showing musical melodies, love stories, ladies dresses, hunting scenes with elephants and tigers and lavish court activities and ceremonies.
This area of Rajasthan is noted for the lavish colourful Rajput paintings and murals as opposed to using scultpures and carvings. The paintings which can be seen at the Mahal are considered about the best examples of this. Generally the colours used were greens and blues with touches of yellow, dark red and black.
- Please also take a look at our other topics about Bundi:
- Bundi Touring and Travel Guide
- Bundi Step Wells
- Looking round Bundi Taragarh Fort
- The following places are possibly of interest if touring this part of India:
- Jaipur touring, travel and sightseeing Guide Jaipur is also the closest airport to Bundi
- Chand Baori Step well Abhaneri Step Well is fairly near to Jaipur
- Pushkar Touring and Travel Guides
- Udaipur Travel and Touring guides
There is much more about touring in India via our India Travel and Touring Guide Home Page.