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By flying boat across India

In 1941, as war clouds loomed over southeast Asia, a Chicago News correspondent by the name of George Weller flew from Cairo to Singapore on assignment. In Singapore, Weller reported on the British Empire’s ineffectual preparations for an attack that was sure to come from Imperial Japan. When the attack did come, it was not from the sea—as the British expected and were prepared for—but through the jungles of Malaya. Weller reported on the Japanese forces’ astonishingly effective campaign down the Malayan Peninsula and the subsequent doomed defense of Singapore. He was there until almost the very end, when the remaining British Empire forces in Singapore surrendered on February 15, 1942. The following year, he published his firsthand account of the fall of Malaya and Singapore, the engrossing Singapore Is Silent.

Japanese troops parading in Singapore after the fall of the city. [Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD]

Japanese troops parading in Singapore after the fall of the city. [Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD.]

Something that I found particularly interesting in Singapore Is Silent was Weller’s account of his flight from Cairo to Singapore. The two cities are a little over 5,100 miles apart by the great-circle route, which runs mostly over the Indian Ocean and only crosses the southern part of peninsular India. A flight like this would be no big deal with a modern long-range airliner like a 787 (even thought it seems that there are currently no airlines offering direct service between Cairo and Singapore). But this was far beyond the range of the airliners of the day.

A Short Sunderland Mk V in military (RAF) service. [Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD.]

A Short Sunderland Mk V in military (RAF) service. [Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD.]

In Singapore Is Silent, Chicagonews (as Weller calls himself in the narrative) flies to Singapore aboard a Short Sunderland operated by British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC). The Sunderland was a flying boat, so it could only take off and land on water. The plane had a maximum range of 1,780 miles, which meant that it had to stop several times to refuel on its way to Singapore. BOAC routed its plane north of the great-circle route, sending it across northern India, where there were plenty of places to stop. Chicagonews’s route across India was this: Karachi (still a part of India at this point), Jaipur, Allahabad, “the narrow upper waters of the Ganges” (no city name specified), and Calcutta.

Karachi is on the coast and Allahabad and Calcutta are on the Ganges (Ganga) river system, but what about Jaipur? It is in arid Rajasthan, with no ocean or large river in sight.

Chicagonews’s plane touches down on “the Rajah’s lake near Jaipur,” where a motor launch takes the passengers to shore. This was clearly one of the artificial lakes around Jaipur. Although I have not been able to find a source to tell me which one it was, I think that it was most likely Jamwa Ramgarh, an irrigation reservoir 15 miles northeast of the city that was built in 1901. With a long axis of about 4½ miles, the lake would have been long enough for the takeoff run of a big flying boat.

Jamwa Ramgarh Tal, as pictured on a 1963 US Army Map Service map. The lake has been dry since 2000. Source: Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.

Jamwa Ramgarh Tal, as pictured on a 1963 US Army Map Service map. The lake has been dry since 2000. [Source: Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.]

The route crossing India by flying boat was a recent development. In the late thirties, Imperial Airways (BOAC’s predecessor) had taken its flying boats only as far as Karachi; for the crossing of India itself, passengers had transferred to landplanes and flown a route of Karachi–Jodhpur–Delhi–Allahabad–Calcutta. When Imperial Airways introduced flying boats for the crossing of India, the route was changed to Karachi–Rajsamand Lake (near Udaipur)–Gwalior–Allahabad–Calcutta.

The age of overseas travel by flying boats was brief. Long-distance routes like BOAC’s Cairo-Singapore were disrupted by Axis conquests during World War II. By the end of the war, land-based planes had become bigger, faster, and longer-ranged, so airliners could make overseas flights with fewer intermediate stops. For example, BOAC adopted the Boeing 377 in 1949, which had a range of 4,200 miles, more than twice the range of the Short Sunderland from just a decade earlier. The Boeing 707, which BOAC adopted in 1960, had a long enough range that it could fly all the way from Cairo to Singapore without making any stops at all in between.

The airport in Jaipur (now a strictly land-based airfield in Sanganer on the south side of the city) is no longer a stopover point for international flights. Long-range planes can simply bypass Jaipur on their way to bigger airports. Jaipur International Airport (JAI) does have direct flights to Dubai, but otherwise its traffic is domestic.

JAI terminal building

The modern terminal building at Jaipur International Airport.

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Willy Loves Monuments 2016

A rhesus macaque sits on a sign identifying the Sun Temple at Galta-ji (Jaipur) as a Rajasthan state protected monument.

A rhesus macaque sits on a sign identifying the Sun Temple at Galta-ji (Jaipur) as a Rajasthan state protected monument.

Last month, the Wikimedia Foundation staged a contest called Wiki Loves Monuments 2016. Users uploaded photos of national- and state-level protected monuments in participating countries (including India), and a jury would select the best photos in certain categories.

On September 1, I found out about WLM 2016 when I looked at Wikimedia’s most popular website, Wikipedia. A banner below the search bar announced: “Photograph a monument, help Wikipedia, and win.” I was delighted. Although I held no illusions that any of my photos would win a prize, I felt as if this contest had been made for me, and I for it. I’d spent the past year visiting all the protected monuments in Jaipur I could find. WLM 2016 gave me a reason to visit more of them. I went to some I had never seen before, and I also returned to some familiar monuments to take better pictures expressly for contribution to WLM 2016. In all, I uploaded 31 pictures of 19 different monuments, all but three of which are in Jaipur.

Wikipedia keeps state-by-state lists of the protected monuments in India. There are two lists for each state: one for the monuments protected by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), and the other for those under the jurisdiction of the state archeological departments. These lists are, unfortunately, rather muddled. Each monument has a distinct identifier, assigned by Wikipedia, identifying the state in which it is located and whether it is protected by ASI or the state. The monuments are organized by identifier, rather than a more sensible district-by-district arrangement. The state-level lists include only those monuments that are listed on the ASI site. (This is at least the case for Rajasthan.) The reason for this is that these are supposedly the only monuments that are recognized at the national level, but this distinction seems dubious to me. The Rajasthan state-level list for some reason repeats several monuments also on the ASI list. In past years, users had uploaded and tagged pictures of the wrong monuments. Two different ASI monuments were illustrated with pictures of the very modern Birla Mandir, which was consecrated in 1985 and has no archeological significance.

Some of the confusion in the Rajasthan state-level list is due to the official list. Some monuments have non-standard names or spellings. Others are not described clearly enough to be identifiable. I am almost certain that one of the monuments in Jaipur that even made it onto the Wikipedia list, “Cenotaphs on Station Road,” does not exist anymore. The site indicated as a cremation ground on an old map is now occupied by modern buildings.

The one thing that disappointed me about WLM 2016 was how incomplete the state-level list was for Rajasthan. I went out and photographed several attractive state-protected temples, but I couldn’t upload their pictures because they weren’t on Wikipedia’s purportedly official list.

But I can upload them on my own website. So here they are, Internet! These are some of the state-protected monuments of Jaipur that WLM 2016 missed. All of them are in the old capital Amber.

Panchmukhi Mahadev Temple backside

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Backside of Panchmukhi Mahadev Temple. This is one of two temples in the town with three shikharas (spires) like this.

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A Not-so-great Great Man History of Jaipur

Jadunath Sarkar and Raghubir Sinh (ed.), A History of Jaipur, c. 1503-1938 (1984; repr. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009).


In the 1930s, the Maharaja of Jaipur State, Sawai Man Singh II, commissioned well-known Indian historian Jadunath Sarkar to write an official history of his state and his own ruling family, the Kacchawaha Rajputs. In undertaking this commission, Sarkar had access to the official records of Jaipur State, which had never been used by historians before. By 1940, Sarkar had finished his manuscript, but because of opposition by the nobles of Jaipur State (who generally come across negatively in the narrative), publication of the book had to be shelved indefinitely. It was not until more than forty years later, in 1984, that Sarkar’s book finally saw the light of day. By this time, the author and the commissioning Maharaja had both passed away. Sovereign Jaipur State also was no more; now it was just a district in the state of Rajasthan. Sarkar’s History of Jaipur was eventually published in a very different world than the one in which it was written.

I had been hearing about A History of Jaipur for a while when I finally got my hands on a copy recently and excitedly started reading it. My excitement did not last long, though. After the first few chapters, I had gotten thoroughly bored, and it ultimately took me more than a month to slog through the book. Had I known a little more about the context of the book and the background of its author, I would have been better prepared for the disappointment.

The most disappointing aspect of the book was that the title did not accurately reflect the contents. It isn’t A History of Jaipur; it is actually A History of the Rulers of Jaipur. Most of the book is just a dynastic history of the Kacchawaha house, from the early sixteenth century to Man Singh II. The narrative follows the Raja wherever he goes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Man Singh I, Mirza Raja Jai Singh I, and Ram Singh I served as generals in the Mughal army, often spending years away from their capitals at a stretch. Sarkar wrote in tiresome detail about all these campaigns, completely ignoring whatever might have been happening on the home front at this time. I would love to know about economic and cultural life in the Kacchawaha kingdom, but Sarkar had nothing to say about these topics.

It isn’t really surprising that Sarkar wrote a Great Man history of the Kacchawaha house, since he was commissioned to write his history by the ruler of that clan. Surely Sawai Man Singh II wanted to be portrayed as a Great Man from a long line of Great Men.

Jadunath Sarkar was best known for writing about the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707, contemporary with Jai Singh I and Ram Singh I). His magnum opus was the five-volume History of Aurangzeb (1912-24), which I now have absolutely no desire to read. As Mohammad Shah points out, Sarkar thought that (Islamic) Mughal rule in India had been oppressive, and British rule was an improvement.1 Aurangzeb comes across in Sarkar’s histories as a temple-smashing religious fanatic, emblematic of the broadly oppressive policies of the Mughal Empire.

In writing the official history of Jaipur State, Sarkar had to change his tack. The reason is that the Kacchawaha house was the first Rajput kingdom to join the Mughal Empire, when the daughter of Raja Bharmal of Amber married Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1562. Condemning the Mughal Empire would, in effect, condemn the Kacchawaha house, because they had willingly joined the empire through a marriage-alliance. Instead, Sarkar restricted his criticism to certain aspects of Mughal policy. Aurangzeb comes across badly in A History of Jaipur as well, but mainly because of his supposed mistreatment of Jai Singh I and Ram Singh I.

In contrast with Mughal rule, British rule in India was, in Sarkar’s eyes, a great blessing. As a princely state, Jaipur was technically sovereign. A treaty signed in 1818 surrendered responsibilities of defense and foreign relations to the British, but the Maharaja of Jaipur could theoretically do whatever he wanted within the confines of his own kingdom. In reality, the British meddled in the affairs of the princely states, posting residents in the capitals and arbitrating in succession disputes. It was in the best interests of the princes to maintain good relations with the Paramount Power (as the British rulers styled themselves). When the Indian Mutiny broke out in 1857, the princes stayed on the side of the British, providing essential support for the suppression of the rebellion.

The glowingly positive terms in which Sarkar describes the British read almost comically nowadays. Take, for instance, this statement about the modernizer Ram Singh II:

The dawn of the modern age in Jaipur was due to the initiative and fostering care of a number of British officers of exceptional ability and generous sympathy, and it was the good fortune of Maharajah Ram Singh II to have been trained by them at the formative stage of his life and to carry to full maturity the reforms for which they had done the spadework.2

Or this one, about Madho Singh II’s visit to England to attend the coronation of Edward VII:

The unifying force of such an Empire [the British Empire] rises above caste, creed, and locality.3

If nothing else, A History of Jaipur is a reminder that the way we interpret history can change drastically over time. No Indian alive today would prefer the British Raj over independence. This attitude can too easily be imposed onto the past, so that all Indians at all times seem to have desired independence. But many members of the privileged classes in India—including Sawai Man Singh II and Jadunath Sarkar himself—benefited from British rule. A History of Jaipur is a relic of a period that most Indians now are willing to forget.

  1. Mohammad Shah, “Jadunath Sarkar’s interpretation of Aurangzeb’s reign,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh 28 (Dec. 1983): 133-41. []
  2. Sarkar, A History of Jaipur, 325-36. []
  3. Ibid., 355. []

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