Maharaja made Pink city quake-proof

Jaipur, Jan 30: Medieval cities were not built like our modern card houses. The rulers of the day seemed far more concerned for long-term ...

Jaipur, Jan 30: Medieval cities were not built like our modern card houses. The rulers of the day seemed far more concerned for long-term development than mindless, instant growth. For one, Maharaja Swai Jai Singh, the founder of Jaipur, introduced several features to protect the Pink City from natural calamities like famine or earthquakes.

According to Yaduvendra Sahai, director of Maharaja Sawai Man Singh Museum housed in the City Palace, the illustrious ruler of Jaipur, who gave his name to the city built in 1727, even ignored some principles of the Shilpa Shastra to protect it from vagaries of nature.

To start with, he chose the existing natural ridge as the focal point of the city, which was 15 degrees off the cardinal point prescribed by the Shilpa Shastra. The King, according to Sahay, felt that the ridge would make structures earthquake-resistant. The foundations of royal buildings were built very deep and he laid numerous shallow trenches beneath them for absorbing quake shocks. This was based on the belief that dry mines were safer compared to those which contained water, Sahay claimed.

For construction, Sawai Jai Singh used smaller boulders, lime and mortar. The mortar was passed through a protracted conditioning, including daily sieving, for six months before use. Sahay blamed insufficient maintenance for the cracks which appeared in the Hawa Mahal, built in 1799, during the January 26 quake.

Convinced that a stable ground was better than alluvial, Sawai Jai Singh had all underground water systems in the area mapped. The map is still available in the museum. Once this map was prepared, Sawai Jai Singh rejected the first plan for the construction of the city. Instead of tampering with natural hill fronts, he built structures Ghat ki guni along the eastern passage to ensure that boulders or run-off water from hills did not endanger the travellers or traffic.

Recently, a landslide blocked the road after a part of the 8220;guni8221; was flattened. Sawai Jai Singh also preserved existing water bodies. In the north, a lake taal was dug deeper and was renamed Taalkatora. A marshy land in the north-east was converted into Santosh Sagar. In the south, where no natural water body existed, he dug a moat inside the city wall. The development of Bapu Bazar and Nehru Bazar over this moat, and the elimination of Raja Mal ka Talab, were to a great extent responsible for the flash flood in 1981.