Jodhpur: a postcard from the lost world

On our way to the blue city of Jodhpur, we share the road with buffalo-drawn wooden ploughs, red-turbaned shepherds, men riding rickety bicycles piled high with building materials and flag-carrying pilgrims on their way to a holy site in the western desert. The dusty air is heady with incense on a day shot through with the silky colours of Rajasthan; reds, pinks, orange and saffron. 

We stop at a Jain temple high up in the mountains and wander its intricately carved marble interior, mesmerised by its icons and calm courtyards. We look out over a wild green landscape where leopards and Indian tigers still roam. 

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Jodhpur for us is the Rajasthan International Folk Music Festival. It’s a three-day event held in the gardens and palaces of the magnificent Mehrangarh Fort, chiselled from the red sandstone hill it rises from. 

Timed to coincide with the brightest full moon of the year, the rhythm of the festival program follows the passage of the moon as it rises above the 16th-century walls of the fort and sets many hours later in the early morning sky over Jaswant Thada, a pearly white marble memorial to the northeast of the fort. 

Throughout the warm afternoons, folk sessions are held on the manicured green lawns of the fort. Divya Bhatia, the Festival Director, introduces tribal performers with a succinct master class on desert culture and its changing musical traditions. 

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The nomadic Kalbeliya and Bopa tribes from the Thar desert play ancient stringed instruments, sing strange laments and dance in a hypnotic swirl of elaborate costumes. Monkey hunters and snake charmers hold us spellbound with stories of their beliefs and customs, a way of being in the world that is under threat from modernisation. 

Towards sunset each day, we drift towards a high vantage point to look out upon the old city of Jodhpur, all ancient palaces and cubist houses as blue as a fable. Great flocks of birds fill the sky as Australia’s Joseph Tawadros on the oud and Mark Atkins on the didgeridoo perform with traditional desert musicians and make new sounds together. 

One evening, Gaura Devi Bikaneri, a blind woman wearing a pastel widow’s suit, sings haunting doha verse poems with the strength of a performer who has been living these songs for all of her 60 years. 

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The palaces, courtyards and gardens of the Citadel of the Sun, as Mehrangarh Fort is known, are spectacular settings, but it’s the breath of the music and the brilliance of the performances that capture our heart. 

Reluctantly, we leave Jodhpur, taking a train deeper into the desert. From the window of our compartment, we gaze out on wild peacocks, gazelles, encampments of thatched, circular mud huts, goat herders, hilltop temples, grazing camels and women in shimmering saris winnowing grain. Closer to the troubled border with Pakistan, military bases and soldiers on active duty temper our enchantment. 

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Jodhpur, Rajasthan, late 2012

Postcards from the Lost World are from places we roamed before borders closed and overseas travel ceased. As we sit out the long interlude between journeys, we reimagine past wanderings and dream of a time before this time began.

Other postcards from the lost world: Cinque Terre, Gotland, Achill Island and Istanbul.