Side galleries

Until now we’d taken a straight route through the linked courtyards of the main level of Junagadh Fort in Bikaner. I’ve written about the first courtyard, then the one with the fountain and the Diwan-i-Aam, and finally the one with the private court, Karan Mahal. After this we moved to the side galleries. I’ll talk about them in the reverse order of our visit, because they would then come in the same order as the quads.

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In the second courtyard, in the galleries opposite to the Diwan-i-Aam is the private royal temple. Niches on the wall contained paintings from the Ramayana. The flat style without any element of naturalistic perspective perhaps indicated that the originals were rather old, perhaps among the oldest that we saw. One alcove held a small but beautiful statue of Vishnu with Lakshmi, another was a statue in the aspect of a warrior, which I could not identify.

In the section with the Ramayana and the statue of Vishnu, the walls and ceilings were painted with rainclouds, corkscrew bolts of red and yellow lightning coursing between them. In the other shrine, the ceiling and walls was painted in the Sonakin style, gold and other colours on a ground of white stucco. All the doors were painted in the Jangali Sunthari style. I think the door that you see above has panels with paintings of scenes from the Ramayana. I can see the celestial elephant, Airavat, in one.

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The galleries next to the Diwan-i-Khaas in Karan Mahal have been turned into a small museum, filled with little things from what once may have been a royal treasury. I saw ivory sandals and jeweled buttons. A walking stick had a handle of gold and jade. A little bracket in the wall, quite unremarked, was a wonderful wooden sculpture of a bird eating berries from a tree. Once these barren rooms would have been filled with a hodge-podge of courtly life. We moved on.

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