Hot desert winds spit across the Thar Desert blowing change through the desiccated landscape.

Dunes shift and reform, parched trees flutter and time, always adrift, heralds change in the Rajasthani way of life.

Hundreds of years ago, when funeral pyre’s flames licked the at sky, new widows ended themselves in its greedy flames. At the Mehrangarh Fortress, Maharaja’s wives left hand prints in its massive doorway just before their immolation, attest to this lost tradition.

Cars buzz in the city streets, but camels flatulent shrieks still pollute the city air, where they groan like antique cargo trucks as they pull heavy loads.

In the desert surrounding the towns where cars cannot travel, camel tracks from trader’s caravans still crisscross the swells of sand. Except the camel’s cargo is a new form of goods, equally valuable and brought by the winds of modernity and technology – tourists seeking the explore a long lost past.

 

Handprints at the towering gate of the Mehrangarh fortress attest to a past tradition of self immolation after the death of husbands, in this case Maharajas. The last self immolation at the fortress was in 1843.

 

A camel scrounging a meal in Rajasthan’s Thar Desert.

 

A Rajasthani woman in traditional attire.

 

A child in Jodhpur, “the blue city,” known for it’s pastel blue painted walls.

 

 

 

 

 

 


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