The unused seventeenth-century palace in Datia

We stopped en route from Gwalior to Orchha at an incredible Rajput palace perched above the small town built in the indo-Islamic style. The journey to the palace involved a driving up steep single-lane road through the shops and houses, avoiding the open drain on one side and the cows, trucks and motorbikes coming down the other way. And nobody lost their temper.

And what an amazing place this was! For those who would like to know, here’s the official information:

The entrance doesn’t really convey the size of the place – it has seven stories (the only palace in India to do so, said our guide) and 440 rooms! It took eight years to build and was only occupied for one night (can that be true?). The first two stories are pretty much built into the hillside, the lowest an artillery storehouse, and the second the defence offices. They are not much decorated although there is the occasional example of a once-beautiful roof:

The staircases are really confusing, some leading nowhere (as a form of defence) and others being extremely steep and narrow.

And then you reach the third floor which has four open courtyards (for art, music, and is shaped like a swastika. Rooms open off rooms with long views and a sense of complexity all round.

As we moved round, there were few local tourists except for a boisterous school party who spotted us in one of the courtyards and unfurled their flag so that we could all have our pictures taken.

There is a little decoration includng a ceiling scene which we found enchanting:

The structure becomes more complex as you mount higher with twelve courtyards on the fourth floor (also in the shape of a swastika) and goodness knows how many on the fifth. There is some story about gambling on the fourth floor involving concubines, but I didn’t fully understand. There was also some calculation about the pillars and gambling which I didn’t understand – some sixty-four of them on this floor.

When you reach the fifth floor, things open out:

You’re able to see the domes of the four queens and the four concubines (the former ribbed, the latter plain).

Some restoration work is going on so you can see the old and the new (and the workers):

You can also see the final floors but they’re being restored as well (I think one level is the library and the top is the king’s apartment).

This was all made with brick and stone – no wood, iron or anything else. Repairs seem pretty labour-intensive – we saw women beating the floor to level it:

There were many locked rooms, some of them decorated but which were protected by grills – here’s my best attempt at looking inside one of them through the grill:

And here’s the thing: according to the Madhya Pradesh tourist website, the guy who built this – Veer Singh Deo – built over fifty monuments in the region. This one is little visited and little known – imagine if it were anywhere else in the world. So if you like this kind of thing, look forward to tomorrow’s blog when we visit Orchha which has many, many of these monuments! But if you prefer to see modern life, we’ll also be posting a blog of the little town which is charming and full of life.