Jaipur: History

History
Jaipur was founded in 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, a Rajput ruler and noted astronomer, who relocated his capital from the hilltop fort at Amber to a new planned city on the plains below. The move was driven by the growing population’s need for more space and better water access than the older fortified hill capital could provide.

What makes Jaipur historically significant beyond its royal history is its status as one of India’s earliest examples of comprehensive city planning, laid out according to Vastu Shastra, the traditional Hindu architectural and town-planning treatise, with a precise grid of streets and nine rectangular blocks reflecting the nine divisions of the universe in Hindu cosmology — a degree of deliberate urban design highly unusual for an 18th-century city anywhere in the world.

Jai Singh II was also a serious astronomer, and the Jantar Mantar observatory he built in Jaipur, completed in 1734, contains the world’s largest stone sundial alongside numerous other astronomical instruments, all built at a scale that allows genuinely precise readings still functional and demonstrable today. The observatory was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010.

The city’s distinctive pink colour, now its most recognisable visual identity, was applied in 1876 specifically to welcome the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) on a royal visit, with pink traditionally associated with hospitality in Rajasthani culture. The maintenance of this colour scheme in the old city has continued through subsequent municipal regulation into the present day.