BHANWAR NIWAS - About Us

DEEP IN THE THAR DESERT, behind endless waves of sand dunes lies Bikaner, one of the most interesting centers of later Indian art. Like a Fata Morgana, Bikaner rises from the very midst of this desert, a great town of red and yellow sandstone, with richly decorated houses rising high over its bustling streets and tall temple spires overlooking the once mighty fortifications. Outside the town there lies a gigantic fort, surrounded by a deep ditch and a double line of mighty bastions, behind which rise many-storied palaces of yellow and red sandstone, marble and encaustic tiles.

Today Bikaner has lost something of its forbidding situation. Railways and highways connect the city with Jodhpur, Jaipur, Delhi and the Punjab. Motor roads radiate to charming environs, such as the lake at Gajner, the temples of Deshnoke, Sheobari and Nagnechiji, the royal mausolea at the Devikund tank. It is true that Bikaner is not so well known to tourists and scholars as Jaipur, Jodhpur or Udaipur, which can boast of a more attractive scenery and of greater economic resources. But the very remoteness of Bikaner has preserved the heritage of the past much better than in the more accessible cities. This heritage is great and can well compare with that of her more fortunate neighbours and not seldom surpasses it.

The forbidding character of the Thar Desert, and consequently its security, has always attracted the wealth of the outside world. Here the Jain and Hindu bankers and merchants whose business reached and still reaches the whole of India, built their houses, settled their families, deposited their treasures, and constructed temples and upasras (monastries). The rajas of Bikaner were wise enough not to scare them away by excessive exactions. Thus the cultural life of Bikaner, of its court and its mercantile upper class, flourished through the centuries largely owing to the treasures flowing in from other parts of India.

The rulers and rich merchants of Bikaner could not only collect art treasures, but offer shelter to first-class artists from Central Rajputana, Gujarat, the Mughal court at Delhi, Lahore, and even from the Deccan. Though Bikaner, secluded in the desert, could never become one of the great centres of inspiration of Indian art, she developed at least an important local variety of Rajput art and, what today is much more important to us, she has, thanks to her remoteness, preserved the artistic monuments of her Golden Age almost without loss or damage.