Centering the Chārbāgh

Abstract

In Centering the Chārbāgh: The Mughal Garden as Design Module for the Jaipur City Plan, Susan N. Johnson-Roehr argues that the privileging of a Hindu-Vedic worldview has had a significant effect on our understanding of Jaipur City’s history. Current interpretive approaches assume that the city’s patron, Sawai Jai Singh II, relied on the maṇḍala when shaping the city plan in the eighteenth century. The emphasis on the maṇḍala as governing device has encouraged historians to neglect other sources of Jaipur’s city plan. Specifically, scholars have not considered the role of the quadripartite Mughal paradise garden (chahār bāgh, Persian; chārbāgh, Hindi) in the planning of the city. Johnson-Roehr suggests that Jaipur’s spatial organization was defined by the chārbāgh rather than the navagraha or vāstu puruṣa maṇḍala, and demonstrates that the plan was a response to a specific chārbāgh, Jai Niwas Bagh, built by Sawai Jai Singh in 1713. Combining a rereading of eighteenth-century documents with an analysis of the physical characteristics of Jai Niwas Bagh, the author concludes that the chārbāgh was the most important element in the development of the rectilinear boulevards, bazaars, and walls that characterize Jaipur today.