Tony Pletts - Hush Orchha

For an ‘undiscovered paradise’ the omens approaching Orchha were less than portentous. Firstly there was the ‘Wacky Races’ taxi ride from Khajuraho, complete with obligatory near death experience. In submitting to the brutality of Indian roads one accepts that you wave goodbye to the romance of travel, but normally a decent view is expected in return. For three hellish hours Madhya Pradesh flew past in a featureless blur. It was flat, scorched and virtually devoid of humanity. Nursing cramps from white-knuckle fatigue I surveyed the outskirts of our chosen destination with a heavy heart. There was little to eulogise. A cement works coated everything as far as the horizon in an industrial grey and enveloped the sky with a carcinogenic fog, reminiscent of the Calcutta smogs I’d just escaped from. As we drove into town occasional flashes of coloured litter peeped through the all-encompassing dust. Civilization was at hand, marked by the abundance of plastic bags that flowered in the undergrowth and blossomed from trees. Such blight made me question my presence. My wife and I were exhausted and essentially travelling blind. We had planned to be in Orissa, but with the tsunami tragedy only a week old it suddenly seemed tactless to lie on a beach. So with ten days to spare we opted to travel half way across the country with the express desire to see Orchha. Why? Because I had a hunch, because I’d seen a picture in a guidebook and because that little voice inside, which I’ve learned to trust so well, told me to go.

Ten minutes later I was in another world, I was in the Hotel Sheesh Mahal. It seems odd to start an article on a historical town with the banalities of accommodation, but those first impressions you receive as you unload your luggage and acclimatize to your new surroundings often echo the grander experiences you hope will follow. In an ideal scenario your room should be representative of your location, a microcosm of the larger picture to which you suddenly belong. In the Sheesh Mahal I was immediately at home and abroad, not to mention thrilled by the fact that I was staying in a wing of the Jhangir Mahal Palace. If you are an aficionado of the great Indian Palace hotel experience, regularly book into the Taj or Oberoi chains and cherish memories of the Umaid Bhawan’ in Jodhpur or the ‘Lake View Palace’ in Udaipur, then you are probably best advised to skip to another article now. The Sheesh Mahal is run by the Government, considers whitewash a decoration and is over booked and under staffed, especially if you are used to liveried service and fawning attention. That said, there are huge compensations. Princely double rooms are affordable for paupers at only 800 rupees (£10) each, the manager is efficient, charming and extraordinarily hard working (quite why he is employed by the government is a mystery) and the whole place is spotlessly clean (as opposed to Indian clean, that state of ingrained griminess you so quickly take for granted as standard issue). On top of this there are all the mod cons - a generator to get you through the interminable power cuts (great as long as you are not planning on sleeping), a decorative phone system and a supply of hot water that is amazingly more on than off. If you fancy playing Roger of the Raj there is even a Royal Apartment for rent, but I’ll save my stories of that for later.

Getting about and orientating oneself in Orchha couldn’t be easier. If you head for more than five minutes in any direction you will find yourself in the countryside. Everything is in walking distance, which is just as well as there are no rickshaw wallahs to speak of. In fact there are no roads, apart from the one leading in and out of town. The advantage of this is two pronged, and a bit of an Indian first – no pollution and no hawkers. As a result Orchha is an extraordinarily chilled out place to kick back and relax in. Its handful of streets all lead to the thriving bazaar and its citizens are welcoming, excited that their small town has suddenly started to feature on the traveller’s map. It seemed churlish to inform them that our kind can potentially bring cynicism, greed, unsympathetic development and cultural erosion, especially when the vibe was so perfect. Sure, the big package busses have been stopping off here for years, giving their customers two hours to ‘do Orchha’ on their way from Agra to Khajuraho, but their presence is pretty benign. Whistle stop tours may be a crime against taste but they can hardly be accused of over exposing the residents to tourism. Orchha means ‘hidden place’, and I’m going to let you into a secret. This little town is a gem and, in short, embodies everything that is good about India, architecture and travelling in general. Just don’t go telling everyone about it.

Orchha’s official main attraction is that it’s steeped in history. You cannot throw a stick and miss a significant building or monument. It’s rather like a mini version of Myanmar’s Began, where decaying and derelict edifices are dotted about a valley floor for as far as the eye can see. My approach to this kind of physical history is that you should experience it first and only make an effort to understand it at a later date if you’re seriously interested. I thus spent five days clambering about in ruins, not having the vaguest idea about what I was looking at. Archaeology be dammed, I was having an absolute ball. When the time came for leaving, and it was dawning on me that I’d like to write a piece, I decided I better invest in a locally published guide so I could bring some bearing to my vacant explorations. ‘Orchha, a guide to the Bundelas’ seemed to fit the bill perfectly, sixty high gloss pages and it was published in English. Sadly it wasn’t written English. I’ve just spent the morning thumbing though its contents, an experience akin to playing football in treacle. While the facts I’ve gleaned from the leaden poetic prose are few, I can wholeheartedly recommend this edition as a one-stop, failsafe cure for insomnia.

So my advice is just get out and enjoy. The Jahangir Mahal Palace at the top of the town is a great place to start, especially if you’re staying there. This five storied structure, with domed kiosks crowning each of its four corners, is built around a central courtyard and is probably Orchha’s most magnificent statement of intent. Just stand on its roof terrace in late afternoon and watch those shadows stretch across its jutting balconies while marvelling at those intricate patterns carved into imposing stone grills. I also love the unwritten Indian attitude to health and safety – you climb it, you take responsibility for your actions. Missing sandstone screens reveal precipitous drops to certain death and crumbling corners without barriers slide into threatening voids. It’s all rather like clambering through a living Escher etching, both impossibly magnificent and mind bendingly complex, blatantly defying the rules of physics.

There are literally dozens of buildings of this calibre. The sacred geometry of Orchha is just astounding. Take a 90 degree look out of any important window and see how another set of spires and domes are framed perfectly in the distance. When as a race did we loose this sense of perspective and vision in city planning? The grounds of the palace alone contain a fascinating Hamam, a pleasure garden, several imposing gates and the Raja Mahal, which I negated to visit due to its comparatively featureless and slightly bleak exterior. This is where my brilliant ‘experiential’ style of tourism falls down. I have since discovered that the Raja Mahal contains amongst the most exquisite murals, depicting courtly life and Hindu gods, to be found anywhere in India. I know these murals are of unparalled splendour, partly because I’ve now seen pictures, but mainly because I missed them. They have since played on my imagination, evolving into a Rajput equivalent of the Sistine Chapel.

Around town nearly every view is dominated by the towering Chaturbhuj Temple. Dedicated to Rada and Krishna it is now little more that a shell, all be it an extremely imposing one. Then there’s the Chhatries, if you’ve ever seen any pictures of Orchha it is likely that is of these five cenotaphs that flank the nearby river Betwa. An afternoon spent in their proximity, firstly sipping tea with the local ‘chai-wallah’, then gently scaling the monuments themselves, is pretty much as good as it gets. Even the most uninspired amateur photographer should come away from the trip with a handful of shots worthy of any chocolate box. Moving away from civilization you can wander through a litter free nature reserve on the other side of the river (watch out for those monkeys) or just head out into the fields for some encounters with friendly villagers, who have made their homes in abandoned and crumbling temples and cenotaphs. This experience is reminiscent of Angkor Wat ten years ago, before big business moved in, when the Kymers uses to inhabit their overgrown monuments, farm the surrounding land and be only too happy to show the occasional tourist around. There’s some illicit pleasure to be had in being made to feel at home in a world heritage class, 16th century, goat-pen knowing the former resident was a Maharaja.

If all this bygone splendour is making time spent here seem a little desiccated then think again. Orchha is a thriving temple town and there is a rocking ‘baba’ scene going on. Hanging out with the holy men, or simply watching them sing and chant in the bazaar, is a great way to feel at one with India and mystically blessed to boot. If you choose to interact with the sadhus they’ll want a few rupees and their picture taken, but once these formalities are over it’s amazing how jovial they can be. This is just one of the many ways you can improve your karma during your stay. Everyday in Orchha there seems to be some kind of festival of this, or puja for that, going on. The Ram Raja Temple, with its pink and gold domes, is the town’s spiritual hotspot. Originally a palace it was turned into a temple when an image of Rama, that had been temporarily installed, proved impossible to move. Nowadays it’s ram-jammed from sunrise to sunset with pilgrims struggling to see into a mystical shrine, which is only unveiled at preordained moments. Outside the temple there are two substantial and intertwined bhodi trees that host some kind of fertility ceremony. We saw crowds of women, dressed in their finest saris, form rings around the trunks and process in endless clockwise circles. It was a dizzying spectacle to watch, though its power was undeniable.

Seeking a path to enlightenment could well leave you hungry, and the likelihood is that you are not going to want to satiate your appetite at any of the sweet shops that form a promenade up to the main temple. Unless, of course, you like swarms of flies and have no respect for your waistline. Probably your best bet for a good meal in town is the Ram Raja café just near the bridge. It barely qualifies as Indian clean, you get to eat on the pavement and there is a strong smell of latrine, but if you can stomach all this it has its plus points. Thalis are plentiful and only 25 rupees (30p), the saag aloo is guaranteed fresh as the chef has to walk down to the vegetable market to buy the spinach and the roasted aubergine is just to die for, which is more than appropriate because you might well loose the will to live waiting for it to arrive at your table. If you’re after a little more in the way of ambience then the restaurant at the Hotel Sheesh Mahal is an equally good bet. The service is similarly erratic, but the food’s delicious providing you stick to the Indian menu and don’t wander off into the Chinese or continental sections. That way disappointment lies. The meals, however, are unlikely to be your fondest memory from this hotel. Providing you have £50 a night to throw around and the foresight to book up well in advance, then it will be your stay in the Royal Apartment that will live with you for years to come.

My wife and I could only afford one night, but for 24 hours we hardly left the hotel. There is your own private balcony and outside dining area leading up to some imposing and heavily carved wooden doors. Once inside your quarters there is a huge open-plan living space about the size of a five-a-side football pitch. Marble floors keep the temperature down while faux priceless works of art leap out at you from every corner. There are plaster (masquerading as stone) busts on plinths, glass fronted cabinets containing hookah pipes & china knick-knacks and a giant, if somewhat cheesy, painting of Hanuman (the monkey god) knocked out in pastel colours. The regal bathroom is even better. There is a marble slab tub that a five-a-side team could comfortably bathe in (and still have room for the referee), more mirrors than you get in, well, a funfair hall of mirrors and, the piece de resistance, a tiny blue chamber that hangs off the side of the building with a toilet mounted like a throne in the middle. Five stories up and with three windows pointing west, north and east this has to be the best vantage point in town. Truly a loo with a view. Enshrined upon it for hours I was lord of all I surveyed, Maharaja for a day, content in the knowledge that from this pinnacle of happiness the only way was down.


		HUSH, HUSH - ORCHHA

For an ‘undiscovered paradise’ the omens approaching Orchha were less than portentous. Firstly there was the ‘Wacky Races’ taxi ride from Khajuraho, complete with obligatory near death experience. In submitting to the brutality of Indian roads one accepts that you wave goodbye to the romance of travel, but normally a decent view is expected in return. For three hellish hours Madhya Pradesh flew past in a featureless blur. It was flat, scorched and virtually devoid of humanity. Nursing cramps from white-knuckle fatigue I surveyed the outskirts of our chosen destination with a heavy heart. There was little to eulogise. A cement works coated everything as far as the horizon in an industrial grey and enveloped the sky with a carcinogenic fog, reminiscent of the Calcutta smogs I’d just escaped from. As we drove into town occasional flashes of coloured litter peeped through the all-encompassing dust. Civilization was at hand, marked by the abundance of plastic bags that flowered in the undergrowth and blossomed from trees. Such blight made me question my presence. My wife and I were exhausted and essentially travelling blind. We had planned to be in Orissa, but with the tsunami tragedy only a week old it suddenly seemed tactless to lie on a beach. So with ten days to spare we opted to travel half way across the country with the express desire to see Orchha. Why? Because I had a hunch, because I’d seen a picture in a guidebook and because that little voice inside, which I’ve learned to trust so well, told me to go. Ten minutes later I was in another world, I was in the Hotel Sheesh Mahal. It seems odd to start an article on a historical town with the banalities of accommodation, but those first impressions you receive as you unload your luggage and acclimatize to your new surroundings often echo the grander experiences you hope will follow. In an ideal scenario your room should be representative of your location, a microcosm of the larger picture to which you suddenly belong. In the Sheesh Mahal I was immediately at home and abroad, not to mention thrilled by the fact that I was staying in a wing of the Jhangir Mahal Palace. If you are an aficionado of the great Indian Palace hotel experience, regularly book into the Taj or Oberoi chains and cherish memories of the Umaid Bhawan’ in Jodhpur or the ‘Lake View Palace’ in Udaipur, then you are probably best advised to skip to another article now. The Sheesh Mahal is run by the Government, considers whitewash a decoration and is over booked and under staffed, especially if you are used to liveried service and fawning attention. That said, there are huge compensations. Princely double rooms are affordable for paupers at only 800 rupees (£10) each, the manager is efficient, charming and extraordinarily hard working (quite why he is employed by the government is a mystery) and the whole place is spotlessly clean (as opposed to Indian clean, that state of ingrained griminess you so quickly take for granted as standard issue). On top of this there are all the mod cons - a generator to get you through the interminable power cuts (great as long as you are not planning on sleeping), a decorative phone system and a supply of hot water that is amazingly more on than off. If you fancy playing Roger of the Raj there is even a Royal Apartment for rent, but I’ll save my stories of that for later. Getting about and orientating oneself in Orchha couldn’t be easier. If you head for more than five minutes in any direction you will find yourself in the countryside. Everything is in walking distance, which is just as well as there are no rickshaw wallahs to speak of. In fact there are no roads, apart from the one leading in and out of town. The advantage of this is two pronged, and a bit of an Indian first – no pollution and no hawkers. As a result Orchha is an extraordinarily chilled out place to kick back and relax in. Its handful of streets all lead to the thriving bazaar and its citizens are welcoming, excited that their small town has suddenly started to feature on the traveller’s map. It seemed churlish to inform them that our kind can potentially bring cynicism, greed, unsympathetic development and cultural erosion, especially when the vibe was so perfect. Sure, the big package busses have been stopping off here for years, giving their customers two hours to ‘do Orchha’ on their way from Agra to Khajuraho, but their presence is pretty benign. Whistle stop tours may be a crime against taste but they can hardly be accused of over exposing the residents to tourism. Orchha means ‘hidden place’, and I’m going to let you into a secret. This little town is a gem and, in short, embodies everything that is good about India, architecture and travelling in general. Just don’t go telling everyone about it. Orchha’s official main attraction is that it’s steeped in history. You cannot throw a stick and miss a significant building or monument. It’s rather like a mini version of Myanmar’s Began, where decaying and derelict edifices are dotted about a valley floor for as far as the eye can see. My approach to this kind of physical history is that you should experience it first and only make an effort to understand it at a later date if you’re seriously interested. I thus spent five days clambering about in ruins, not having the vaguest idea about what I was looking at. Archaeology be dammed, I was having an absolute ball. When the time came for leaving, and it was dawning on me that I’d like to write a piece, I decided I better invest in a locally published guide so I could bring some bearing to my vacant explorations. ‘Orchha, a guide to the Bundelas’ seemed to fit the bill perfectly, sixty high gloss pages and it was published in English. Sadly it wasn’t written English. I’ve just spent the morning thumbing though its contents, an experience akin to playing football in treacle. While the facts I’ve gleaned from the leaden poetic prose are few, I can wholeheartedly recommend this edition as a one-stop, failsafe cure for insomnia. So my advice is just get out and enjoy. The Jahangir Mahal Palace at the top of the town is a great place to start, especially if you’re staying there. This five storied structure, with domed kiosks crowning each of its four corners, is built around a central courtyard and is probably Orchha’s most magnificent statement of intent. Just stand on its roof terrace in late afternoon and watch those shadows stretch across its jutting balconies while marvelling at those intricate patterns carved into imposing stone grills. I also love the unwritten Indian attitude to health and safety – you climb it, you take responsibility for your actions. Missing sandstone screens reveal precipitous drops to certain death and crumbling corners without barriers slide into threatening voids. It’s all rather like clambering through a living Escher etching, both impossibly magnificent and mind bendingly complex, blatantly defying the rules of physics. There are literally dozens of buildings of this calibre. The sacred geometry of Orchha is just astounding. Take a 90 degree look out of any important window and see how another set of spires and domes are framed perfectly in the distance. When as a race did we loose this sense of perspective and vision in city planning? The grounds of the palace alone contain a fascinating Hamam, a pleasure garden, several imposing gates and the Raja Mahal, which I negated to visit due to its comparatively featureless and slightly bleak exterior. This is where my brilliant ‘experiential’ style of tourism falls down. I have since discovered that the Raja Mahal contains amongst the most exquisite murals, depicting courtly life and Hindu gods, to be found anywhere in India. I know these murals are of unparalled splendour, partly because I’ve now seen pictures, but mainly because I missed them. They have since played on my imagination, evolving into a Rajput equivalent of the Sistine Chapel. Around town nearly every view is dominated by the towering Chaturbhuj Temple. Dedicated to Rada and Krishna it is now little more that a shell, all be it an extremely imposing one. Then there’s the Chhatries, if you’ve ever seen any pictures of Orchha it is likely that is of these five cenotaphs that flank the nearby river Betwa. An afternoon spent in their proximity, firstly sipping tea with the local ‘chai-wallah’, then gently scaling the monuments themselves, is pretty much as good as it gets. Even the most uninspired amateur photographer should come away from the trip with a handful of shots worthy of any chocolate box. Moving away from civilization you can wander through a litter free nature reserve on the other side of the river (watch out for those monkeys) or just head out into the fields for some encounters with friendly villagers, who have made their homes in abandoned and crumbling temples and cenotaphs. This experience is reminiscent of Angkor Wat ten years ago, before big business moved in, when the Kymers uses to inhabit their overgrown monuments, farm the surrounding land and be only too happy to show the occasional tourist around. There’s some illicit pleasure to be had in being made to feel at home in a world heritage class, 16th century, goat-pen knowing the former resident was a Maharaja. If all this bygone splendour is making time spent here seem a little desiccated then think again. Orchha is a thriving temple town and there is a rocking ‘baba’ scene going on. Hanging out with the holy men, or simply watching them sing and chant in the bazaar, is a great way to feel at one with India and mystically blessed to boot. If you choose to interact with the sadhus they’ll want a few rupees and their picture taken, but once these formalities are over it’s amazing how jovial they can be. This is just one of the many ways you can improve your karma during your stay. Everyday in Orchha there seems to be some kind of festival of this, or puja for that, going on. The Ram Raja Temple, with its pink and gold domes, is the town’s spiritual hotspot. Originally a palace it was turned into a temple when an image of Rama, that had been temporarily installed, proved impossible to move. Nowadays it’s ram-jammed from sunrise to sunset with pilgrims struggling to see into a mystical shrine, which is only unveiled at preordained moments. Outside the temple there are two substantial and intertwined bhodi trees that host some kind of fertility ceremony. We saw crowds of women, dressed in their finest saris, form rings around the trunks and process in endless clockwise circles. It was a dizzying spectacle to watch, though its power was undeniable. Seeking a path to enlightenment could well leave you hungry, and the likelihood is that you are not going to want to satiate your appetite at any of the sweet shops that form a promenade up to the main temple. Unless, of course, you like swarms of flies and have no respect for your waistline. Probably your best bet for a good meal in town is the Ram Raja café just near the bridge. It barely qualifies as Indian clean, you get to eat on the pavement and there is a strong smell of latrine, but if you can stomach all this it has its plus points. Thalis are plentiful and only 25 rupees (30p), the saag aloo is guaranteed fresh as the chef has to walk down to the vegetable market to buy the spinach and the roasted aubergine is just to die for, which is more than appropriate because you might well loose the will to live waiting for it to arrive at your table. If you’re after a little more in the way of ambience then the restaurant at the Hotel Sheesh Mahal is an equally good bet. The service is similarly erratic, but the food’s delicious providing you stick to the Indian menu and don’t wander off into the Chinese or continental sections. That way disappointment lies. The meals, however, are unlikely to be your fondest memory from this hotel. Providing you have £50 a night to throw around and the foresight to book up well in advance, then it will be your stay in the Royal Apartment that will live with you for years to come. My wife and I could only afford one night, but for 24 hours we hardly left the hotel. There is your own private balcony and outside dining area leading up to some imposing and heavily carved wooden doors. Once inside your quarters there is a huge open-plan living space about the size of a five-a-side football pitch. Marble floors keep the temperature down while faux priceless works of art leap out at you from every corner. There are plaster (masquerading as stone) busts on plinths, glass fronted cabinets containing hookah pipes & china knick-knacks and a giant, if somewhat cheesy, painting of Hanuman (the monkey god) knocked out in pastel colours. The regal bathroom is even better. There is a marble slab tub that a five-a-side team could comfortably bathe in (and still have room for the referee), more mirrors than you get in, well, a funfair hall of mirrors and, the piece de resistance, a tiny blue chamber that hangs off the side of the building with a toilet mounted like a throne in the middle. Five stories up and with three windows pointing west, north and east this has to be the best vantage point in town. Truly a loo with a view. Enshrined upon it for hours I was lord of all I surveyed, Maharaja for a day, content in the knowledge that from this pinnacle of happiness the only way was down.