Orchha

Orchha was founded in 1531 by Rudra Pratap Singh, a Bundela chief who moved his seat to a defensible bend of the Betwa. His successors built the Raja Mahal and the great temples, and the kingdom became one of the leading Rajput states of Bundelkhand, sitting awkwardly between Mughal power to the north and rival chiefs to the south. Madhukar Shah's queen is said to have brought an image of Rama from Ayodhya and installed it in her palace, which became the Ram Raja temple when the image could not be moved to the Chaturbhuj temple built for it.

Relations with the Mughals swung between war and alliance. Bir Singh Deo, who ruled in the early seventeenth century, killed Akbar's minister and historian Abu'l Fazl on the orders of the prince Salim, and was rewarded when Salim became the emperor Jahangir; he built the Jahangir Mahal to house his patron on a visit, along with palaces at Datia and other towns. Later in the century Shah Jahan's armies attacked Orchha, and in the 1630s Jhujhar Singh was driven out.

The court moved to Tikamgarh in the 1780s, and Orchha slipped into obscurity — the reason so much of the seventeenth-century town survives unaltered. The state became a British protectorate and lasted until it acceded to independent India in 1950. The monuments passed to the Archaeological Survey of India, the town became a stop on the circuit between Agra, Khajuraho and the tiger parks.

Everything in Orchha turns on the Ram Raja temple, where Rama is worshipped not only as a god but as the ruling king of the town. Police are posted as its guards and a guard of honour is held there each day, and the daily routine of waking, dressing, feeding and resting the deity follows court protocol rather than ordinary temple practice. No other Rama temple in India is run quite this way, and pilgrims come for that reason as much as for the architecture.

The surrounding culture is Bundelkhandi: Bundeli is spoken at home, and the region's folk forms include the Alha, a sung epic of medieval warriors, and the Rai and Badhai dances performed at weddings and fairs. Bundela painting survives on the walls and ceilings of the Raja Mahal and the Lakshmi temple, where court scenes, hunts and episodes from the Ramayana were painted in strong mineral colours; some panels show nineteenth-century subjects, including the fighting at Jhansi.

Daily manners are those of a conservative rural district — modest dress, hands joined in greeting, shoes left at doorways — softened by long familiarity with visitors. Evenings are social: the bazaar fills after the heat, aarti brings drums and bells from the temple, and families walk down to the cenotaphs and the river. Weddings cluster in the winter months and fill the streets with bands and processions.

Only a few thousand people live in Orchha, which makes it a large village with an outsized set of monuments. Farming in the surrounding Niwari district — wheat, gram, mustard and pulses on black soil, with some sesame — supports most households, and tourism supports the rest: guesthouses, restaurants, guides, rickshaw drivers, stalls selling brass, textiles and offerings, and the staff of the heritage hotels. Pilgrim traffic to the Ram Raja temple is steadier through the year than foreign visitor numbers, which fall away in the summer.

The town became one of the three tehsils of Niwari district when it was created in 2018, splitting from Tikamgarh, with the district offices at Niwari itself. Bigger needs — hospitals, colleges, the railway, most shopping — are met at Jhansi, half an hour away across the state border, and many residents commute. Water supply, summer heat and the limited work available locally push younger people towards Jhansi, Gwalior and Delhi.

The day starts early with temple bells and the bazaar opening, goes quiet through the hottest hours, and picks up again in the late afternoon when visitors return to the monuments and residents walk by the river. Cows, goats and the occasional nilgai move freely through the lanes; monkeys are a constant presence around the temples. In the monsoon the Betwa runs loud and brown, and the scrub around the sanctuary turns briefly green.

Orchha eats what Bundelkhand eats: wheat, pulses and dairy, cooked plainly and generously spiced rather than rich. The dish that marks an occasion is bafla, wheat dough balls boiled and then baked over coals, cracked open and soaked in ghee, served with thick dal and a fiery garlic or green chilli chutney. Alongside it come kadhi, a tangy yoghurt and gram-flour curry, seasonal vegetables such as pumpkin, aubergine and gourds, and chapatis rather than rice, which appears mostly at feasts.

Breakfast is poha — flattened rice steamed with onion, mustard seed and turmeric, finished with crisp sev, coriander and a squeeze of lime — usually eaten with a coil of hot jalebi and milky tea from the bazaar. Through the day the stalls fry samosas, kachoris and pakoras, and in winter gajak and chikki, sesame and peanut brittle set with jaggery, are sold by weight. Sweets are made from mawa, milk reduced to a solid, formed into peda and barfi and bought as temple offerings.

Food around the monuments is adapted to visitors: rooftop kitchens serving paneer and chicken curries, biryani, thalis and a short list of pasta and pancakes. Almost everything sold close to the Ram Raja temple is vegetarian, and many households in the town are vegetarian by conviction. Lassi and sugarcane juice are the usual hot-weather drinks, and alcohol plays little part in local life.