Jodphur is rife with contrasts. Luxurious hotels and a colossal fortress appear to be in a different universe from the rest of the chaotic town.

By Robert Thicknesse

The last time I had opium tea was before a peculiarly awful “space opera” performed by Vangelis in Athens a few years ago. And I certainly was grateful: once the convulsive vomiting passes, you’re left with a delightful haze – Valium with three-dimensional effects.

It hardly seemed necessary in the already fantastical Mehrangarh Fort, a colossal edifice louring 400ft above the “Blue City” of Jodhpur in India, but the organisers of the Rajasthan International Folk Festival in the fort last October laid it on anyway: an old gent with flowing white beard, sitting cross-legged in one of the fort’s innumerable courtyards, a shisha bubbling away and a little teapot from which he’d pour handfuls of his brew into your palm. His conversation might have been limited but his tea added a nice, floaty buzz.

In Mehrangarh Fort it’s impossible not to go to town with the eastern make-believe. The place feels like the incarnation of memories that lurk in the subconscious of anyone who ever read The Arabian Nights. This part of Rajasthan is an elemental and romantic place: Marwar, the Thar desert stretching away scrubbily towards Pakistan, the towns dyed with plant and mineral colours, Mehrangarh (“fort of the sun”) looming on the horizon for miles in the haze of the plain.

The fortress is usually closed at night but last October, on four evenings of the brightest full moon for 200 years, Mehrangarh glowed and flickered with light and colour, its piled-up palaces, apartments and ramparts echoing with wildly various sounds, from trancey evening ragas to the jovial vulgarity of Northumbrian diddley-i. One keening local sang a long lament asking her beloved why he was beating her with a small stick. (Answer: it was the biggest he could find.) Beatboxer Jason Singh made extraordinary noises with his mouth music. Balkan-Afro-Anatolian groovers Tarhana (from Holland) got together with local musicians from the Langa and Manganiyar communities to produce a kind of soup of world music that veered interestingly towards acid jazz.

On opening night the maharaja of Jodhpur led a torch-lit procession from the main gate. The castle’s ramparts, winding upwards round its perimeter, were loud with the ululated greetings of local singers on balconies far above; bangled and jewelled girls, sitting cross-legged, danced with arms and torsos, daggers in their teeth; rose-petals showered down from on high.

Jodhpur is the Cinderella of Rajasthani cities; everyone goes to Jaipur, with its peaceful pink city at the heart of the frenetic bazaar, and those who venture further into the Thar desert are mostly bound for the sandstone city of Jaisalmer. Lying between the two, Jodhpur lacks Jaipur’s more obvious tourist attractions and Jaisalmer’s picturesque situation, but the mazy blue city (originally the Brahmin part of town was plastered with an indigo wash as a mosquito-repellent, then the habit spread) is full of unexpected beauties: cusped arches in the street suddenly open a view of an old, blue-washed haveli, with jutting balconies and carved balustrades. The scene is the normal Indian one of chaos functioning on the brink of collapse, the elaborate choreography of humans, cows, goats, dogs, auto-rickshaws and mopeds (I saw one with a world-record family of six on board) weaving around each other with a nerve-wracking haste that actually displays as much grace and timing as a motorbike display team.

Jodhpur is just as likely to pitch you into a scene straight out of Kipling as any better-known place. As I was wandering towards the main gate with its very Indo-Victorian clock tower, a procession erupted out of the town: troupe after troupe of dancing-girls, some on carts pulled by camels, more on carts pulled by horses. When the traffic backed up, one gang got off their cart and danced in the street, sequined, black flounced dresses with multicoloured embroidery swirling, long scarves, arms waving, bangles jingling. Disapproving matrons bustled past while ragged men watched with gloating eyes. I couldn’t think why it looked so familiar. Then it struck me: Rajasthan was where the gypsies emerged from, 40 generations ago at the beginning of the second millennium. (Castanets are still big in Rajasthani folk music, too.)

More secrets of survival in India are displayed on a poster helpfully put up by the Rajasthan Tourist Board. They lead you in uncontroversially (Always keep your hotel room locked) before developing a philosophy of much wider application: Free rides can culminate in trouble. Avoid developing relations for furthering business with people who are sweet talkers and at times impeccably turned out. Don’t hang on to the arms of young men or give them the impression that you find them attractive.

Well, that’s easy for them to say. My first attractive young man got plenty of brownie points by telling me I looked like a film star. Then he blew it when I asked which one: “John Cleese.” Damn! Actually, the film-star flattery is simply the current Jodhpur ploy to start a conversation that, ideally, reaches its destined culmination in some shop or other. Since forced retail therapy is likely to happen anyway, your best bet is to go along with the most attractive sweet-talker you can find. Top marks for this went to Ramzan Ali of Marwar Spices, who thrust a charming welcome, and some really delicious spiced tea (“I will hospitalise you to tea!”), on me as a prelude to transferring most of his stock into my bag.

At a certain point after dark, everything stops dead and the town passes out. Overdoing it one night, I found no transport home, so trudged back through the town: an amazing scene, thousands of people sleeping on the pavements, on market barrows, anywhere there was a flat surface, and not a mouse stirring. It was incredibly eerie, like a scene from the London Underground in the Blitz.

Arriving in Jodhpur, I had remarked on a massive building rising on the opposite side of town from the fortress. “That’s where you’re staying,” said the driver. At the end of a half-mile driveway, the Umaid Bhawan, once the maharaja’s palace, Umaid Bhawan, now one of the Taj Group’s flagship hotels (there are others dotted around Rajasthan, best known being the romantic Lake Palace at Udaipur), marches for hundreds of yards along a ridge. It looks like the Natural History Museum in London redesigned by Albert Speer, Victorian-Gothic fantasies replaced by marching orders of columns, curtain walls and unbalconied windows, surmounted by a vast dome and Gormenghast turrets, all built in a forceful yellow sandstone. Inside, crepuscular marble corridors stretch away into the distance as in a pharaoh’s mausoleum, turbaned flunkeys push floor-polishing machines with Sisyphean patience, fans whir, hushed voices whisper and echo from other corridors perhaps miles away. The initial impression is incredibly intimidating, from the fierce-looking fellow who opens your car door to the phalanxes of butlers who, with immense charm, prevent you from doing anything at all. But you’d have to be a very hard-eyed puritan if, after a couple of days of this, you didn’t discover that you never wanted to leave.

It’s the grandest of the palace hotels. I also stayed in the Jai Mahal in Jaipur, a dinky, boutique version of the same with a large number of elephants in the car park, something which only I seemed to find remarkable. The Umaid Bhawan was commissioned as a famine-relief project in 1929 by the present maharaja’s grandfather (and it kept 3,000 labourers employed for 15 years).

It’s an unusual experience to live in a room that is twice as big as your London flat. Occasionally I had trouble finding one or other of the two balconies that adorned my room, and trips to the bathroom pretty much required a guide. Namaste-ing servants greet you at every turn of the corridor. In one inner courtyard, a boy is employed to wave a flag at the pigeons to keep them out of the water-channels; years of this seem to have driven him quite mad. As you breakfast on the terrace, Rajasthani musicians play soothing ragas on the lawn below. Air-conditioned limos drive you to town – should you feel it necessary to go there.

For connoisseurs of contrast, Jodhpur is hard to beat: right at the bottom of the maharaja’s drive, a few hundred people live in scraggy tents in the scrub, and the town itself with its open sewers and piles of rubbish and rubble is in pretty urgent need of a spring-clean. The pristine fortress, particularly with the elegant, otherworldly fancy-dress party of the festival going on, and the polished hush and overwhelming luxury of the Umaid Bhawan are an entirely different universe from the town.

But despite the unimaginable disparity in wealth between a $500-per-night hotel and a pavement-dwelling cycle rickshaw-wallah, you never feel remotely unsafe; the relentless cheerfulness of India sees to that. And stoical resilience is the biggest impression that remains once everything else has faded: the primordial landscapes, the massive impassivity of the forts and palaces, the stubborn, mostly good-humoured endurance of hardship.