Saheliyon Ki Bari and Bharatiya Lok Kala Mandal
After visiting the beyond amazing City Palace Museum in Udaipur, our first day in that wonderful city continued with visits to the Saheliyon Ki Bari gardens and the Bharatiya Lok Kala Mandal folk museum. On our way to the former, we circled the Fateh Sagar Lake (see above) and got our first glimpse of the amazing vistas, complete with mountains in the background (and the Monsoon Palace which we would visit later during our stay).
The Saheliyon Ki Bari means “garden of the maidens” and was built in the eighteenth century for the ladies in waiting on a visiting princess. Today it is a relaxing verdant place full of fountains and flowers, a small botanical garden if you will.
I think my favorite part of the gardens was the paintings on the walls surrounding the gardens, of women in traditional dress in procession on horses and elephants and camels.
While Saheliyon Ki Bari, along with the City Palace Museum, are two of the monuments in Udaipur that everyone visits, our next stop was not. When people think folk museum in Udaipur, they think Bagore Ki Haveli. However, our guide RV told us that the better place to see Udaipur folk art was at the Bharatiya Lok Kala Mandal museum.
The museum is built in a rather circular fashion, with rooms filled with displays on the outside of the circle, a hallway that leads around the middle of the circle which has displays hanging on it, and in the middle of the circle is an open-air auditorium for music and dance performances.
There is also a small theater on the outside of the circle where short marionette shows are given. Not long after we entered the museum, the time for the puppet show was near, so we went to the theater and watched. Our guide told us that one of the highlights of the show is an act with two marionettes, a man and a woman, but the woman marionette flips over every so often and becomes a man. So the other man makes advances on this “woman” (by which I mean he jumps on top of her) and just when things are getting good for him, the woman turns into a man and beats the crap out of him. Again, our guide thought this was hilarious. But seeing that the crowd watching this show was almost entirely school children other than the three of us, I had to question the correctness of the subject matter for the audience. Oh well. I guess that was a learning moment for us as far as what people consider comedy in India.
We loved seeing the many folk deity masks and costumes and folk altars and such, and asked if we could visit the museum’s gift shop. RV talked with someone, and soon after a woman came and opened the gift shop for us, and we found lots of things – pillowcases, a mini folk deity wooden altar, etc. – that we were eager to buy. But as we were putting our purchases together, it became clear that this woman was not only the gift shop attendant, but she also handled the museum’s box office! So while we were buying things, the line of people waiting to get into the museum was spilling out into the street. We felt bad when we realized this, and paid quickly and left.
Now that we had seen three sights in a row, it was already well into the afternoon, and we were very hungry. So we asked RV if we could go to lunch somewhere. He had a good place in mind for us, and we got back into our car to head there. In the next post, I will finish up our first day in Udaipur.
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