Still Udaipur

The palaces and hotels in Udaipur are built right at the water's edge, just like in Venice. At intervals there are stone stairways leading down to the lake. Most of the hotels on the water's edge are expensive, but anyone can go there for a drink or some food, in their rooftop restaurants. I have been climbing up and down stairs, exploring some of these beautiful old hotels and their restaurants, having a drink here, a snack there while I drink in the view of palaces on the other side of the lake and in the middle of the lake. In between times I have been looking at Indian miniatures, painted in the ancient tradition by young artists.

The Mughals created the most exquisite miniature paintings on ivory, using gold leaf and painting with ground up semi precious stones mixed with glue. They used squirrel hair paint brushes, sometimes just one hair thick, to paint in the minutest details. Now it is forbidden to paint on ivory, but the tradition has been kept alive, passed down from old masters to their students, generation after generation. The best paintings still use semi-precious stone pigments: lapis lazuli, turquoise and coral, but today they paint on camel bone, silk and paper. Every other shop in Udaipur is filled with miniatures of varying quality. The prices are high today. In one of these shops the salesman told me that he was part of a cooperative of fifty seven artists, who had learned their craft from an eighty year old miniature painter. Most of them lived and worked in the surrounding villages. He, on the other hand, lived in Sweden, where he said he sold more paintings than here in Udaipur.

In the afternoon I went to the most beautiful restaurant, in a courtyard shaded by trees, right on the edge of the lake. I stayed there all afternoon, watching the palaces on the other side of the lake change as the sun moved across the sky, chatting with an American woman who had come to India for her friend's wedding and had stayed on to see a little of India.