A Palace that Moved!

tells the incredible story of how it was done.

As you travel the dusty roads of interior Rajasthan, you begin to feel this nagging ache in the heart. No, it's not angina, it's the pain of seeing your history and heritage crumble to dust before your eyes.

All around you are the remains of delicately carved havelis, frescoed palaces and gracefully proportioned cenotaphs, forsaken and falling. What makes them precious is not just their beauty but also that they belong to an age where every stone arch and every carved lattice was the creation of human hands that imbued it with their own individual spirit and artistry.

As unique as a fingerprint. Creative and alive in a way that a modern-day house can never be. Machines and manufactured materials promise you clone-like sameness, not the heterogenesis that comes from the intertwining of mind with matter.

Perhaps this was the angina that seized Jitendra Singh Rathore when, in the year 2002, he happened upon a conversation about the tearing down of Ravla Koshilav, a dilapidated 200-year-old palace in southern Rajasthan.

In one of those moments, that years later one thinks of as a "defining moment", he heeded the call of his heart and decided to save the place. Except in a way that had never been done before.

He decided to dismantle the palace stone by stone, transport it and resurrect it in another location! It helped that he was not an architect, or he would possibly never have conceived of such a mad idea. For moments of brilliance are born of a lack of learned knowledge rather than the opposite.

The decision to move the palace instead of simply restoring it where it stood was driven by simple business sense. Coming from a family that owns and runs 10 heritage hotels, Jitendra knew that location was crucial if it was to be a profitable proposition.

And that's how it came to pass that, as in a tale out of the Arabian Nights, a whole palace was literally lifted off its moorings and transplanted 50 km away on the sandy banks of the Maghai, a lovely little seasonal river at Ranakpur.

Ranakpur is the site of a stunning complex of Jain temples whose beauty rivals that of the Dilwara Jain temples in Mount Abu. The site draws a steady stream of visitors "" tourists and devotees.

The spot chosen for the palace was in a fold in the Aravallis, an agricultural plot of 5 bighas beside the Maghai. Jitendra and his wife Gayatri have long believed in the benefits of vastu, and the new site is fully vastu-enabled and vastu-aligned to best harness the energies of the cosmos.

In 2002, Jitendra Singh negotiated a contract with the thakur owner of Ravla Koshilav for the dismantling and purchase of the palace stones for a sum of Rs 2.75 lakh. And in February 2004, two years to the day, the first guest checked into Fateh Bagh "" the new avatar of Ravla Koshilav.

This pathbreaking work has inspired the notification of a whole new hotel category by the department of tourism "" "heritage renaissance hotels".

Ironically, Fateh Bagh is not eligible for inclusion as it was built before the notification came into effect! Conservationists and restorers have long sourced doors, windows and lintels from old buildings and used them for embellishing a new structure, as in the Dwarika Hotel in Kathmandu or a hotel in Kerala that is made from 20 wooden theravads. But no one had attempted a full resurrection like that of Fateh Bagh.

The manner of this dismantling and reconstruction of Fateh Bagh was not very different from that of a particularly complex Lego building set. Most medieval palaces and havelis in Rajasthan followed a method of construction of "joggled voussoirs", whereby stone pieces in an arch or lintel interlock together, using grooves and struts alternately.

In some palaces, this form was carried a step further, whereby a stone piece once fitted, was turned in the manner of a key in a lock, so that once turned, it was inextricably bolted into place. Mortar was not used, though sometimes molten lead was poured into joints.

The entire palace was thus made of pieces of stone enmeshed together in the manner of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. This lent the stone structure a tensility, which is why so many medieval Rajput and Mughal monuments have withstood major earthquakes.

But all this only complicated the task for Jitendra. With the help of a friend, Mohan Kumavat, a building contractor familiar with traditional Rajput structures, he made paper drawings of each element "" columns, arches, pavilions, brackets "" and assigned each piece in each element a colour-coded number. The total number of these pieces came to a staggering 65,000.

But that was the easy part. Getting a labour team to actually implement the painstaking task of unlocking the heavy sandstone pieces, some weighing more than a tonne, was another story.

As many as three teams started the job, only to throw up their hands and walk out. A fourth team was instituted which finally completed the job in three months. And then it took another three months and 35 trucks to cart the pieces 50 km away to Ranakpur.

The next challenge was to rebuild a palace that was true to the original, yet incorporated a few changes that would make it suitable for a hotel. For instance, it needed RCC roofing to make it adequately water-proofed.

The roof-stones were then used in the courtyard. Together with Kumavat and a civil engineer, Jitendra drew up a plan on a CAD system. A team of 50 men from among the best in Udaipur were brought in to reassemble the palace. These included a master artist and restorer to fresco the mouldings with traditional Rajput floral motifs .

The original frescoes on the wooden doors of Ravla Koshilav had long been obscured from being slapped over with paint several times. Farooq Khan, who has also undertaken restoration for Taj Hotels, spent weeks scrubbing off the paint and then touching up the originals.

Reassembling the palace was daunting as the men floundered among the thousands of stones with only amateur sketches, a home-grown coding system and a few photographs to guide them. The moment of reckoning came when the artisans could not fit as many as 13 jharokhas because of a mistake in the coding.

The only solution was a very expensive one "" to call in additional Sompura craftsmen, a caste of stone workers from western India with expertise in stone architecture. But Rathore and his wife had already sunk in far too much money.

So he took one long deep breath, spread out all the pieces around him and applied himself to deciphering the puzzle. In one week he had managed to fit all 13. Perhaps it was the good vastu, or perhaps he simply loves and understands these old buildings...

The Rajputs have always been builders and architects, studding the Aravallis with rugged forts and citadels, within whose formidable bastions they built palaces, temples and havelis of astounding beauty and delicacy. And perhaps it is the call of this racial memory that Jitendra Rathore hears. Fateh Bagh is a name of much felicity "" it is in every way a victory over time.