Jodhpur

• 1. Introduction

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  Jodhpur sits near the geographic centre of Rajasthan, surrounded by the stark landscape of the Thar Desert, and its old town is painted almost entirely blue. That is the first thing visitors notice: a city rising from sandstone and scrub, its walls and rooftops washed in a shade that earned it the name the Blue City. But the colour is only the beginning of the story. Rao Jodha, a Rajput chief of the Rathore clan, founded this city in 1459 and gave it his name, the Sanskrit word pur meaning town or city. He placed it on the strategic road linking Delhi to Gujarat, and that location alone would shape its fortunes for centuries. Merchants moved opium, copper, silk, sandalwood, and dates through its markets. Mughal emperors made it a vassal. British colonists catalogued its land as the largest in all of Rajputana. And just four days before Indian independence, its last maharaja signed the document that folded the ancient kingdom into the new republic. How did a desert city founded by a single chieftain become a metropolis of 1.6 million people, a military hub within 250 kilometres of the Pakistani border, and a film location for directors from Christopher Nolan to Satyajit Ray? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Kingdom Built on Trade

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  Rao Jodha did not start from nothing. His clan, the Rathores, had already put down roots in the nearby town of Mandore after a Pratihara ruler gave it as a dowry to a Rathore chieftain named Chunda. Chunda had used that foothold to push back against the declining Tughlaq dynasty, conquering territories including Khatu, Didwana, Sambhar, Nagaur, and Ajmer. By the time Jodha established Jodhpur in 1459, he was extending a project that had been building for generations. He drove the Delhi Sultanate back from the surrounding territory and established the kingdom known as Marwar. Mandore had served briefly as the capital, but Jodhpur eclipsed it even within Jodha's own lifetime. The city's position on the Delhi-Gujarat road was not accidental. That corridor carried goods in both directions, and Jodhpur's merchants profited from the flow of opium, copper, silk, sandalwood, and dates. Those same trading networks would later send Marwari merchants out across northern India, where they built a reputation for commercial dominance that persisted through the British period and beyond.

• 3. Mughals, Marathas, and Rebellion

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  After Rao Chandrasen Rathore died in 1581, Emperor Akbar annexed Marwar and turned the kingdom into a Mughal vassal. The arrangement was not simple subjugation. Jodhpur retained internal autonomy, and the exposure to the Mughal world brought new styles of art and architecture to the city and opened commercial doors for local merchants across northern India. The arrangement held until Aurangzeb sequestrated the state around 1679 following the death of Maharaja Jaswant Singh. What followed was a rebellion that lasted roughly thirty years. Durgadas Rathore eventually restored the throne to Maharaja Ajit Singh after Aurangzeb died in 1707. As Mughal power collapsed, however, the Jodhpur court fell into internal intrigue. Rather than seizing the opportunity, Marwar descended into strife. The Marathas filled the vacuum left by the Mughals and became the new overlords. In 1755, Jai Appa Scindia attacked Nagaur after looting parts of Rajasthan. He halted his army near a pond at Tausar, about 3.5 kilometres from Nagaur fort, and cut off food and water supplies. Maharaja Vijay Singh called a council and asked for volunteers. Gaji Khan Khokhar and Kan Singh stepped forward, disguised themselves as traders, and observed Scindia's army for two months. On the 25th of July 1755, a Friday at eleven in the morning, they attacked Scindia with daggers and killed him. Both men were killed by Scindia's soldiers in the fight. A proverb remembered in the region to this day recalls their deed. The Maratha army fought on for months near Nagaur but lost momentum after Scindia's death. The episode illustrated how much the region's balance of power now depended on personal acts of violence rather than stable political structures. Eventually the weakened Marwar court sought the help of the British and entered into a subsidiary alliance.

• 4. The British Era and Its Legacy

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  A major revolt shook the region in 1857 when Rathore nobles from Pali, led by Thakur Kushal Singh of Auwa, rose against British authority. Colonel Holmes and the British Army defeated the rebels and restored order. What followed was a long period of relative stability under colonial administration. During the British Raj, the state of Jodhpur held the largest land area of any state in the Rajputana, covering 93,424 square kilometres. Its population in 1901 stood at over 4.4 million. The state's estimated annual revenue reached 3,529,000 British pounds. Out of this period grew the commercial class known as the Marwaris, whose success in trade across India became a defining feature of the subcontinent's economic history. They had begun building those networks through the old caravan routes and refined them under colonial conditions into a diaspora of merchants and financiers spanning the country.

• 5. Independence and the Question of Accession

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  On the 11th of August 1947, four days before India's independence, Maharaja Hanwant Singh signed the Instrument of Accession merging Jodhpur into the Union of India. The decision was not straightforward. Hanwant Singh did not want to join India at all. Vallabhbhai Patel, the architect of Indian integration, persuaded him. On the 30th of March 1949, Jodhpur became part of the newly formed state of Rajasthan, created by merging the former princely states of Rajputana. The State Reorganisation Act of 1956 confirmed Jodhpur's place within Rajasthan permanently. At that point, the city was the second-largest in the state after Jaipur, a ranking it still holds today. After the inclusion of 395 villages into the city boundary in February 2021, the population reached 1,663,000, and projections suggest the city could exceed 3.1 million people by 2031.

• 6. The Blue City on Screen

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  Mehrangarh Fort looms over the old city from its rocky perch, and filmmakers have been drawn to it and the surrounding landscape for decades. Christopher Nolan used Jodhpur's historic buildings and desert landscape for The Dark Knight Rises. Tarsem Singh filmed The Fall there. Wes Anderson brought Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman to the city for The Darjeeling Limited. Sooraj Barjatya directed Hum Saath-Saath Hain on those streets. Kung Fu Yoga, starring Jackie Chan, Sonu Sood, and Disha Patani, filmed scenes there, as did Akshay Kumar's Airlift. The Mandarin-language film Buddies in India, launched in China in 2017 with Hindi songs in the soundtrack, used the city as its backdrop. But perhaps the most celebrated use of Jodhpur on film came from Satyajit Ray, who shot his Bengali film Sonar Kella in Jodhpur in the early 1970s. Ray, who also wrote the original novel on which the film was based, captured the city as it appeared at that time. The characters in the story stayed at the Jodhpur Circuit House. That film has remained a cultural touchstone and gave Jodhpur a distinct place in the imagination of Bengali audiences far removed from Rajasthan.

• 7. Desert Climate and Extreme Weather

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  Jodhpur carries a hot desert climate classification, known in the Koppen system as BWh. The average annual rainfall is around 362 millimetres, nearly all of it falling between June and September. That average, however, conceals wild swings. In the famine year of 1899, the city received only 24 millimetres of rain. In the flood year of 1917, it received 1,178 millimetres. Temperatures from March to October are extreme, regularly topping 40 degrees Celsius in April, May, and June. On the 20th of May 2016, the temperature reached 48.8 degrees Celsius, the highest ever recorded in the city. The Jojari River, a tributary of the Luni River, flows through the urban area from Banad to Salawas. A riverfront development project covering a 35-kilometre stretch of the Jojari was approved in January 2021 under the Namami Gange programme of the Ministry of Jal Shakti, building on earlier work overseen by the Jodhpur Development Authority.

• 8. A City Still Growing

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  The Rajasthan High Court, which sits in Jodhpur, was established on the 21st of June 1949 and inaugurated by Maharaja Sawai Man Singh on the 29th of August 1949. Its first Chief Justice was Kamala Kant Verma. That institution anchored Jodhpur's role as an administrative and legal centre for the state. The city is also home to the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences Jodhpur, the National Law University established in 1999, and MBM Engineering College, the oldest engineering institution in Rajasthan, founded in 1951. The city's economy contributes approximately four billion dollars to Rajasthan and serves as the centre of India's handicraft industry, valued at around 200 million dollars. The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor Project, valued at over 100 billion US dollars, is expected to affect Jodhpur's industrial landscape significantly, with Marwar Junction, about 100 kilometres from the city, designated as one of nine freight loading points along the corridor. Jodhpur's South Western Air Command remains one of Asia's largest airbases, a presence shaped by the city's location roughly 250 kilometres from the border with Pakistan, and by the airport's pivotal role during the Indo-Pakistani wars of 1965 and 1971.