Sawai Jai Singh

• 1. Introduction

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  Sawai Jai Singh II inherited a throne at the age of eleven with barely enough resources to pay for a thousand cavalry. The year was 1699, and the Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb had reduced the Kingdom of Amber to near-penury over the preceding ninety-six years. Yet from that desperate starting point, the boy who became the 30th Kachwaha ruler would go on to found one of the great planned cities of the ancient world, build a network of astronomical observatories that outperformed European instruments, and perform a sacred Vedic rite that no Hindu king had attempted in centuries. How did a ruler squeezed between the declining Mughals and the rising Marathas carve out such a legacy? And what drove a medieval king to translate Euclid and Napier into Sanskrit? The answers reach from the battlefields of Malwa to the night skies above Jaipur.

• 2. A Throne Under Pressure

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  Jai Singh's father, Mirza Raja Bishan Singh, died on the 31st of December 1699, and the boy who followed him onto the throne at Amber found almost nothing waiting for him. The Kingdom of Amber sat uncomfortably close to the Mughal power centers of Delhi and Agra, which had long pushed the Kachwaha rulers toward diplomacy rather than defiance.

  Six months after his accession, Aurangzeb ordered the young raja to serve in the Deccan Wars. Jai Singh delayed for roughly a year, partly because he was ordered to raise a force larger than his official rank required, and partly because he had a marriage to conclude. He married the daughter of Udit Singh, nephew of Raja Uttam Ram Gaur of Sheopur, in March 1701. When he finally reached Burhanpur on the 3rd of August 1701, heavy rains stopped his advance. By the 13th of September 1701, Aurangzeb had cut his rank by five hundred and docked his pay.

  His performance at the siege of Khelna in 1702 earned him back only what he had lost, plus one title: Sawai, meaning one and a quarter times superior to his contemporaries. It was a meager reward that would come to define his name. His tutor Jagannatha Samrat, who guided him during these early years, may have lit the intellectual spark that would later drive Jai Singh toward the stars.

• 3. Rebellion and Alliance

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  The Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah I struck at Jai Singh with a move that was both personal and political: he granted the title of Mirza Raja to Jai Singh's younger brother, Vijay Singh, declared Vijay Singh the Raja of Amber, and stripped Jai Singh down to an ordinary Jagirdar. It was a calculated humiliation.

  Jai Singh responded with exactly the kind of political ingenuity that would mark his entire career. He built a political alliance with the Kingdom of Marwar and a matrimonial alliance with the Kingdom of Mewar. Together, these moves sparked a Rajput rebellion and recovered the territories that had been taken from him.

  Later, the emperor Muhammad Shah conferred on Jai Singh the title of Saramad-i-Raja-i-Hindustan on the 21st of April 1721. Two years later, in 1723, he received the fuller title of Maharaja Sawai, Raj Rajeshwar, Shri Rajadhiraj. These honors reflected a shift: Jai Singh was no longer simply a vassal fighting to survive. He had become the most formidable ruler in Northern India, and other Rajas looked to him for protection and representation at the imperial court.

• 4. Three Terms in Malwa

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  Between 1714 and 1737, Jai Singh governed the province of Malwa three separate times, and each appointment revealed a political landscape more dangerous than the last. In his first viceroyalty from 1714 to 1717, Maratha war-bands pushing north from the Deccan were steadily beaten back.

  By his second appointment in 1729-1730, the situation had transformed. The Peshwa Baji Rao had defeated the Nizam of Hyderabad at the Treaty of Shevgaon in March 1728. Chimaji Appa, Baji Rao's brother, had crushed the Malwa governor Girdhar Bahadur on the 29th of November 1728. Maratha forces had occupied Gujarat and grown enormously in strength. Jai Singh, reading the shift clearly, appealed to the Maratha ruler Shahu to restore the great fortress of Mandu to the Mughals. The order came through on the 19th of March 1730. By May, Jai Singh was recalled to Rajputana.

  His third and final posting from 1732 to 1737 gave him the most consequential advice he ever offered. He petitioned Emperor Muhammad Shah to negotiate with Shahu, arguing that Shahu still remembered the good relations between his own grandfather Shivaji and the late Jai Singh I. The advice was sound. Anti-Jai Singh factions at the Delhi court helped dismiss it. Muhammad Shah chose war instead. The replacement governor, Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah, was routed by the Peshwa, and by the Treaty of Duraha on Saturday the 7th of January 1738, the whole of Malwa passed to the Marathas.

• 5. Cannon, Matchlocks, and Fortifications

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  Jai Singh's army, according to the estimate of historian Jadunath Sarkar, did not exceed forty thousand men at full strength, costing roughly sixty lakhs a year. What set it apart was not its size but its firepower. Jai Singh was among the first Indian rulers to arm his infantry with matchlocks rather than the traditional Rajput sword and shield, a decision that anticipated the tactics later associated with commanders like Mirza Najaf Khan, Mahadji Sindhia, and Tipu Sultan.

  His most striking military creation was the Jaivana, a wheeled cannon he built before moving his capital to Jaipur. It remains the largest wheeled cannon in the world. In 1732, when serving as governor of Malwa, he maintained thirty thousand soldiers divided evenly between cavalry and foot-musketeers, not counting additional contingents stationed in the Subahs of Agra and Ajmer or in his own fort garrisons.

  When the Persian raider Nadir Shah defeated the Mughals at Karnal on the 13th of February 1739 and sacked Delhi on the 11th of March the same year, Jai Singh stayed within his own borders. He used the crisis productively, launching an extensive program of fortification across the thikanas under Jaipur. Most of the later fortifications around the former Jaipur state are traced to decisions made during this period.

• 6. Building Jaipur

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  Construction of what would become Jaipur began as early as 1725, though the foundation stone was ceremonially laid only in 1727. By 1733, Jaipur had officially replaced Amber as the capital of the Kachawahas. The city was known originally as Jai Nagara in Sanskrit, meaning the city of victory; the British would later call it the pink city, a name that stuck by the early twentieth century.

  The design came from Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, an architect trained in the ancient Sanskrit manuals on city-planning known as silpa-sutras. The layout followed the ancient Hindu grid pattern found in archaeological ruins dating to three thousand BCE. Merchants from across India settled within its thick walls, protected by a garrison of seventeen thousand soldiers with adequate artillery.

  A Sanskrit epic titled Ishvar Vilas Mahakavya, composed by Kavikalanidhi Devarshi Shrikrishna Bhatt, recorded the construction of the city and other significant events of the era. The planned city eventually became the capital of the Indian state of Rajasthan. To assert his sovereignty beyond the building of a new capital, Jai Singh performed two Ashvamedha sacrifices, one in 1734 and another in 1741, reviving an ancient rite that had lain dormant for several centuries.

• 7. Observatories and the Night Sky

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  In 1719, a noisy dispute broke out in the court of Emperor Muhammad Shah over how to calculate the auspicious date for an imperial journey. Astronomers disagreed, calculations clashed, and the spectacle left Jai Singh convinced that India needed better astronomical education. His interest in the subject may have been kindled even earlier, possibly as far back as 1702 by his tutor Jagannatha Samrat.

  He ordered the construction of five observatories, known collectively as the Jantar Mantar: at Delhi, Mathura in his Agra province, Benares, Ujjain the capital of his Malwa province, and his own capital Jaipur. Each contained a set of purpose-built instruments. The Ram Yantra was a cylindrical building with an open top and a central pillar for measuring the altitude and azimuth of celestial objects. The Jai Prakash was a concave hemisphere. The Samrat Yantra was a massive equinoctial sundial capable of estimating local time, locating the Pole Star, and measuring the declination of celestial objects. The Digamsha Yantra was a pillar enclosed by two circular walls. The Narivalaya Yantra was a cylindrical dial.

  The observations produced by these instruments were, by the account of those who used them, remarkably accurate. Jai Singh compiled a set of astronomical tables called the Zij-i-Muhammadshahi to help others make their own observations. European Jesuit astronomers invited to visit the observatories found that the techniques and instruments at Jaipur surpassed what they themselves employed. Today the observatories at Jaipur, Varanasi, and Ujjain remain functional; the one at Delhi does not, and the Mathura observatory has been lost entirely.

• 8. Scholarship and Reform

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  Jai Singh had Euclid's Elements of Geometry translated into Sanskrit, along with several works on trigonometry and the work of John Napier on the construction and use of logarithms. He was initiated into the Nimbarka Sampradaya of the Vaishnava sect and actively promoted Sanskrit learning.

  His social reforms carried real political weight. At his insistence, Emperor Muhammad Shah abolished the jaziya tax, a levy on the Hindu population that Aurangzeb had imposed in 1679. Muhammad Shah ended it in 1720. In 1728, Jai Singh persuaded the emperor to also lift the pilgrimage tax on Hindus traveling to Gaya. He pushed for the abolition of Sati and for reducing the extravagant spending that had become attached to Rajput wedding customs.

  He was the first Hindu ruler in centuries to perform the Ashvamedha sacrifice, which he conducted in 1716, and later the Vajapeya in 1734. On both occasions, large amounts were distributed in charity. His final years brought military setback: the Battle of Gangwana ended his ambitions to create a Jaipur-led political union in Rajputana, as his attempts to annex Bundi and Rampura and intervene in the affairs of Bikaner and Jodhpur drove other Rajput clans toward the Marathas instead. He died in 1743 and was cremated at the Royal Crematorium at Gaitore, north of Jaipur. His son Ishwari Singh succeeded him.