Winter Holidays: Trip to Gwalior

We left for Gwalior and on the way we stopped at a palace called the Datia fort and palace. The Datia palace is very nice and it was also built for Jahangir. The palace took many years to make. It seems Jahangir stayed there only for one night. The palace is seven fl

oors tall and has domes which were covered and painted in mosaic.  The palace had more than 100 rooms or so. The outside part of the palace is completely painted, but now the paint is wearing off. Nobody visits the palace; it’s quite rare.

From there, after spending an hour in that beautiful palace, we went to Gwalior. We reached Gwalior and went to our hotel: Tansen’s Residency by Madhya Pradesh Tourism.  The food was very good, rooms were big and spacious.  We were in a suite, that had a drawing room, dining room and bedroom. After this we went to the Scindia Family’s palace. It was big, grand and magnificent. It was influenced by European architecture. Only a part of it is open, Then we were heading towards the Gwalior fort. While going uphill to the fort, on the sides of the road there were rocks which had Lord Mahavira and other Jain sculptures sculpted on it.

Close by there was a Jain temple. The Gwalior fort had a very South Indian architecture. There was Persian, Afghan influence too. The whole fort was like a temple. It has two floors which were underground. The whole fort had very nice ventilation. The first basement floor had the swinging rooms for the eight queens of the kings. It was a room where there were 8 eight swings. (Now they are not there) and the queens used to have fun. The second basement floor was the bathing room of the queens. Both of these rooms in Aurangzeb’s time were used as hanging rooms. He had hanged one of his brothers in one of the rooms.

Second place was the Shan Jahan Palace and Jahangir Palace. It was nothing great. The palaces were quite small and not very decorated. There were horse stables and also elephant stables. Both the palaces were built on a large ground. After this, all these areas were used by the British. All these forts and palaces were built in a large compound. There was a huge jail built for one big gangster. There were two temples a.k.a  the Saas bahu temple. All these temples were vandalized by Aurangzeb. The temples were very intricate.

 The Scindia palace was huge and luxurious. I wish I lived in such a palace! The chandeliers were very big, almost the size of a room. We went back to the hotel, took some rest and went back to the Gwalior fort for the sound and light show. It was freezing cold and a cloud passed through us brrr....there were not many people for the show, just some ten of us. The show was okay and the voice over was by Amitabh Bachchan. We headed back to the resort  and had our dinner ; the best part of the dinner was a live ghazal performance. We enjoyed it as our tiring day ended.

Next morning, we went to the Birla Sun temple and Tansen’s tomb. We also saw the Tansen’s guru’s tomb called the Fakir Gaus Makbara and other small tombs.