Mahabat Khan III (r. 1911–1948), the last Nawab of Junagadh, was an avid dog lover to the point of madness.

He owned a pack of 800 dogs, each of which was given a separate room in the palace, a personal servant to tend to its daily needs, grooming, and feeding, and also a telephone so the Nawab could check on them.

When a dog died, Chopin’s funeral march was played and a state mourning was declared.

The Nawab was also known to use his dogs to harass the British.

>"To annoy the Raj whose airs and graces he resented," the Maharaja of Junagadh had his liveried staff dress his dogs in formal evening suits, mount them on rickshaws and drive them on British summer capital Shimla’s fashionable Mall.

>"The women were infuriated, often feeling a dog’s breath on their pale powdered faces as the rickshaws jostled for space on the way to Cecil Hotel for a dance. The Maharaja had a stormy meeting with the Viceroy and promised to keep his dogs locked away. He had to agree but waited until there was a ball at the Viceregal Lodge and ordered his servants to round up every crazed, lunatic pi dog in Simla. He set them loose in the grounds and was rewarded by the sound of horrified memsahibs shrieking like peacocks."

Roshanara and Bobby

Of all his 800 dogs, the Nawab had a favorite in a female dog named Roshanara. In 1922, Roshanara found her match in a Golden Retriever named Bobby. Nawab decided that the only logical next step was to throw a wedding fit for a head of state, reportedly spending an amount equivalent to ₹2 crore today.

Invitations were sent to royals and dignitaries from all over India, including Lord Irwin, the Viceroy of India, who declined. Regardless, over 150,000 guests, including thousands of local citizens, attended the festivities.

The bride was escorted to Durbar Hall in a custom-made silver palki, dripping in expensive jewels and fine fabrics. Meanwhile, the groom, adorned in gold bracelets and a jeweled necklace, arrived with a grand procession of 25 dogs, each wearing a golden bracelet. It was also accompanied by a military band and a guard of honor.

The wedding ceremony was held at the Nawab’s palace, a magnificent structure that stood as a symbol of his wealth and power. The palace grounds were decorated with flowers and lights, creating a festive atmosphere. Guests were treated to a lavish feast, with dishes prepared by the best chefs in the region.

1948

The priorities of the Nawab were put to the ultimate test when he decided to accede to Pakistan, despite not sharing a land border with it.

The decision led to a revolt by his subjects and an eventual blockade by the Indian government. Realizing his position was untenable, the Nawab was forced to flee to Karachi in a chartered private aircraft.

Faced with a hasty exit and limited space on the plane, the Nawab, true to form, prioritized his beloved dogs. He packed as many of his pets onto the aircraft as possible, reportedly leaving behind several of his wives and a significant portion of the royal treasury on the tarmac to ensure his dogs made it to safety.

He lived out the rest of his days in Pakistan, dying in 1959.

References

• Highness: Maharajahs of India, by Ann Morrow
• Passion royale for pampering pets, by The Tribune

The Shekhawati region of Rajasthan is famously known as the world's largest open-air art gallery.

Between the 18th and 20th centuries, this arid land became a vibrant hub of immense wealth, driven by the entrepreneurial prowess of Marwari merchants who capitalized on the bustling caravan trade routes, and later integrated themselves to the greater part of the subcontinent's commerce.

As these families amassed staggering fortunes, they sought to outdo one another in grand architectural statements back home in Shekhawati. They poured their wealth into constructing sprawling, multi-courtyard mansions known as havelis, transforming their remote hometowns into opulent, competitive showcases of their success and social standing.

However, with time, the Marwari merchants stopped frequenting their ancestral homes from the urban world they had settled in. Without upkeep, many of these grand estates have surrendered to the harsh desert climate. Yet, even in their current state of decay, the havelis possess a haunting beauty.

References

The Painted Towns of Shekhawati by Ilay Cooper

Pratap Singh (r. 1572—1597), the 12th Maharana of Mewar, is famously remembered for his resistance against Mughal imperialism. Despite initial losses, Pratap had pivoted to asymmetric warfare and waged a successful guerilla war, reclaiming most of Mewar including the strongholds of Udaipur, Kumbhalgarh, and Gogunda as attested by the contemporaneous epigraphic evidences:

>सिध श्री महाराजाधिराज महाराणाजी श्री प्रतापसिंगजी आदेशातु प्रगणै जहाजपुर रै ग्राम पंडेर मध्ये हल धरती बीगा ११ करै दीधा धीमुषे । साह भामा । सवत् १६४५ काती सुदी १५ ।

—Pander inscription, where Pratap is granting the lands of Pander to a trusted follower called Sadulnath Trivedi.

But sustaining a multi-decade war against the most powerful empire on Earth centered barely 300 miles away from Mewar required more than just martial acumen. While his military achievements are well-documented, his agrarian strategies and economic resilience are often overlooked in popular narratives.

Following the Siege of Chittorgarh 1568, Mewar had lost its fertile eastern plains to Mughals. Another devastating setback came following the Battle of Haldighati 1576 when Mughals occupied the Dariba Silver Mines (located in the present-day Rajsamand district of Rajasthan). In an interview with AIR Central English Features unit, Dr. Shri Krishna explained that the Mughals carted away massive amounts of silver, melting them down to mint imperial silver coins.

Following these agrarian and economic setbacks, Akbar expected Mewar to capitulate. But Pratap combated these reverses by fundamentally reforming the entire administration of the state.

The Scorched Earth

In order to overstretch Mughal supply chains and devastate their logistics, Pratap ordered the farmers in the plains to abandon the eastern belt entirely and migrate to the valleys of Aravalli range.

Being denied resources locally, Mughals had to import supplies from outside Mewar which made the economics of the forceful occupation exponentially more costlier and riskier. Caravans were now forced to carry fodder for the oxen as well, drastically decreasing the throughput while still leaving them easy targets for mountain raids.

>Traditional Mewar accounts underline that, alongside constant attempts to sever the imperial supply lines, the land was not ploughed but kept wasted and scorched by the people of Mewar for over six years – from before Haldighati in 1576 until 1582, with crops destroyed and wells filled with earth and rubble, in order to deter the Mughal occupying forces.

—Rima Hooja

Bhils to the Rescue

However, the decision created the problem of his own supplies. Mewaris of the plains were unaccustomed to pursuing agriculture in rugged, rocky, and densely forested Bhomat region of the Aravallis. To handle this, they relied on the Bhil tribe's indigenous knowledge of the mountains.

Bhils practiced a form of sustainable hill agriculture known locally as Walar (a variant of shifting or slash-and-burn cultivation adapted for arid highlands). The state shifted its focus to cultivating drought-resistant coarse grains like Jowar (sorghum) and Bajra (pearl millet) that could grow in rocky terrain.

>Til, kuri (Sesamum indicum), kuri (Panicum miliaceum), basthi, kudra, mal, and sainwalai are only grown in walar cultivation, i.e. by cutting down and burning the jungle on the hill-sides, and sowing the seed in the ashes. This mode of cultivation is very popular with the wild tribes of Girasias, Bhils, and Minas, and has proved most destructive to the Aravalli forests.

—The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Volume XIII

(Interestingly mentioned here, British calls walar cultivation as "most destructive to the Aravalli forests". Colonialists frequently misunderstood indigenous slash-and-burn agriculture. When practiced by small tribal populations with long fallow periods (allowing the forest to regrow), walar was highly sustainable and perfectly adapted to the rocky terrain where plows couldn't go. It only became "destructive" when populations spiked and colonial timber extraction restricted forest access.)

Beloved of the World

Written by Pratap's court scholar Chakrapani Mishra in 1577, Vishwavallabh (translated to "Beloved of the World") is a comprehensive treatise on agriculture and hydrology. In the very opening verse the author says, “I propose to expound in this book the science of plant life but without water there can be no plants. Hence I will first explain the sources of water.”

In the first chapter he recommends several surface indications of groundwater on the lines of Varahamihira and Surapala but has added several more plants/trees as water indicators.

One full chapter of the book is devoted to the technique of constructing water reservoirs (II-1–39).

(Translated and commented on by Nalini Sadhale and YL Nene. Published by Asian Agri-History Foundation)

Since Aravallis did not have predictable rivers of the plains, Mewaris used the hydrologic science codified in Vishwavallabh to build small, hidden check-dams using local rocks and brush to pool water from seasonal rains in shaded ravines, preventing rapid evaporation, along with tracking groundwater as instructed by the treatise.

A king fighting for his kingdom's independence investing in agricultural science and ecological preservation speaks volumes on long-term vision for state-building. As Rima Hooja writes:

>We get glimpses of the Mewar that Pratap may have created, under more favourable circumstances, from Pratap’s commissioning of works like the Sanskrit text Vishva-Vallabha. This book, written by Chakrapani Mishra at Pratap’s court, was completed in 1577, a year after the fateful battle of Haldighati. The work is a compendium on agriculture, horticulture, finding water sources, water collection structures in different terrain grafting plants and developing new varieties, and best farm practices for different terrains. In a peacetime Mewar, following the directions provided in the Vishva-Vallabha a sixteenth-century ‘green revolution’ could have taken place.

>Even wartime Mewar found this book very useful, and small-scale farming by Bhils and others in previously non-agrarian locales helped provide some food to Pratap’s own troops, creating farming oases far from Mughal reach.

The book would go on to be used in the peacetime of Pratap's reign as well.

The Mines of Mewar

We have discussed the Dariba Silver Mines being temporarily occupied by Mughals. Yet there were other mines in the kingdom. The Mewaris still controlled the Agucha Mines (located in the present-day Bhilwara district of Rajasthan) and Zawar Mines (located in the present-day Udaipur district of Rajasthan).

Pratap strategically concentrated his defensive efforts to protect these critical assets. He successfully ensured that especially the vital zinc mines at Zawar remained secure and completely out of Mughal clutches.

The mining activities of Mewar have always been global in nature. As British archaeometallurgist Dr Paul T Craddock writes:

>The remains of early mining and metallurgy we have studied in India are at least as sophisticated as anything further west, and there are no parallels or analogies anywhere for the zinc smelting processes that we have uncovered in the Zawar mines near Udaipur, Mewar. This was the sharp edge of technical innovation, taking place on a major scale well away from Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. We can safely say it was the start of the industrial revolution in the Kingdom of Mewar, 500 years before it begins in the West.

>...It would suffice to say that in India by the 12th century CE, the production of zinc at Zawar was beginning on an industrial scale. It would seem that the mines at Zawar were always worked predominantly for zinc, with lead recovered as a by-product…We can thus confirm Zawar as the earliest known zinc mine in the world.

—The production of lead, silver and zinc in early India

Pratap would go onto recover the Dariba Mines post Battle of Dewair 1582.

Economic Recovery

By 1585, Pratap drove out most of the Mughal forces including last of Akbar's invasions under Raja Jagannath, uncle of Man Singh of Amber. Pratap established a new capital at Chavand, which marked the beginning of the economic recovery.

With the end of Scorched Earth Policy, the population that had retreated to Aravallis or peaceful neighboring kingdoms returned to their homes in large numbers. The repopulation effort was aided by a string of favorable monsoons that revived traditional agriculture.

Akbar's failure to subjugate Pratap for decades proved fatal to his dream of conquering Mewar as he was forced to relocate to Lahore in 1585 where he would stay until 1598 while Pratap ruled as a sovereign king of a sovereign kingdom. We may quote V. Smith’s fitting epitome of his reign:

>The emperor desired the death of the Rana and the absorption of his territory in the imperial dominions. The Rana, while fully prepared to sacrifice his life if necessary, was resolved that his blood should never be contaminated by intermixture with that of the foreigner, and that his country should remain a land of freemen. After much tribulation he succeeded, and Akbar failed.

References

• History of Mewar: from Earliest Times to 1751 A.D. by RV Somani
• Maharana Pratap: The Invincible Warrior by Rima Hooja
• Akbar the Great Mogul, 1542-1605 by VA Smith
• Maharana Pratap: Beyond Haldighati by All India Radio feature
• The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Volume XIII
• Water Harvesting and Conservation in Ancient Agricultural Texts by Nalini Sadhale
• The production of lead, silver and zinc in early India (Craddock, Freestone, Gurjar, Middleton and Willies)

Happy Maharana Pratap Jayanti to all.

Pratap Singh (r. 1572—1597), the 12th Maharana of Mewar, is famously remembered for his resistance against Mughal imperialism. Despite initial losses, Pratap had pivoted to asymmetric warfare and waged a successful guerilla war, reclaiming most of Mewar including the strongholds of Udaipur, Kumbhalgarh, and Gogunda as attested by the contemporaneous epigraphic evidences:

>सिध श्री महाराजाधिराज महाराणाजी श्री प्रतापसिंगजी आदेशातु प्रगणै जहाजपुर रै ग्राम पंडेर मध्ये हल धरती बीगा ११ करै दीधा धीमुषे । साह भामा । सवत् १६४५ काती सुदी १५ ।

—Pander inscription, where Pratap is granting the lands of Pander to a trusted follower called Sadulnath Trivedi.

But sustaining a multi-decade war against the most powerful empire on Earth centered barely 300 miles away from Mewar required more than just martial acumen. While his military achievements are well-documented, his agrarian strategies and economic resilience are often overlooked in popular narratives.

Following the Siege of Chittorgarh 1568, Mewar had lost its fertile eastern plains to Mughals. Another devastating setback came following the Battle of Haldighati 1576 when Mughals occupied the Dariba Silver Mines (located in the present-day Rajsamand district of Rajasthan). In an interview with AIR Central English Features unit, Dr. Shri Krishna explained that the Mughals carted away massive amounts of silver, melting them down to mint imperial silver coins.

Following these agrarian and economic setbacks, Akbar expected Mewar to capitulate. But Pratap combated these reverses by fundamentally reforming the entire administration of the state.

The Scorched Earth

In order to overstretch Mughal supply chains and devastate their logistics, Pratap ordered the farmers in the plains to abandon the eastern belt entirely and migrate to the valleys of Aravalli range.

Being denied resources locally, Mughals had to import supplies from outside Mewar which made the economics of the forceful occupation exponentially more costlier and riskier. Caravans were now forced to carry fodder for the oxen as well, drastically decreasing the throughput while still leaving them easy targets for mountain raids.

>Traditional Mewar accounts underline that, alongside constant attempts to sever the imperial supply lines, the land was not ploughed but kept wasted and scorched by the people of Mewar for over six years – from before Haldighati in 1576 until 1582, with crops destroyed and wells filled with earth and rubble, in order to deter the Mughal occupying forces.

—Rima Hooja

Bhils to the Rescue

However, the decision created the problem of his own supplies. Mewaris of the plains were unaccustomed to pursuing agriculture in rugged, rocky, and densely forested Bhomat region of the Aravallis. To handle this, they relied on the Bhil tribe's indigenous knowledge of the mountains.

Bhils practiced a form of sustainable hill agriculture known locally as Walar (a variant of shifting or slash-and-burn cultivation adapted for arid highlands). The state shifted its focus to cultivating drought-resistant coarse grains like Jowar (sorghum) and Bajra (pearl millet) that could grow in rocky terrain.

>Til, kuri (Sesamum indicum), kuri (Panicum miliaceum), basthi, kudra, mal, and sainwalai are only grown in walar cultivation, i.e. by cutting down and burning the jungle on the hill-sides, and sowing the seed in the ashes. This mode of cultivation is very popular with the wild tribes of Girasias, Bhils, and Minas, and has proved most destructive to the Aravalli forests.

—The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Volume XIII

(Interestingly mentioned here, British calls walar cultivation as "most destructive to the Aravalli forests". Colonialists frequently misunderstood indigenous slash-and-burn agriculture. When practiced by small tribal populations with long fallow periods (allowing the forest to regrow), walar was highly sustainable and perfectly adapted to the rocky terrain where plows couldn't go. It only became "destructive" when populations spiked and colonial timber extraction restricted forest access.)

Beloved of the World

Written by Pratap's court scholar Chakrapani Mishra in 1577, Vishwavallabh (translated to "Beloved of the World") is a comprehensive treatise on agriculture and hydrology. In the very opening verse the author says, “I propose to expound in this book the science of plant life but without water there can be no plants. Hence I will first explain the sources of water.”

In the first chapter he recommends several surface indications of groundwater on the lines of Varahamihira and Surapala but has added several more plants/trees as water indicators.

One full chapter of the book is devoted to the technique of constructing water reservoirs (II-1–39).

(Translated and commented on by Nalini Sadhale and YL Nene. Published by Asian Agri-History Foundation)

Since Aravallis did not have predictable rivers of the plains, Mewaris used the hydrologic science codified in Vishwavallabh to build small, hidden check-dams using local rocks and brush to pool water from seasonal rains in shaded ravines, preventing rapid evaporation, along with tracking groundwater as instructed by the treatise.

A king fighting for his kingdom's independence investing in agricultural science and ecological preservation speaks volumes on long-term vision for state-building. As Rima Hooja writes:

>We get glimpses of the Mewar that Pratap may have created, under more favourable circumstances, from Pratap’s commissioning of works like the Sanskrit text Vishva-Vallabha. This book, written by Chakrapani Mishra at Pratap’s court, was completed in 1577, a year after the fateful battle of Haldighati. The work is a compendium on agriculture, horticulture, finding water sources, water collection structures in different terrain grafting plants and developing new varieties, and best farm practices for different terrains. In a peacetime Mewar, following the directions provided in the Vishva-Vallabha a sixteenth-century ‘green revolution’ could have taken place.

>Even wartime Mewar found this book very useful, and small-scale farming by Bhils and others in previously non-agrarian locales helped provide some food to Pratap’s own troops, creating farming oases far from Mughal reach.

The book would go on to be used in the peacetime of Pratap's reign as well.

The Mines of Mewar

We have discussed the Dariba Silver Mines being temporarily occupied by Mughals. Yet there were other mines in the kingdom. The Mewaris still controlled the Agucha Mines (located in the present-day Bhilwara district of Rajasthan) and Zawar Mines (located in the present-day Udaipur district of Rajasthan).

Pratap strategically concentrated his defensive efforts to protect these critical assets. He successfully ensured that especially the vital zinc mines at Zawar remained secure and completely out of Mughal clutches.

The mining activities of Mewar have always been global in nature. As British archaeometallurgist Dr Paul T Craddock writes:

>The remains of early mining and metallurgy we have studied in India are at least as sophisticated as anything further west, and there are no parallels or analogies anywhere for the zinc smelting processes that we have uncovered in the Zawar mines near Udaipur, Mewar. This was the sharp edge of technical innovation, taking place on a major scale well away from Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. We can safely say it was the start of the industrial revolution in the Kingdom of Mewar, 500 years before it begins in the West.

>...It would suffice to say that in India by the 12th century CE, the production of zinc at Zawar was beginning on an industrial scale. It would seem that the mines at Zawar were always worked predominantly for zinc, with lead recovered as a by-product…We can thus confirm Zawar as the earliest known zinc mine in the world.

—The production of lead, silver and zinc in early India

Pratap would go onto recover the Dariba Mines post Battle of Dewair 1582.

Economic Recovery

By 1585, Pratap drove out most of the Mughal forces including last of Akbar's invasions under Raja Jagannath, uncle of Man Singh of Amber. Pratap established a new capital at Chavand, which marked the beginning of the economic recovery.

With the end of Scorched Earth Policy, the population that had retreated to Aravallis or peaceful neighboring kingdoms returned to their homes in large numbers. The repopulation effort was aided by a string of favorable monsoons that revived traditional agriculture.

Akbar's failure to subjugate Pratap for decades proved fatal to his dream of conquering Mewar as he was forced to relocate to Lahore in 1585 where he would stay until 1598 while Pratap ruled as a sovereign king of a sovereign kingdom. We may quote V. Smith’s fitting epitome of his reign:

>The emperor desired the death of the Rana and the absorption of his territory in the imperial dominions. The Rana, while fully prepared to sacrifice his life if necessary, was resolved that his blood should never be contaminated by intermixture with that of the foreigner, and that his country should remain a land of freemen. After much tribulation he succeeded, and Akbar failed.

References

• History of Mewar: from Earliest Times to 1751 A.D. by RV Somani
• Maharana Pratap: The Invincible Warrior by Rima Hooja
• Akbar the Great Mogul, 1542-1605 by VA Smith
• Maharana Pratap: Beyond Haldighati by All India Radio feature
• The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Volume XIII
• Water Harvesting and Conservation in Ancient Agricultural Texts by Nalini Sadhale
• The production of lead, silver and zinc in early India (Craddock, Freestone, Gurjar, Middleton and Willies)

Happy Maharana Pratap Jayanti to all.