Bharatpur

Maharaja Suraj Mal raised this fort in the 1730s, and its defence was unusual. Not stone alone, but enormous banks of packed earth ringed the walls. When British columns under Lord Lake rolled up their cannon and pounded away with gunpowder, the shot simply buried itself in the mud and lost all its force. Siege after siege ended in retreat, and that record earned it the name Lohagarh, the iron fort — still spoken of as the one stronghold in India the British could never take. In 1826, though, a force under Lord Combermere breached the walls at last.

The park travellers now know as Keoladeo was once simply the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary. It is said that some two and a half centuries ago Maharaja Suraj Mal shaped this marshy stretch by hand, and an old Shiva temple standing within it, Keoladeo, gave the place its name. For generations it served as the duck-shooting ground of Bharatpur's rulers and their British guests, with thousands of birds falling in a single day. It became a national park in 1982, and this UNESCO World Heritage site still fills each winter with migratory birds — though the Siberian crane has not been seen here since 2002.

Deeg was the first capital of the Bharatpur rulers. The palace here was begun by Maharaja Badan Singh and expanded by his son Suraj Mal into something grand enough to answer Mughal architecture on its own terms. After his campaign against Delhi, Suraj Mal is said to have prised marble structures and a great deal of treasure out of the Mughal palaces and carried them home to Deeg. The palace's glory is its fountains, hundreds of them, worked by an ingenious old gravity system rather than modern machinery. When they all play together, the courtyards feel like the monsoon has arrived early.

Standing at the very heart of the city, the Ganga Maharani temple is reckoned among Bharatpur's finest pieces of architecture. Its story belongs to Maharaja Balwant Singh, who by tradition had long been without a child. He is said to have vowed that if a son were born to him, he would raise a grand temple to Mother Ganga. The wish was granted and the work began, but the building took some ninety years to finish, so several generations watched it rise. The holy Ganga water for the idol is said to have been carried down all the way from Haridwar.

Temples to Lord Ram stand in every corner of India, but shrines to his brother Lakshman are genuinely rare. Bharatpur is said to owe its name to Bharat, another of Ram's brothers, though the ruling house traced its own lineage elsewhere. What is certain is that the rulers took Lakshman as their family deity, and by tradition it was they who raised this handsome temple right in the middle of the city. Built of Rajasthani sandstone, it rewards a slow look: the carving across its walls is extraordinarily fine.

Walk into Bharatpur Palace and you find two traditions sharing one roof: the building is a fine blend of Rajput and Mughal styles. The wing known as the Kamra Khas now houses a government museum, and it is worth lingering over. Travellers can look closely at objects that carry the city's past, then step back into the courtyards and let the quiet do its work, imagining the daily splendour of a princely state that once ran its affairs from these rooms.