Bhāṭīs of Jaisalmer

The desert city

Rāwal Jaisal moved his seat to a triangular hill in the deep desert in 1156 and built a fort of the local yellow sandstone. Jaisalmer's position on the routes between Sindh, Multan and the Gujarat ports made it prosperous out of proportion to its country, and the merchant houses of the town built the carved sandstone havelis for which it is known.

The fort is still inhabited, which is unusual among Indian hill forts and has created a serious conservation problem: the drainage of a modern resident population is undermining foundations designed for a desert with almost no water use.

Jainism and the libraries

The Jain community of Jaisalmer built a group of temples within the fort between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries and assembled manuscript libraries — the Jinabhadra Sūri Jñāna Bhaṇḍāra among them — which preserved palm-leaf manuscripts of great age. Because the desert climate is dry and the town remote, texts survived there that were lost everywhere else, and the collections have been important to Sanskrit and Prakrit scholarship.

The state suffered repeated sieges, and Rajput tradition records more than one jauhar at Jaisalmer during the Sultanate period. It entered British protection in 1818, declined as sea trade replaced the caravan routes, and acceded to India in 1949.