The wonderful story of FOREIGNERS ( hadi rani kund)

saronic
Zurich, Switzerland
Reviewed January 4, 2019
a clean stepwell with annoying youngsters
We came to this place not from the district capital Tonk, which is about 40km to the north, but from our heritage hotel near Deoli in the south. It took us about an hour on a very bad road past the artificial lake behind Bisalpur Dam to get here. The stepwell is about a kilometer away from the town center of Todaraisingh.

One enters through an open iron gate with no guardian around and thus also no entrance fee. We had the place to ourselves, until some youngsters, who had seen us entering, came after us. For the remaining time they kept annoying us with begging, staring at my wife, talking loudly and then letting loud music blast from a transistor radio. My wife left and went back to the car, where our driver was waiting, while I kept visiting the stepwell.

Unlike at the Abhaneri 'baori', which we had seen a few days earlier, here one could walk on the steps down to water level and also wander through the two galleries, one above the other, at one of the four sides of the stepwell..What surprised me was the cleanliness of the place, especially in comparison with the 'baori's of Bundi.

Besides the stepwell there are also the ruins of a beautiful palace to be seen in town, the Raja Rai Singh Mahal, of which a part had been used as a school, as we could guess from blackboards and maps on the walls still there. Also at this place we were followed, but this time by younger and better behaved boys, who probably just were curious to see some foreigners. Obviously Todaraisingh is completely off the beaten path in Rajasthan and hardly gets visited by tourists despite its attractive monuments.