The Thanjavur Maratha Palace

Every now and then, I come across interesting people I yearn to meet.

No – not Brad Pitt or George Clooney.

But people like Dostoevsky. Lee Kuan Yew. Chanakya.

The attraction lies in their stories, their perspectives, their motivations – those conversations will be or would have been delightfully entertaining for my mind.

And so, also added to the list recently is Serfoji IInd – a Maratha ruler who ruled Thanjavur or Tanjore from 1798 until his death in 1832.

Ruling cannot be an easy job even as a monarch. There are all those major responsibilities of public finance, enemies, armies, and of course the management of the people.

Within all that time-consuming and soul-consuming work, if one can find enough mental leisure to devote to the creation of amazing art, then one must be a genius.

And it appears Serfoji-II was a genius.

He put together a library (a separate note on that) of manuscripts and he created this palace.

The beauty is overwhelming and I probably have 500 photos of the place taken in an hour. here I present only a few….

A Video

It is a place I could easily live in forever. Not sure if I’d ever be able to sleep – because my eyes would just want to drink in more and more and more!

Amazing isn’t it?

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Traveling to the smaller towns in Asia, I realise why museums do not have the same significance in Asia as museums have elsewhere. It is because the cities themselves are living musuems. The houses, the temples, the palaces, the roadside shrines, the individuals and their traditional costumes – all of these are so saturated with culture that the need for connecting to the past is already met with by daily life experiences and a museum feels redundant.

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August 2022

jaina mishra

wovensouls.com