Culture & Travel

Pacho, On His New Year’s Resolution, Love For Jaipur, And The Jaigarh Heritage Festival

The King of Jaipur opens up about his childhood memories, personal style, favourite books, and more.

ByRadhika Bhalla

His Highness Maharaja Sawai Padmanabh Singh of Jaipur.

We’re sitting in the ‘Egyptian Room’ of the City Palace, Jaipur, and His Highness Maharaja Sawai Padmanabh Singh of Jaipur—or Pacho, as the world knows him—is in the mood to discuss art, culture, and history. It’s certainly not the regular topic for a 26-year-old. But he’ll have it no other way, so we get right to it.

Before we begin, there’s the question of his famous nickname. “I prefer long names. But it’s just easier for a lot of people to call me Pacho. I’m the only one in our family with the name ‘Padmanabh’, and we trace our ancestry to a few thousand years,” Pacho explains.

The idea of building and preserving for posterity is a guiding force for many of Pacho’s dreams and ambitions for the future. His interest in art began, subliminally, when he was much younger. “I have grown up surrounded by so much art. However, I never really appreciated it as much until I went to live abroad, where I saw how much care, love, and respect people afforded to the living heritage of their countries,” Pacho shares, discussing the start of his journey as a patron and student of art. “Once I returned, I felt extremely sad looking at the state of our cultural treasures. To a certain extent, we haven’t looked after our built heritage, culture, and tradition. Art is only one aspect of it; so much of it is intangible, living practises and traditions that aren’t written down anywhere… That’s what makes us beautiful as a people.”

Here, in Jaipur, the city is teeming with anticipation of the grand opening of the first edition of the Jaigarh Heritage Festival. And while 2024 was already an incredible and busy year for Pacho, dotted with grand gallery openings, fashion shows, and parties at the City Palace, this festival is special for a reason very personal to him. “Ever since I was a child, Jaigarh was one place I would go to if I ever needed to get out or needed peace in my life,” he recalls. “Of course, when we would go with friends, we’d play hide-and-seek and pitch up tents and sleep there. But along with that, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. On one side, you have the beautiful Amer Fort, and on the other, the wild mountains and lush, green forests for as far as your eyes can see. It’s a place that is very close to my heart.”

The seeds of this two-day-long festival were planted in July 2023, which marked the 40th anniversary of the Fort being opened to the public. To commemorate this, a small festival was held at the venue in December 2023. One year later, a roster of some of the country’s most talented and erudite names were present on the hallowed grounds of Jaigarh—Niloy Ahsan Zulkernaeen playing the Dhrupad, Nagada maestro Nathoolal Solanki, Ustad Mir Mukhtiyar Ali performing Sufi music, Vidya Shah, Jaipur’s indie folk fusion band, Yugm, and Padma Shri Kailash Kher, among others.

And that was just day one of the show. The weekend continued with a Taus recital by Sandeep Singh and Avirbhav Verma, conversations by historian Parul Pandya Dhar with history-writer Ashwitha Jayakumar, and historian Rana Safvi with the Gaddi-Nashin of Ajmer Sharif, a Khartal workshop by Chugge Khan, performances by the Jaisalmer Boys, Kathak, workshops, and shopping.

“This year, we teamed up with Teamwork Arts, who are under Mr. Sanjay Roy. They’ve been the leaders in putting events and spectacular experiences together,” Pacho adds. “For a long time, I have felt Jaigarh to be one of the most beautifully-built monuments around the world…not only in Jaipur or Dhundar, which is our larger region, but around the world. It’s not just the immediate attraction towards the architecture, but also the methods and practises used to create it, like the water systems, which were so progressive for their time. The oldest parts of Jaigarh were built nearly a thousand years ago, and about 90% of what you see now was commissioned by Sawai Jai Singh II.”

The intention behind the festival, he explains, is to create a real, genuine difference, “not just lip service that we are impacting communities. We actually want to provide a platform to the artisans; we want the musicians to feel like their trade is being celebrated,” he emphasises. Ask him which artists he is looking forward to interacting with, and he speaks of the Manganiyar folk artists of Rajasthan, who hail from Jaisalmer and Barmer. “Their tradition is that literally the moment a child is born, the members of the village start teaching it how to sing. There’s a lot of mystery around their trade, so at the workshops they will actually speak about the instruments and their trade. It’s nothing you’ve probably heard of before,” Pacho states.

His knowledge of Rajasthan and Jaipur, the history, and an appreciation of culture is admirable. “Jaipur is my life,” he says, straightaway. “I don’t see myself anywhere else in the world. I feel very strongly about it. There are a lot of ambitions I have for the city.”

Among those ambitions is to revive Jaipur’s legacy as the centre of excellence for art and craft, the way it had intended to be since its inception 300 years ago. “It’s just that, for some reason or the other, no one has actually packaged and presented it like that. I think it’s really time we claim it for ourselves,” he shares. ‘Often, when you’re surrounded by so much beauty—in architecture and traditions—you tend not to stop and take stock of it. And so, I think festivals such as these are important because people can come together to appreciate it all.”

Another desire—nay, “responsibility”, as Pacho says—is to take care of and protect the palace and surrounding heritage structures for posterity, along with providing platforms to foster dialogue around them. “Also, what is the right way to preserve them?” he asks. “Some monuments have been ‘fixed’ on several occasions in the last 100 years without proper knowledge. Like using cement—it is the biggest enemy of these heritage structures. Earlier, all kinds of sustainable practices were used to build them. Redoing or correcting some of these mistakes has been my biggest challenge.”

And it doesn’t stop here. “What I’d really like to be able to do is to have other 26-year-olds want to talk about culture. I want to bridge the gap. Of course, people are more interested in contemporary art, and not so much in antiquity, both tangible and intangible. But if more young people talk about these things, there’s a greater chance that they will still be interested in these institutions in the next 50 years,” he shares.

An ‘old soul’, Pacho has made a name for himself in fashion, as well. “I try to wear what is found here, in Rajasthan,” he says. At the moment, he is enjoying a mulmul kurta and linen pants from Rajasthan. And his juttis are by his jutti maker in Barmer. “I wear my bandhgala all the time with buttons that are made over here, as well as a safa. And you’re seeing me with a moustache.” This style of dressing up is very much deliberate. “I’m very much trying to be a self-proclaimed ambassador of our culture,” Pacho reveals. “And I think everybody should be. When I travel abroad, and I’m wearing a bandhgala or mulmul or juttis, nothing in the world makes me prouder of where I’m from.”

What about music? “I was last listening to a song called Jalalo Bilalo by Gaurav Raina, which is very traditional with a fusion twist.”

And any OTT shows? While he’s completed The Diplomat, Pacho much prefers reading, having recently read The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life by Steven Bartlett, “an interesting read for entrepreneurs and anybody who needs to do any kind of management.”

“There’s another book my mom’s given to me, which is about the instructions given to the Maharaja of Gwalior, much like The Prince by Machiavelli. I’d also recommend Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E.Lawrence. My grandfather, who was in the Indian army in a regiment called the 10th Battalion Para, had made it a rule that anybody joining the regiment had to read that book.”

Finally, I’m curious to know what Pacho’s New Year’s resolution is for 2025? Create another museum, a festival, a rocket to the moon? At this point, that won’t be a surprise, for the sky clearly is the limit. “It’s to try and spend less time on my phone,” he says (*surprise, surprise*). “I probably spend as many hours on it as most people do. But I also work on my phone all the time because I travel so much and don’t carry anything else with me. So work happens, and then you switch onto something else that’s not work… The day I figure it out, you’ll find me under a tree, three feet above the ground, floating [laughs].”

Of course, he has another, very special resolution. “I would love to do more things with my family…my grandmother, mom, father, and my two siblings who are very, very dear to me. I’d love to be able to create more experiences with them.”

There is much to be done and much to be planned, and the year has only just begun. It’s a matter of time before we again applaud Pacho, who is turning Jaipur into a city that everyone else loves just as much as he does.

Pacho, On His New Year’s Resolution, Love For Jaipur, And The Jaigarh Heritage Festival

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