Chittaurgarh is all about the romance of history. Where a less imaginative eye can see only a mound of rock, the artistic mind can find a glorious past of 275 years etched on stone, a time when death was preferred to dishonour and swords clashed with alarming regularity. A magnificent fort watches over the town, defying the every­dayness of the landscape with stories so incredible that only a thin line seems to separate fact from fiction.

Indeed, the story of Chittaur is prima­rily the story of its 700-acre fort. Built by the Mauryas between the 5th and the 8th centuries, it fell in 734 to the Gehlot founder Bappa Rawal and was occupied for the next eight centuries by a succes­sion of Rajputs and Gujaratis, with inter­mittent Muslim assaults. Having housed 70,000 people in its heyday, the fort is today more a 500-foot high colony than a monument. As a testimony to its origins and its many rulers, it’s littered with Hindu, Jain and Muslim construc­tion, sometimes merged in one building.

Chittaur was the Sisodia capital of Mewar from the early 13th century until the Mughal Emperor Akbar’s conquest of 1567, at which point Rana Udai Singh decamped to the hills. History, as warfare later comes to be glamorously known, having moved on, the beauty of this windswept swathe of eastern Mewar today lies in its quietude.