Praise with stereotypes: How Western journalists portrayed Jaipur in early 20th century

At the turn of the 20th century, a number of British and American journalists made the long journey to India. Their assignment was straightforward: to feed the Western reader’s curiosity about the wealth and opulence of the country’s princely states. But what they also ended up doing was to propagate the stereotype of India as a land of maharajas, mystics and snake charmers.

One city that received a fair deal of coverage in the Western press was Jaipur, which in the winter of 1905, hosted the Prince of Wales as a guest of Maharaja Sawai Madho Singh II.

A special correspondent of The Daily Telegraph wrote a detailed article about Jaipur in November, describing floridly its ecology and its balance of modernity and tradition. “The City of Victory is less than 200 years old,” he said. “Five miles away, among the mountains to the north, Amber, the old city, waits, patient and half-ruined, for the day to come when the long-delayed tide of desert sand shall sweep round into the recess where Jaipur hides, and the dainty gardens and wide pink-washed streets of balconied and latticed houses shall at last become part and parcel of the great Indian desert.”

The correspondent added: “Even now the long levels stretch...

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