Who were the Bhatis, and how did Jaisalmer get rich in the middle of a desert?

1156: a passed-over prince and a hermit's prophecy

Jaisal was a Bhati prince who was passed over for the throne of Lodurva, the clan's earlier capital, in favour of a younger half-brother. He left and built his own. The story Jaisalmer tells — and Rajasthan Tourism repeats — is that a hermit named Eesul showed him Trikuta hill and cited a prophecy of Krishna that a descendant of the Yadu line would found a kingdom there. The Bhatis trace themselves to the moon through Krishna, which is why the prophecy fitted.

Whatever Eesul said, the geography was the real oracle. Trikuta is a three-peaked ridge above the tracks camels had to take between the Indus and the coast, and the hill had water. In 1156 Jaisal raised a mud fort on it. The stone came later — ninety-two of the fort's ninety-nine bastions were built or rebuilt between 1633 and 1647.

The toll road

For centuries the camel trains between Central Asia, Sindh and the Arabian Sea paid Jaisalmer's tolls. The Bhatis began as raiders of caravans — the first great siege of the fort, under Alauddin Khalji around 1299, was provoked by a Bhati raid on a treasure caravan — and matured into their bankers. Duty receipts became golden stone. It is why a remote outpost has some of the most extravagantly carved buildings in India, and why the merchants' houses outshine the palace: in a caravan city, the merchants were the power.

Two and a half sakas

Jaisalmer's tellings count its sieges as 'two and a half sakas' — a saka being the final act when a fort fell and the women committed jauhar rather than be taken. The first was Alauddin Khalji's, around 1299. The second came in the mid-to-late fourteenth century. The half was in the sixteenth century, under Rawal Lunakaran, against an Afghan force, when the city fell too fast for the full rite and the men killed the women themselves.

The casualty figures you will hear in the fort are bardic — sixteen thousand this, seventeen hundred that. Nobody counted, and we do not print them. The structure of the story is the verified part; the numbers are the fort remembering itself.

Why the money stopped

Three things ended the caravan economy, in order. Bombay grew into a great port in the nineteenth century, and sea trade replaced the land routes the Bhatis had taxed for seven hundred years. Drought and famine between 1895 and 1900 emptied the countryside. Then Partition in 1947 drew a border across what was left of the western roads, and closed them overnight.

Jaisalmer did not decline so much as stop. What woke it was the opposite of trade: the border wars of 1965 and 1971 made the desert strategic, and roads, rail and garrisons followed. Then, in 1974, Satyajit Ray set Sonar Kella — 'the golden fortress' — here, and a Bengali film did what no caravan could. The fort you visit is a Bhati fort kept alive by the army and the tourists who came after it.

What to look for when you are there

Stand on the fort's cannon point and look at the ground, not the view. Ninety-two of the ninety-nine bastions under you are seventeenth-century — the Bhatis rebuilt in stone once the tolls could pay for it, four hundred years after Jaisal's mud walls. Then walk to Patwon ki Haveli and understand who really held the money: one gold-and-gemstone trader building five mansions for five sons, in a lane, over fifty years. The palace is smaller than the merchant's house. That is the whole economy in one street.

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