History · the people
Who was Sawai Jai Singh II?
- Title
- Maharaja of Amber, then Jaipur
- House
- Kachhwaha
- Kingdom
- Dhundhar
- Reigned
- 1700 – 1743
The short answer
Sawai Jai Singh II was the Kachhwaha ruler who founded Jaipur on 18 November 1727 and built five masonry observatories across northern India. He ruled from 1700 to 1743, moved his capital eleven kilometres down from Amber to the plain, and laid the new city on a nine-block grid drawn from a Hindu architectural treatise. UNESCO inscribed that walled city in 2019.
A city with a shape before it had residents
Almost every Indian city of the period grew outward from something — a fort, a shrine, a river crossing. Jaipur was drawn first. Nine chowkris on the Prastara plan of the Vastu Shastra, two of them for the state buildings and the other seven given to the public, with the core built in four years between 1727 and 1731. That is what UNESCO cited in 2019: a grid that breaks with the medieval pattern of everything around it.
Why he left Amber
Not because Amber was weak. Amber was extremely defensible, which was exactly the problem — a fort on a ridge cannot become a trading city, and it had no room to grow. Jai Singh took the court down to the plain and built somewhere that could hold a market.
The planner was Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, though UNESCO's own text calls him simply Vidyadhar; the surname is standard in Indian sources and safe, but the inscription is more cautious than most guides are.
The observatories
He built five: Delhi in 1724, Jaipur between 1728 and 1734, then Ujjain, Mathura and Banaras. Jaipur's is the largest and best preserved, which is why it is the one UNESCO inscribed, on 31 July 2010.
The Vrihat Samrat Yantra there is the largest stone sundial in the world and reads local solar time to about two seconds. It is still accurate — but India runs on a single time zone set to 82.5°E and Jaipur sits at 75.8°E, so the instrument is roughly twenty-seven minutes behind the clock in your pocket. It is not wrong; the country agreed a different noon.
The Mughal position
Jai Singh served the Mughal empire and rose within it, which is the Kachhwaha pattern and the opposite of Mewar's. That accommodation is what paid for the astronomy and the city — and it is also why Mewar's bards were rude about his house for two centuries.
Where you can stand in it
Singh II, in places you can visit
DATES CHECKED · AUGUST 2026Dates from our own research dossiers. Where tradition and record disagree, we say which is which.
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