History · the people
Who was Rao Jodha?
- Title
- Rao of Marwar
- House
- Rathore
- Kingdom
- Marwar
- Reigned
- 1438 – 1489
The short answer
Rao Jodha was the Rathore ruler of Marwar who founded Jodhpur in 1459 and began building Mehrangarh on the rock above it. He moved his seat there from Mandore, nine kilometres north, because Mandore's defences had failed and the rock had not. The city carries his name, and the fort he started took his successors four centuries to finish.
A city named after a man who chose a rock
Jodha's decision was strategic rather than romantic. Mandore was the old Rathore seat and it was indefensible; the outcrop the locals called Bhakurcheeria, the mountain of birds, was 120 metres of sheer rock with water on it. He took the fort site in 1459 and the city grew at its foot, which is why Jodhpur is one of the few Rajasthani cities where you can see exactly why it is where it is.
The Rathores before him
By their own chronicles the Rathores came to Marwar from Kannauj on the Gangetic plain, as refugees after their kingdom fell. That descent is the traditional bardic account and it is disputed by historians; what is not in doubt is that they held Mandore from the fourteenth century and that Jodha inherited a kingdom under pressure.
Jodha was one of many sons of Rao Ranmal, who was assassinated at Chittorgarh in 1438. Jodha spent the years that followed recovering Mandore, and by 1453 had it back.
The curse the city still repeats
The rock was not empty. A hermit called Cheeria Nathji, the lord of birds, lived on it and was displaced by the building. The story Jodhpur tells is that he cursed the site with drought — and that Jodha, to appease it, had a man named Raja Ram Meghwal buried alive in the foundations, on the promise that his family would be looked after.
This is tradition rather than record. It is told on the fort by its own guides, and the family's descendants are said to hold land granted in return. Treat it as what Jodhpur believes about itself, which is worth knowing either way.
What he did not finish
Almost all of it. The fort Jodha began in 1459 was added to by his successors for four hundred years, and most of the palaces you walk through inside Mehrangarh are seventeenth- to nineteenth-century. The fifteenth-century work is the rock, the siting and the intent.
The Rathores held it as their seat until 1943, when the family moved to Umaid Bhawan.
Where you can stand in it
Rao Jodha, in places you can visit
What the chronicles claim, and what the record shows
Rajput houses wrote their own histories, and those histories had a job to do. These are the claims worth knowing the status of.
Rathore descent from Kannauj
Traditional bardic account, disputed by historians
The hermit's curse and the buried man
Tradition, told on site; not a documented event
DATES CHECKED · AUGUST 2026Dates from our own research dossiers. Where tradition and record disagree, we say which is which.
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