Hawa Mahal

Nine hundred and fifty-three windows, and the women behind them were never supposed to be seen through a single one. Built in 1799, the Hawa wasn’t a palace at all – it was an architectural workaround for royal women confined by purdah, the practice of secluding women from public view through veils and separate living quarters. They couldn’t appear in public or before strangers, but they were desperate to follow the day-to-day events and royal processions occurring on the streets below. So the Maharaja commissioned architect Lal Chand Ustad to build a viewing screen: a kind of architectural veil through which women of the royal household could watch the world without being watched back.

The five-story honeycomb facade contains 953 small windows called jharokhas, each decorated with lattice work carved intricately enough that you could see out but no one could see in. The building was never meant as a residence – it’s surprisingly shallow, with the top three stories barely a room deep, just chambers where women sat and observed. They watched festivals, elephant fights, bazaar life, and royal processions through these calculated openings, maintaining complete seclusion while staying connected to the world they were forbidden to enter. The lattice work also allowed cool air to pass through during Jaipur’s scorching summers, earning the structure its name: the Palace of Winds.

Most visitors snap a photo from the street and move on, but stepping inside reveals a maze of steep stepladders, narrow doorways, and stained glass windows casting colored light across the corridors. There’s no front entrance – even the architecture insisted on discretion, so you’ll have to enter through the back. What looks like a grand five-story palace is really just an elaborate screen barely one room deep. It was designed to resemble Krishna’s crown, and the Maharaja loved it so much it became his favorite retreat. Today, you’ll find music performances and cultural exhibitions behind those honeycomb windows, and all 953 of them still catch the breeze, cooling a building that was always more about clever engineering than confinement.