[Extract ...] In Jaipur, a city of much lore and tourism, one does well to be skeptical. If you, for instance, visit the sprawling offices of the Jaipur Public Works Department (JPWD), and proceed to make friends with its innumerable Peons, Draftsmen, Assistant Architects, Senior Architects, Chief Architects, Engineers, and all their subordinates and superiors, then, after innumerable rounds of hot chai, the conversation usually turns to the legendary Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details. Indeed, it is the most junior ranks of the establishment, the Architectural Draftsmen, who will sit you down and insist on narrating the Portfolio’s story with much ceremony. They will tell of the fabulous collections of full-size details drawn with the immaculate penmanship of draftsmen of old. They will also tell of the Jeypore School of Art, where the draftsmen were trained. They will sing the praises of the erstwhile Maharajas of Jaipur who patronized their work. There is awe in their eyes and voices. It all has the familiar nostalgia of “those days gone by.”

The evidence is in the back rooms of the JPWD. Here, in certain select drawers of long rows of filing cabinets, neatly labeled in ink that has long faded away, are the old 24" × 36" sheets of yellowing, torn cartridge paper, embellished with architectural details, drafted with painstaking detail. The drawings are incomplete and seem to be the discards. Where, then, are the originals? When you ask, the conversation turns to other matters, such as the authority of the legendary Col. Jacob saab, the English head of the PWD, who had the drawings made, and then, of course, must have taken the originals back with him to London. Other fingers point to the Maharaja’s inscrutable crypts. Still others point to sources that, if admitted to, might cause the draftsmen to lose their jobs.

The draftsmen are usually Kumawats, the Rajput sub-caste traditionally responsible for building. Today they seem to be in disarray. Most of the Kumawats I visited had either changed profession or were long retired. None of them seemed to have any extant actual building skills either. Drafting was their only forte. They blame the bureaucratic priorities of the democratic government of contemporary India for their ills, as everyone seems to do in India.