Ahilya Fort

A working family fort, still lived in by the descendants of the woman who built it, stands high above the Narmada — some ninety kilometres from Indore, in a town most travellers have never heard of. It is one of the more unusual places you can spend a night in India.

The philosopher-queen of Malwa

It is worth knowing who she was before you arrive. Ahilyabai Holkar, born in 1725, took over the Holkar kingdom of Malwa in 1767 after the deaths of her husband and father-in-law, and ruled it for twenty-eight years. She made this small Narmada town, Maheshwar, her capital.

What she did from here was extraordinary. She rebuilt the Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi, restored Somnath, raised the Vishnupad temple at Gaya, and laid ghats, wells, rest-houses and schools across the whole of India — a building programme run by a queen, from a riverbank in Malwa.

Nehru wrote that her reign "has become almost legendary as a period during which perfect order and good government prevailed."

She championed the town's women weavers, too: Maheshwar is still one of India's great handloom centres, known the country over for the Maheshwari saree.

Not a hotel dressed as a palace

Her fort, Ahilya Wada, is the one you stay in, and it never left the family. In 2000, Prince Richard Holkar — a direct descendant, and son of the last Maharaja of Indore — opened the family home to guests: nineteen rooms across six old buildings, set among three acres of courtyards, fountains and gardens above the river.

There is no reception-desk theatre, and no buffet. Dinner is a fixed daily menu, designed by Prince Richard and grown largely in the fort's own organic beds, eaten together at one long table. There is a pool in a walled garden, yoga on the ramparts at dawn, massages — and otherwise the considerable luxury of nothing much to do.

The river is the fourth wall

Because the fort stands directly above the Narmada, the river is the fourth wall of the place. Below run the ghats the queen built, and boats drift on the water beneath your window. Maheshwar is said to have more than a hundred temples, and the riverfront Kashi Vishwanath and Sahasrarjun shrines are a short walk from the gate. In the lanes, the Rehwa Society — founded in 1979 to revive the weaving, and now around a hundred and thirty weavers — is still at the looms.

Why you come

You may have seen these walls before without quite knowing it; they have stood in for old India in films from Ashoka to Pad Man. But the reason to come is quieter than any of that. Ahilya Fort is one of the few places left where you sleep inside real, un-museumed history — a house still warm with the family whose ancestor built half the ghats in India — while the sacred river turns to gold beneath the window.