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Celebrations at the Garh

Udaipur's palace hotels own the four hundred guest wedding. This is about the other kind: a proposal down at the water, a wedding of forty on a lawn, a birthday in December with a fire going.

  • udaipur
  • events
  • weddings
A long wooden buffet counter lit from beneath, set up on the lawn at night with brass serving dishes and painted paper parasols along the top

The other wedding city

Udaipur is where the country comes to get married. From November to March the lake palaces run three day weddings back to back, bands and horses hold up the traffic on Rani Road most evenings, and the properties built for that work have a banquet department, a floor plan and a schedule that starts on time because the next wedding starts after it. That is one kind of celebration, and the places built for it do it well. This page is about the smaller kind: a proposal down at the water, a wedding of forty on a lawn, a birthday in December with a fire going.

What the lawn gives you

The lawn sits between the house and Fateh Sagar, with Rajiv Gandhi Park on one side and the Aravallis across the water. Nothing is built on it, so how it looks is a question of the hour. In the afternoon it is flat green grass and a lot of sky. From about five the light comes across the water rather than down on it, and it holds for a good twenty minutes after the sun has gone behind the hills on the far shore. After dark you have the lights of the far side, and one tree in the middle of the grass with bulbs strung through it.

It is a garden and not a hall, which cuts both ways. There is grass underfoot and no ceiling. Between July and September the rain is a real variable and worth a second plan. Between October and March it is not, which is why almost everything described here happens in those months.

The lawn at Devendra Garh running down to Fateh Sagar in the late afternoon, with garden tables under a large tree and the far hills across the water

Proposals

By its own account the house has hosted many surprise proposals over the years. What makes the lawn workable for one is logistics rather than atmosphere. The setting up happens down on the grass while the other person is upstairs or out on the lake road, there is no lobby to be walked through on the way, and on a quiet evening there is nobody else's event running twenty feet away. Two things decide how it goes, the hour and who else is on the property that night, and both are worth asking about before anything is fixed.

A lit circular arch draped in tulle on the night lawn, carrying a neon Will You Marry Me sign, with candles, flowers and a line of fairy lights leading across the grass to a rug
One evening's setup, from the house's own photographs.

What goes on the grass is a conversation rather than a list, and the photograph above is one evening's version of it rather than a menu. Send the date and the rough idea on WhatsApp and it gets answered by the people who would be there on the night.

What a small event needs that a big one does not

A four hundred guest wedding needs a machine to run it. A gathering of forty needs close to the opposite. It needs one person who knows what was agreed and picks up the phone, rather than a department and a form. It needs the timing to be allowed to move, because the speeches will run long and dinner at nine is fine as long as the kitchen hears about it at eight. And it helps for the place to be a house, so the people staying the night, the people eating and the people carrying chairs across the grass are all in one building rather than three.

That is the case for a property this size, and it is also the limit of one. If your list is long enough to need a banquet department, one of the big hotels along the lakes will do it better, and that is a better thing to work out now than in October.

The lawn after dark with two tables and stacked garden chairs on the grass, a tree hung with bulbs, a hammock, and the lights of the far shore of Fateh Sagar beyond the wall

Winter, and the fire

From about the middle of November the evenings get cold enough that a bonfire stops being decorative. Nights fall towards ten degrees through December and January, days sit in the low twenties, and the sky can stay clear for weeks together. That is the stretch the lawn is at its best after dark, and the reason a winter bonfire is on the experiences list at all. It is also peak season for the whole city, so it is the hardest part of the year in which to get a date. There is a season by season guide elsewhere on this blog that goes through what each part of the year gives you and what it takes away, and it is worth reading before you settle on a weekend.

How to start

Dates first. Everything after that, what goes on the lawn, what people eat, who is staying the night, is easier to answer once we both know whether the day is free, and through winter it often is not. Message us on WhatsApp with the date, or the two or three dates you are choosing between, and a line about what the occasion is. If this is not the right place for what you have in mind, we will say so rather than sell you a Saturday.