Dhundhari

The Dhundhari are the Indo-Aryan people of Dhundhar, east of the Aravalli Range around Amber, whose Rajasthani speech is also called Jaipuri after the city in its heartland. Written in Devanagari, Dhundhari carries a literary tradition shaped by Jain scholars, above all the seventeenth-century works of Todarmal.

In the eleventh century Kachwaha Rajput prince Dulha Rai seized the region from its Meena chiefs, and his son took Amber in 1037; it became the dynasty's capital around 1207 and stayed so for five hundred years.

The Kachwahas rose with the Mughals: Raja Man Singh I, builder of most of Amber Fort, was one of Akbar's foremost generals, and his grandson Jai Singh I commanded imperial armies under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb. In 1727 Sawai Jai Singh II, a noted astronomer who built observatories across northern India, founded planned Jaipur as his capital. Jaipur became one of the richest Rajput states of the eighteenth century, and in 1818 accepted British paramountcy as a princely state.