Modikhana Chowk

Modikhana is one of the nine original chowkris — grid wards — laid out when Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II founded Jaipur in 1727, and it survives today as a busy, unshowy slice of the walled city.

• You reach it just south of Chhoti Chaupar, the smaller of the old city's two crossing-squares, where the broad Kishanpole and Chaura Rasta thoroughfares give way to a warren of narrow lanes.
• The name itself tells the ward's story: a *modi* was the royal provisioner or store-keeper, and *khana* the place of stores, so this block once held the granaries and supply depots that fed the young capital.
• Where jewellers and tourists throng nearby Johari Bazaar, Modikhana keeps a workaday rhythm — this is where Jaipur actually shops.
• The layout is textbook Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, the polymath who translated the principles of the Shilpa and Vastu Shastras into a rectilinear mandala of nine blocks and 34-metre avenues.
• Within Modikhana those grand streets splinter into shoulder-width rastas lined with shuttered shopfronts, their facades washed in the trademark terracotta pink that earned Jaipur its nickname and, in 2019, a place on the UNESCO World Heritage List as an exceptional example of a planned eighteenth-century city.
• Wander in and the ward reveals itself in trades rather than monuments: bolts of cotton dress material and printed fabric stacked to the ceiling, glass and lac bangles glinting in shallow trays, brass and steel household ware, thread, buttons and everyday provisions.
• Small temples sit wedged between shops, garlanded and quietly attended by the families who both live and trade here.
• It is loud, close and colourful, and the pleasure lies in the walking — following a lane until it opens onto a courtyard shrine or a wholesale cloth godown you would never have found on a map.
• For the vegetarian traveller the old city is home ground, and Modikhana sits within a short stroll of some of Jaipur's most trusted pure-vegetarian kitchens.
• A kulhad of masala chai from the long-running Sahu counter on Chaura Rasta is the classic pause, and Laxmi Misthan Bhandar (LMB) in nearby Johari Bazaar handles the sweet tooth, LMB being explicitly eggless.
• As always in Jaipur, confirm that any bakery item is egg-free before you buy — a pure-veg board does not always mean eggless.
• Come on a weekday morning, when shutters are rising and the crowds are thinner, dress modestly for the temples and doorways you will pass, and treat Modikhana as a walk through a working neighbourhood rather than a sight to be ticked off.