If you are concerned about your carbon footprint, be assured that your holiday at Savista in Jaipur will place a minimum strain on the Planet’s resources.
Savista Retreat is a countryside boutique hotel in Jaipur with several unusual and welcome features. While it offers all the comforts and services of a hotel, it is determinedly not a typical or chain hotel. The Savista Haveli houses 14 bedrooms and a recreation and dining complex that includes a games lounge, library, movie theatre, music room and several spacious, breezy lounges. The haveli is set in its own gardens of Jasmine, Champa, Parijat, Karanji, Gulmohur, Khejri and Neem trees.
Set amid vast tracts of undulating cropland and farmsteads, this eco-retreat is a 12-acre estate of trees, gardens, meadows, fields and birds that offers a rich experience of pristine rural Rajasthan.
With its location in a village on the edge of the city, this retreat just outside of Jaipur offers an ideal balance of experiencing elegance and peace within a rural Rajasthan setting, along with easy access to Jaipur city’s historical monuments and bazaars (a 30 minute drive away), and visiting off-beat sites around Jaipur.
The emphasis is on sustainable living:
- Water harvesting and ground water recharge;
- Solar energy for water heating;
- Use of organic fertilisers and pesticides in the gardens and croplands;
- A freshwater swimming pool that is chemical-free and re-used for irrigation;
- Integration with the local community in operations and produce sharing.
Farm-to-fork
The estate grows its own vegetables and grains, beans and oilseeds, free from chemical fertilisers and pesticides; the milk and yoghurt are from livestock fed on the estate’s grass; water drawn from deep bore wells on the farm provide drinking water that is safe, pure, sweet and mineral-rich.
All these features make this retreat a socially responsible, eco-friendly and sustainable travel destination.
Experiences
There is a movie theatre, complete with cushions and Rajasthani quilts, is ideal for a relaxing evening, with an extensive collection of Hollywood and Indian films, documentaries, and TV shows. Guests have access to a guitar, electronic keyboard, harmonica, tabla and harmonium in the music room (which also houses a vintage sitar and veena).
The haveli is WiFi enabled, and guests can connect to the internet anywhere in the complex via their laptops, tablets, or mobiles. The poolside games lounge is outfitted with a table tennis table and a range of indoor board games, as well as a travel library and low level lounging mattresses and cushions set around coffee tables. The library has a rich collection of reference books on Indian history, religion, culture and philosophy, as well as fiction by Indian and international authors. It also has reading chairs and a work table. It is situated by the pool, and large glass doors behind lead down to the stone-paved amphitheatre and fields beyond. Other activities include:
- Block printing workshops;
- Learning from a village potter;
- Village tours and visits to rural households, and camel cart rides through the countryside;
- Yoga lessons;
- Visit to a handmade paper factory;
- Indian classical music and dance performances, and art exhibitions, as and when they are held at city auditoriums and arts centres;
- Jaipur city bazaar and heritage walks
Eco-sensitive habitat
The Savista haveli has been restored with locally produced, energy-conserving building materials, drawing on the skills of hereditary masons. These masons helped source specific rooftop bricks – known for their thermostat/insulation properties – from far-off villages, where a few households still practice this dying art of brick production.The external walls and roofs are all in white, designed to produce an ‘albedo effect’, a small contribution to countering global warming.
The trees and aromatic shrubs on the estate – lime, guava, pomegranate, neem, khejri, gulmohur, chameli, champa, parijat, hibiscus and others – are all local varieties, known for their hardiness and low water requirement. The estate is kept green through sprinklers and drip irrigation.
The aesthetic and eco-friendly swimming pool doubles up as an irrigation resource, making it possible for the pool water to be freshly refilled in part on a daily basis. All water needs at Savista are met from groundwater that is pure and sweet and fit to drink. Recharge wells ensure that excess runoff is harvested, while rooftop and courtyard rainwater is harvested using a gravity-based system of water supply/drainage pipes.
Fallen leaves and farm and kitchen wastes are recycled for the preparation of manure using compost pits. Farmyard manure using cow/buffalo dung supplements the manure used for crops and gardening.
Energy conservation is a high priority at Savista. Solar roof panels heat water for bathroom and kitchen use. The haveli uses LED (energy-saving) bulbs for all its lighting requirements, supplemented by locally manufactured candles.
During winter, pruned twigs and logs from Savista’s trees are used for heating, lighting bonfires in the courtyard and in the open-air dining area, and for fireplaces in the dining room, bar and a few select guest rooms.
Socially responsible destination
Savista’s social inclusion policy takes several forms. Most of the housekeeping and farm staff are drawn from the surrounding communities, irrespective of caste or religious identity, and trained in modern skills.
Where necessary, staff are provided with housing and food; alternatively, they are given transport to and from work. Local mechanics are used for maintenance of pumps, generators and other farm equipment.
Neighbouring farming families get free access to Savista’s freshly-mown grass for feeding their cows, whose milk is in turn bought back by Savista for its own requirements.
Savista continues to uphold the traditional practice of permitting nomadic herders of camels, sheep and goats to annually harvest the leaves of its 100-odd khejri trees for use as animal fodder. No family in the area, irrespective of social position, is denied access to Savista’s water for household use should their own water source become unavailable temporarily.
Savista’s philosophy of socially responsible living stems from the social/political and spiritual heritage of its owners. An ancestor of the family in the mid-19th century chose to renounce his feudal patrimony and become a sanyasi (ascetic). In doing so, he exhorted his descendants to integrate a core set of philanthropic and spiritual values into their feudal lifestyle.
There thus developed in these villages the tradition of a less-sharply-unequal feudal society. More recently at the time of India’s independence, the then family patriarch ensured that all the land of these two villages under his control was redistributed among the resident tenant population.
He also took the leadership in dismantling many of the old norms of social inequality through example – endowing considerable amounts of land as ‘common properties’ for schools, temples, pastures, and social forestry projects, and empowering the Dalit castes (erstwhile ‘untouchables’) through land ownership deeds. The result is that there is not a single household in this area that does not own land.
