Udaipur is one of the cities which reward an amount of prior knowledge. The more you know about Rajasthan and its history, its palaces, its people, its painted walls, the more you will notice when you roam around. You don’t have to rush through your holiday, but can take time to sit by a window looking over the Aravallis with a cup of tea and feel where you are.
When you learn about the history of Rajasthan, you learn more about the culture and traditions. The curiosity which grows within you to learn more and also to visit the cities builds the excitement to visit those cities.
If that describes you, you already know that a great book is just as important to a trip as a great pair of walking shoes is. A relaxed stay at a private villa like Goya Hills, enclosed by the hills and silence of the Aravallis, creates the right backdrop for such travel. So here are five Goya Hills Guest experience books that will make your time in Udaipur more meaningful, more layered, and more unforgettable.
1. In Rajasthan — Royina Grewal
Type: Travel Memoir | Best For: First-time visitors, story lovers, slow travellers
What makes this book special is its honesty. Grewal is not interested in making Rajasthan look like a postcard. She writes about the camel trainers and the maharajas with equal care. She sits with snake charmers in Udaipur, fire dancers in Bikaner, and female politicians in Jaipur and she lets them speak, rather than speaking for them. Each chapter covers a different city: Alwar, Jaipur, Ajmer, Chittor, Udaipur, Jodhpur, Bikaner, and Jaisalmer.
The Goya Hills Connection: Grewal’s book is not about rushing through places. It is about paying attention to them. That is exactly the spirit of Udaipur slow travel reading and exactly the Goya Hills guest experience books that fits a private villa, where you have the time and the stillness to actually absorb what you read.
2. The Rajput Palaces — Giles Tillotson
Type: Architecture & History | Best For: Architecture lovers, detail-oriented travellers, those who want to truly understand what they are looking at
When you stand inside the City Palace of Udaipur and look at its layered courtyards, its carved balconies, its mirrored interiors and arched gateways, you are looking at nearly four hundred years of architectural thought. Most visitors take a photograph and move on. This book helps you actually understand what you are seeing.
Giles Tillotson is one of the world’s foremost experts on Indian architecture and the history of the Rajput courts. His book traces the development of Rajput palace architecture from 1450 to 1750 — a period when Rajasthan’s rulers were building some of the most extraordinary structures in the world. Tillotson examines the ancient fortress capitals like Chitor, the cities built at the height of Rajput power like Udaipur and Bikaner, and newer cities like Jaipur.
He pays particular attention to how Rajput architecture drew from both ancient Hindu traditions and its relationship with Mughal architecture — and how, despite their differences, the palaces of Rajasthan form a distinct and consistent architectural language.
The Goya Hills Connection: Staying in a beautifully designed private villa reading culture in the Aravalli hills, with architecture that echoes Rajasthan’s own relationship between landscape and structure, is a wonderful context in which to read this book. You begin to see the connections between space, stone, and story.
3. A Princess Remembers — Gayatri Devi
Type: Memoir / Autobiography | Best For: Everyone — this is a book that crosses all boundaries of interest and background
The one book on this Goya Hills guest experience books list is very likely impossible to set aside. A Princess Remembers is the autobiography of Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur. A princess by birth to the family in Cooch Behar, brought up in a palace by five hundred servants, she became the third Maharani of Jaipur. Vogue once named her as one of the ten most beautiful women on Earth.
Glamour, however, isn’t the main focus. What the book explores is the life of one woman at perhaps one of the most tumultuous times in Indian history, from the height of the powers of the princely class through Indian independence, the dissolution of the princely states and what followed. Her personal, romantic life: her wild, bohemian childhood, her secret, six-year love affair with Jai, her husband and a world-famous polo player and her entrance into the proper, complicated world of royalty in the Pink City is recounted.
It is the warmth and intimacy of the writing that are most surprising. This is not a distant, formal account. Gayatri Devi writes the way a graceful woman talks with affection, frankness, and occasional sadness. She founded progressive schools, entered politics, and lived a life that few could imagine. And she describes all of it with remarkable clarity.
The Goya Hills Connection: The Goya Hills guest experience books is rooted in a particular idea of refined living, thoughtful, unhurried, surrounded by beauty. Gayatri Devi’s memoir embodies the same quality. It is the ideal companion for long, quiet evenings at the villa.
4. A Fantastic State of Ruin: The Painted Towns of Rajasthan — David Zurick
Type: Photography Book | Best For: Visual thinkers, art lovers, guests who appreciate beauty in unexpected places
For centuries, Shekhawati’s merchant families built extraordinary havelis (mansions) that served as trading houses, homes, temples, and pleasure palaces. After Indian independence, the families left for cities, and the buildings were abandoned. Today, they stand as a vast open-air gallery of deteriorating beauty — gorgeous, melancholy, and almost entirely unknown to the wider world.
Zurick’s photographs capture both the grandeur and the sadness of these places. Critics have called the book “an invitation to visualise timelessness” and “melancholy and celebratory in equal measure.” It is a visual study of what happens to beauty when the world moves on — and of the quiet dignity of those who remain.
The Goya Hills Connection: A private villa reading culture in the Aravalli hills has its own relationship with the landscape that surrounds it. Sitting with this book on the veranda, looking out over the hills, connects you to Rajasthan’s deeper story — of art, of time, of how beauty survives even in neglect.
5. A History of Rajasthan — Rima Hooja
Type: History / Non-Fiction | Best For: Curious travellers who want the full picture
Rima Hooja is an archaeologist, historian, writer and her work is authoritative without being inaccessible. The book spans Rajasthan’s history from prehistoric times, the Old Stone Age, all the way to the mid-twentieth century. It covers political history, yes, but also literature, religion, art and architecture, the role of women, socio-economic conditions, and what Hooja calls the “everyday life of the average citizen.”
It is a wide-angle lens on one of India’s most complex states. And crucially, it is written to be read by both scholars and general readers. One Goodreads reviewer wrote that they read it on a solo trip across Rajasthan and that “every word struck a chord.” That is the mark of a history book that has got the balance exactly right.
The Goya Hills Connection: Good travel is not just movement, it is an understanding. Having a copy of this on the reading table at your private villa is the kind of thing that turns a holiday into something that stays with you long after you return home.
A Simple Reading Plan for Your Udaipur Slow Travelling Reading
You do not need to read all five books in one trip. Here is one way to approach it:
One week before you arrive: Start A Princess Remembers. It is the easiest entry point — personal, warm, and completely absorbing. You will arrive in Rajasthan already knowing its royalty.
The first evening: Pick up In Rajasthan by Royina Grewal and read the Udaipur chapter. Then go to sleep and walk through the city the next morning with her voice still in your head.
On a slow afternoon at the villa: Open A Fantastic State of Ruin. Let the photographs fill the quiet hours.
Before your palace visit: Read the relevant sections of The Rajput Palaces by Giles Tillotson. You will not look at the buildings the same way again.
Throughout: Keep A History of Rajasthan close. Use it as a reference, not a race.
Why Reading Matters at Goya Hills?
The philosophy behind the Goya Hills guest experience books is simple: a good stay is a slow stay. The private villas on the Aravalli hillside are designed for people who want to stop not because they have run out of things to do, but because they have found something worth staying for.
Rajasthan books guests are a natural part of that experience. When you are not rushed, you read differently. You notice details you would otherwise miss. You ask questions. You sit longer. And Rajasthan, with a thousand years of stories woven into every palace wall and every desert road, rewards that kind of attention more than almost anywhere else in the world.
Udaipur Slow travelling reading are not just a nice touch. They are part of how a place like Udaipur becomes more than a destination. They are how it becomes a memory that changes you.
Pack a Book. You Will Not Regret It.
Udaipur will give you sunsets over Lake Pichola. It will give you the sound of temple bells in the morning and the smell of incense in the evening. It will give you architecture that stops you mid-step.
But the books you carry with you, the stories you read before and during and after your walk, are what turn those moments from beautiful to profound.
Pick one from this list. Or all five. Tuck them into your bag alongside your light cotton clothes and your sunscreen. And let Rajasthan speak to you not just through its walls and its water, but through its words.
