Last updated: October 2026 · Method: built from published site information and recurring traveller reports; figures approximate, verify on site.
📄 Image slot — a market stall wall hung with colourful string puppets.
The string puppet is Rajasthan’s portable souvenir, and Udaipur’s markets sell everything from factory-line puppets to genuine workshop work.
Telling them apart
- The craft markers: hand-painted faces with individual expressions, real fabric bodies, and wooden heads carved rather than moulded, machine versions repeat the same face down the row.
- The price logic: modest sums for honest small puppets; the collector tier prices by the painter’s hand. Ask who painted it, the same rule the art-shopping guide applies to paintings.
- Where: the old-city lanes around the bazaar belts and the stalls near the cultural venues, the Bagore show is the best preview of what the craft does.
Shipping: puppets travel well in checked bags; ask for the string tied off to survive the journey.