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On most trains travelling from Delhi to Bombay, the town of Gwalior is the first stop after Agra and the Taj. Few travellers bother to get off here. There is a fine craggy fort to one side of the tracks - 'the pearl in the necklace of Hind', according to one mediaeval traveller - but from the train windows Gwalior is indistinguishable from millions of other small mofussil bazaar-towns across India. The streets are noisy and chaotic, with cows and children and street stalls blaring out Hindi film music. If any of the passengers on the train have bothered to look out of the window, most return to their newspapers within seconds.

It is only as the Express pulls out of the station, turns a corner and heads out of town that it is possible to catch a glimpse of one of the most extraordinary palaces in India. Jai Vilas is a vast marble extravaganza set in a green sweep of immaculate parkland. Pedimented gateways give onto echoing courtyards; arcades of arches rise to pepperpot copulas. Yet it is the sheer size of the building which really astonishes. Here in a nowhere-town in the middle of Central India lies a palace built on the scale of Versailles.

Even at the height of the Raj, the British only directly controlled two-thirds of India; the remaining third was the preserve of 600 Princely States. "God created the Maharajahs," wrote Kipling, "so that mankind could have the spectacle of jewels and marble palaces." Of no dynasty was this more true than the Scindias of Gwalior, who ruled a state in Central India larger than Portugal.

Until the Scindia's kingdom was dissolved in 1947, Gwalior was one of the most popular destinations in India for visiting British dignitaries: no Viceroy or monarch would dream of leaving the country without staying with the Scindia's, any more than they would dream of leaving India without seeing the Taj Mahal. It was when the Maharajah Jaiaji Scindia heard that the Prince of Wales was planning one such trip in 1875 that he gave orders that work should begin on the grandest and most modern palace in Asia.

A fortune was spent on the new building. In its two hundred-odd rooms gold leaf covered every dado, while solid marble flagged every floor. Particular care was lavished on the great Durbar Hall where ceremonial occasions were to be held. It was to be the largest drawing room in India, while underfoot lay the largest carpet in the world. Above hung the two biggest chandeliers in Asia: so large that before these crystal enormities were hoisted into place the strength of the roof had to be tested by building a ramp a mile long and walking twelve elephants across its width. Only one thing was lacking: it never occurred to the Maharajah to take the effort to find a proper architect.

Instead, Jaiaji instructed a local Indian army Colonel to knock something up. Col. Michael Filose had served as the Gwalior's Head of Education but he had no formal architectural training; indeed he had previously designed only one building: the Gwalior jail. Jaiaji was nonplussed: he packed Filose off to Paris to see Versailles with instructions to come back and build something similar in Gwalior before the Prince of Wales arrived.

That Filose managed to train his Indian craftsmen to emulate the European style and build such a palace in the middle of Central India on such a time-scale was little short of a miracle. But as the building neared completion there were warning signs that corners had been cut. A correspondent from the Madras Mail visited the building works and commented that the "apparent substantiality" of Jai Vilas was "merely a cloak for flimsiness." Worse was to follow.

Jaiaji's favourite toy - and still one of the most famous diversions of Jai Vilas - was the silver train which carried the nuts, cigars and port around the dining room. When you picked up the decanter, the train stopped. It is not clear exactly what went wrong with the mechanism on the royal visit, but on the night the Prince of Wales came to stay, the train braked suddenly and toppled the port decanter right into the Prince's lap. Later that night there was another disaster. Before she went to bed, the future Queen Mary decided to have a bath. As the vast marble tub slowly filled with water, it quivered imperceptibly, then slowly sunk out of sight through the floor.

Yet behind the comedy of Jai Vilas lies a genuine tragedy. For in adopting European architecture - as the princes did in court after court across India - the Maharajahs turned their immense powers of patronage away from local Indian craftsmen. In this way they killed off forever a millennia-old tradition, a blow from which Indian architecture has never really recovered. More to the point, Jai Vilas appealed to no-one. The British laughed at its idiosyncratic decoration, while Jaiaji himself found the building unsuited to his lifestyle. There was nowhere he could lie back and watch his dancing girls, just nine hundred rooms the size of aircraft hangers, all full of uncomfortable Chippendale chairs.

Only a few years after building the palace at enormous cost, he decided to move out. The palace was abandoned, except for occasional use as a visitor's wing, standing as a monument to both the wasteful extravagance of the Maharajahs and to the great gulf of misunderstanding that sometimes separated the British from their Indian allies.

Today, fifty years after Gwalior State was dissolved and absorbed into the Republic of India, Jai Vilas is back in use as a palace-museum, preserving for its occasional visitors some strikingly eccentric fragments of the world of the Maharajahs: the train is still there, circling the dinner table on its silver track, as are zoo-fulls of stuffed tigers, preserved for prosperity in every conceivable pose: standing, sitting, jumping, even sitting upright on their hind legs and holding a cocktail shaker. Beyond stretch 900 rooms, many done up in the most dubious taste, notably a corridor of high-kitsch cut glass rooms as garish as anything Elvis Presley would build in Graceland.

All this provides a steady income for Madhavrao Scindia, the former Maharajah, and helps to finance his considerable political ambitions. But the Gwalior Sardars - the noblemen and officials who once ran Gwalior State - have found it harder to adjust to the new world of independent India.

During my stay in Gwalior, I arranged to meet a couple of the old sardars in one of the ante-rooms in Jai Vilas. Brigadier Pawar, was in the lead, accompanied by his wife, Vanmala, and another old gentlemen who was addressed as 'the Major'. I asked them what they missed most of the old days:

"Well actually," said Brigadier Pawar, "the old days we miss altogether. We miss them so much you can't pin point any one thing: everything is missed."

"In the old days everybody had time," agreed the Major.

"There was time for processions, for riding, for tiger shooting...."

"There was not much competition," continued the Major. "Things were just there. Now you have to struggle for each achievement."

"Before it was a very much sheltered life. Now it's more competitive."

"Unless you pull someone down you can't go up."

The two old men looked at each other sadly.

"After independence," I asked, "how many of the old sardars never really found another role?"

"The majority," replied Brigadier Pawar. "It all happened so... abruptly. Some of us had land. A few tagged along with the Maharajah and went into politics. But the majority just stayed at home, remembering the old times. They didn't know about business or figures. What else could they do?"

The Brigadier shook his head.

"You cannot imagine the splendour and affluence of those days," said Vanmala. "If I started telling you, you would feel it is a story I am making up."

"In those days every sardar had fifteen horses and an elephant," said the Major. "But now we cannot afford even a donkey."

"But its not just the sardars that are nostalgic," said Vanmala. "The entire population is nostalgic. That's why the Scindias are still so popular. Whenever any of them stand for election they are voted in by the people."

"But why is that?" I asked. "Don't people prefer democracy?"

"No," said the Pawars in unison.

"Absolutely not," said the Major.

"You see in those days there was no corruption," said the Brigadier. "The Maharajahs worked very hard on the administration. Everything was well run."

"The city was beautifully kept up," said the major. "The Maharajah would himself go around the city, you know at night, incognito, and see how things were being managed. He really did believe his subjects were his children. Now wherever you go there is corruption and extortion."

"Today," said Vanmala, "every babu in the Civil Service thinks he is a Maharajah and tries to make difficulties for the common man. But in those days there was just one king. The people of Gwalior had confidence that if they told their story he would listen and try to redress them."

"The Maharajah was like a father to them," said the Major.

"Now all of that is no more," said Brigadier Pawar.

"That world has gone," said the Major.

"Now only our memories are left," said Brigadier Pawar. "That's all. That's all we have."

In Britain there have been widespread celebrations marking fifty years of Indian independence, but in India there has been much less rejoicing. As The Times of India acknowledged in an editorial to mark Republic Day, "in this landmark year not much remains of the hope, idealism and expectations that our founding fathers poured into the creation of the Republic. In their place we now have a sense of abject resignation, an increasing sense of drift."

Yet if corruption has set into many of the old institutions of the Raj - the civil service, parliament and so on - one set of institutions that have vigorously resisted any accommodation with the post-colonial world are the public schools that the English left dotted around the subcontinent. This is true of nowhere more that La Martiniere College, Lucknow.

Here everything that might be expected in a school on the banks of the Thames has been exactly reproduced on the banks of the Gomti, right down to statutory inedible food. "Independence changed nothing at La Martiniere," I was told by one old boy. "The curriculum didn't change, the food didn't change, the games didn't change. Diwali continued to be celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day. They kept the Union Jack flying from the roof well into the mid-Sixties."

Today in La Martiniere boys of all religion still attend chapel every day, listening to a choir made up of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus sing Jerusalem and The Lord is my Shepherd. Curriculum and uniform remain firmly those of the English public school of the 1930's, with khaki drill and the works of John Buchan still very much de rigeur.

The school building, completed in 1795, is vast and extraordinary, rising out of the plains of Uttar Pradesh, part Enlightenment mansion, part Nawabi fantasy, and part Gothic colonial barracks. Its facade mixes Georgian colonnades with the loopholes and turrets of a mediaeval castle; above, Palladian arcades rise to Mughal copulas. One morning, wandering around after the boarders had massed to sing the school hymn, Bright Renown, I visited the library, a spectacular room decorated with Mughlai plasterwork inlaid with Wedgwood plaques. There I found three seventeen year olds at work on their prep - Samir, Pradeep and Tony, a Muslim, a Hindu and an Anglo-Indian Christian respectively. I asked them what books they were studying.

"All the books we are taught are British," said Tony. "Shakespeare, Great Expectations, Keats, Byron, Shelley..."

"Can you recite any British poetry?"

"Of course," said Pradeep. "The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusted trees, the moon was a ribbon of moonlight tossed among cloudy seas... That's The Highwayman. We know all that sort of stuff."

"And what about the great Urdu poets of Lucknow and Delhi," I asked, "Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir and so on. Are you taught those?"

"No," said Pradeep. "We haven't been taught about the culture of Lucknow at all. Or about the culture of India. We only study British poets and novelists."

"Does that seem odd?"

"Perhaps," said Samir uncertainly. "I've never really thought about it."

"What about history?" I asked. "What do they teach you about the Indian Mutiny for example?"

There was an anxious pause.

"Well, you know fifty La Martiniere boys fought in the defence of the British Residency?" said Samir. "So as far as the school is concerned, we are with the British. We feel very proud of the boys when we go to the Residency and see La Martiniere's name on the wall."

"But in other parts of India," added Pradeep, "we support the Indians of course. Don't we?" The three boys looked at each other and giggled nervously.

"But if you'd been there," I persisted, "which side would you have been on: with your school or with your countrymen?"

"Um," said Samir.

"I don't know," said Pradeep.

"It's a difficult question,” said Tony.

Despite the survival of such unlikely Anglophile sympathies, a recent murder at La Martiniere has shattered the notion that the subcontinent's public schools can forever remain an archipelago of Englishness floating untroubled in an increasingly choppy Indian sea.

Just before dawn on the 7th of March last year, two figures made their way to a bungalow on the perimeter of La Martiniere. Walking to the back of the building, they found a broken window looking into the bedroom of the school's Anglo-Indian P.T instructor, Frederick Gomes. The two took aim and fired a hail of bullets at the sleeping figure.

The murder - which remains unsolved - created a sensation in India, particularly when several guns (though not the actual murder weapons) were found to be circulating among the school's pupils. For La Martiniere has always been an institution of legendary distinction: during the Raj it produced generations of District Magistrates and imperial civil servants, while since Independence it has educated several members of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty as well as producing streams of cabinet ministers, industrialists and newspaper editors. If India's increasingly endemic violence could creep into such an institution, it was asked, what was the hope for the rest of India?

"The killing is a metaphor of our times," fumed Saeed Naqvi, one of India's leading columnists and an old boy. "For such a level of violence to reach the sacred precincts of La Martiniere is symbolic of the way that Lucknow, like so much of India, has completely ceased to be what it once was."

There is certainly some truth in this. When La Martiniere was founded in the late eighteenth century by Claude Martin, an enigmatic French adventurer, Lucknow was one of the most magnificent cities in the East. Travellers compared it to Venice and Istanbul, with its canals and gardens and spectacular skyline. Now, however, the city is tatty and decayed; barbed wire hangs limply around what were once beautiful Moghul gardens.

Suleiman, Rajah of Mahmudabad, is one of the last members of Lucknow's old Moghul aristocracy not to have sunk into either penury or oblivion. An old boy of La Martiniere, he is a highly cultivated man who speaks seven languages and has completed a post-graduate research in astrophysics. The Rajah was a successful Congress M.P under Rajiv Gandhi, but has since resigned from politics believing that it is impossible to remain in government without becoming affected by the criminalisation of the system:

"The world that I knew has been corrupted and destroyed," he said when I met him in his Lucknow palace, the Kaiserbagh. "What is happening at La Martiniere is only the tip of the iceberg. The whole economic and social structure of this area is collapsing. I go into fits of depression when I see the filth of modern Lucknow and remember the flowers and trees of my youth. We're regressing into a Dark Age The new breed of low-caste Indian politician has no ideas and no principles. In most cases they are just common criminals in it for what they can plunder through corruption."

The Rajah has a point. Lucknow is the capital of India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh and the terrifying speed of the decay of the state's politics over the last decade can be best measured by charting the number of criminals among members of the State Assembly. In 1985, there were some 35 MLA's [Members of the Legislative Assembly] with criminal records. By the 1993 elections, that number had grown to a grand total of 150 MLA's. The criminalisation of the state's politics has now reached crisis proportions.

Against such a background, perhaps it was only a matter of time before the violence and corruption seeped into the precincts of La Martiniere. If anything it is maybe surprising that some sort of atrocity did not take place earlier. Moreover on the edge of the school's immaculate cricket fields lie two villages said to be the headquarters of the Lucknow drug mafia. One theory has it that a drug gang had Gomes assassinated after he became a witness to some mafia action, but the Lucknow police believe that the murder may well have been carried out by one of La Martiniere's own pupils. No arrests have yet been made for the murder, but off-the-record police sources have indicated that a student is one of the principal suspects.

"Of course its very shocking when a murder has been committed," said the headmaster, Elton de Souza "But what can we do? The children and the staff have all pulled together and somehow we seem to have overcome what happened. I don't know whether it’s a reflection of what's going on around us, but the murder has certainly left a deep impression on everyone concerned."

Many old boys have blamed de Souza himself for the decline of the school - a decline that the murder can only accelerate. But Saeed Naqvi believes that the decline of La Martiniere is part of a much wider change that is affecting all that is left of Britain's legacy in India:

"The old Anglophile, Anglophone elite of India is being pushed into the margins," he says. "In their place a new lower caste elite are rising up and bringing a very different set of values with them. It's taken fifty years, but what is happening now is really the final twilight of the Raj. La Martiniere was a wonderful survival from a vanished world, but it just can't go on. In fifty years the culture and the society which sustained it has simply disappeared."

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