Warriors to Hoteliers - the Princes of Rajasthan by Stuart Wolfendale

Rajasthan, a province of India’s northwest, is Steven Spielberg type of place. Above the heat haze, hostile mountain- sides are held down by monumental forts. Along city streets of carved ochre stone, stride men with wildly wound turbans of ferocious colour and moustaches wide as a hawk’s wing spread. Women of provocative beauty slide along, veiled. Palaces of latticed stonework sit on placid lakes, somehow inured by Royal decree to the arid blasts of the Thar desert which make life for former subjects more a matter of survival than prosperity.

Across this landscape of absolutes and film-set exotica, still unaltered by democracy and the Indian version of the Morris Oxford, rode to war a caste of warrior kings on decorated elephants followed by hordes of disorganized foot soldiers to fight invaders, but mostly, each other. The number of ruling Rajput maharajas, great and small, was to modern politics, ridiculous. Like Scottish chieftains, they tore into each other and sided with foreign invaders for advantage.

Perpetually surrounded in their forts and outnumbered, they would open the gates and charge to their deaths whilst their women folk threw themselves, or were thrown, onto pyres. What they lacked in imagination and strategy was made up for by insane courage.

These warrior kings were still rattling their sabres at the encroaching British Raj two hundred years ago. Now, many have disappeared from their lands into genteel poverty. The wealthier have shown decades of preference for the gambling tables and racetracks of England until their money runs out. Those who held on do so now as hoteliers, letting the master bedrooms where they were conceived as de luxe suites for tourists at US$500 a night.

I passed through Rajasthan last year and was invited to visit His Highness Maharaja Gaj Singh of Jodphur, as prominent now in the hotelier business as his forefathers had been in battle since 1459. The British army eponymously named the riding breeches out of admiration for its local cavalry. The Maharaja received me in his lengthy sitting room in the Umaid Bhawan Palace.

With its 347 rooms and massive central dome, it is the largest palace in India. It was only finished fifty years ago, and built partly to give the subjects something to do during a famine. Dominating rather than delicate, it is built in the ‘Indo-Deco’ style and the massive stone slabs are held together by friction not mortar. The Maharaja’s bedroom measures 7000 square feet [650 square metres] and is for hire. The palace is mostly a hotel.

His Highness’s two miniature dachshunds snapped at my ankles whilst Indian minders who entered with me knelt and touched the crease of the royal trousers.

“The dogs are called ‘Pepsi’ and ‘Tia Maria’,” explained the Maharaja, ordering them off my tendons. “I have a third called ‘Gimlet’.”

I ventured that that was a rather Somerset Maugham sort of drink. “Still damned popular in India, I can tell you!” he chuckled from a full and ruby face that might have done justice to more than a few in its time.

The prince is something of a leader in the move to tourism, and is president of the Heritage Hotels Association of India. He explained that the move into hotel conversion came rapidly upon Indira Ghandi’s revocation of the substantial annual pensions that were awarded to the princes at Independence. “It comes naturally really,” he claimed calmly.

Well, not quite. The Matarajmatha, or queen mother, of Jaipur is reported to have snapped “Don’t touch my bathroom!” as her son’s designers came to refurbish the former royal bridal suite in the princedom’s Rambagh Palace. To some, like her, Indian monarchy in Rajasthan had gone spectacularly to pot.

Of the Rajput monarchies, Jaipur remains perhaps the most prominent. The city was built in 1727 by Sawai Jai Singh II who felt on sufficiently relaxed terms with the Mughal invaders in Delhi to come down into the lowlands from his hilltop fort at Amber. A mathematician by training, he designed Jaipur on a grid and blessed it with an advanced observatory. It is nicknamed ‘the pink city’ after it was painted top to bottom in that traditional colour of welcome for a visiting British royal.

The City Palace is now part museum and part residence for the current maharaja, Sawai Bahani Singh who had enraged his mother with his conversion of the prettier Rambagh Palace to a hotel and letting tourists ride his elephants.

The third ruler of note in Rajasthan is the Maharana of Udaipur, something of a doyen of the maharajas. After being thrown out of his gloomy fort city of Chittoragh by the mughals in 1559, after three successive bloody seiges, the Maharana built a new city by Pichola Lake. Apart from the labyrinthine city palace on the shore, later to be the first in Rajasthan to whore itself as part hostelry, he built one on the lake, a self contained island of white marble sitting ethereally on the water. All of that siren beauty is now available by the night on a credit card.

There is some confusion in local minds as to who the present ruler is. “The prince in charge is actually the second brother,” whispered my official escort. “The actual Maharani was passed over for the properties and lives in a bungalow in the grounds. We do not talk of this.” The domestic troubles of The House of Windsor seemed relatively suburban.

There are now nearly eighty royal properties contorting themselves into hotels through Rajasthan. There is little else to be noted of the once madly brave and brilliant Rajput dynasties. What went so royally wrong?

In fighting amongst themselves, the people left their doors open to invaders, most significantly the British who militarily shut down the thirty six Rajput rulers and neutered them under paramount rule. The British even set up a special school to tutor young princes and keep an eye on who would prove difficult and who malleable. The first student, Yaswant Singh, insisted on coming to school every day astride an elephant trailing two hundred servants who waited for him outside whilst English schoolmasters chattered on about parliamentary democracy within.

With no wars on which to spend their money, the princes spent it on themselves, and in London and New York where title could be enjoyed without responsibility. Never had there been such absences from the realm. The first Maharaja of Jaipur to go to London travelled with vast urns of Ganges water. More recent rulers packed gallons of champagne for the return journey. The present Maharaja of Jaipur is nicknamed ‘Bubbles’ after the fabled amounts of champagne drunk to celebrate his birth in the Rambagh Palace.

Not all of them liked British rule. The Maharaja of Udaipur refused to sit next to George V at the Delhi Durbar of 1911 and hung the sash and jewels of the Grand Knight Commander of the Star of India round his horse’s neck. When the Prince of Wales went pig-sticking with Maharaja Pratap Singh of Jodhpur in 1921 and unwisely dismounted well into wild pig country, the Maharaja told him coldly, “You know you Prince of Wales; I know you Prince of Wales; but pig, he not know you Prince of Wales.” Edward remounted.

Jaipur remained prominent in recent years because of politics. The Matharajmatha Gayatri Deva, the most beautiful woman in the world according to Cecil Beaton, is still furious with her son over the Rambagh conversion. She was elected to parliament for Jaipur with 80% of the vote. As a supporter of the opposition Janata Party she was jailed and humiliated by Indira Ghandi during the ‘Emergency’. Sitting in her own palace with a dining room entirely of Lalique from the table itself down to the spoon handles (all the Rajputs were obsessed with Lalique) she was for a long time not on terms with ‘Bubbles’ who was a Congress supporter and for a while, minister for civil aviation.

What happened to all those little princes the British used to snoop on at their private schools? Of the ones that did not go entirely to pot, some became ambassadors, relying on their rank and charm. Some led their units into battle for the Raj over two world wars, and lead them still for the Indian Army, relying on Rajput military tradition. Some became uncomfortable hoteliers relying on architectural history.

Maharaja Gaj Singh considered that this latter category might be rather more important than is usually credited. He pointed out to me that Rajasthan accounted for 600,000 visitors a year, one third of Indian tourism. “The French started coming to Rajasthan. They were followed by the Germans, and the British have become quite strong. The American numbers are a bit weak. I think they worry about bad stomachs and whatnot.”

The Maharaja criticizes the government for shortcomings in Indian tourism. “They see it as an elitist industry. Manufacturing is preferred for investment. Somehow tourism can look after itself. This is not altogether so. We need infrastructure.”

Talking of elitism, I pointed out to His Highness that he and his princely brethren rather ran the tourism show in Rajasthan.

“Yes, there is the legacy of course,” he gave me what one might call a gimlet look. “It very much depends on what we want to do with our lives, how we behave ourselves.” One could almost feel ‘the tables’ tugging and the Moet et Chandon bottles begging to be popped.

I said goodbye to him in his private courtyard. An Indian Army soldier stood by his car with the door open. The princes have no official status any longer but this may be difficult to get across to a nearby brigade commander who is on the ‘old boy net’. A servant approached His Highness nimbly with a silver tray, a small cut-glass of water and a porcelain bowl. The Maharaja took his blood pressure tablets and was driven away to a boar hunt.

One observer recently commented to a correspondent from the London Independent newspaper: “Their most popular pastime is hitting the bottle - hard.” Opening the doors to the tourists and the top of the Scotch bottle has probably become marginally safer, but still not quite as satisfying as opening the gates and thundering to hit the enemy.