Kishore Singh flips through a sweeping tale of architectural traditions that inspired the Umaid Bhawan, and catches up on some nostalgia in the bargain.
When the deadline for the completion of the electrification of Umaid Bhawan was brought forward to 24 December 1942, Maharaja Umaid Singh held his breath as “[f]irst one bank of lights flashed on, and then the next, until the palace was ablaze in the dusk. The Monarch’s creation had come to life!”
Uniquely, its first event would be a Christmas party, with guests arriving “to swim in the basement pool”, while later, “they loaded the table with chicken, ham, turkey, rice pulao, kebabs and koftas…ice creams, mince pies and fresh fruit salads”.
The Christmas party was soon a tradition, and of the 1943 celebrations, a chronicler recorded that it was “unsurpassed anywhere in magnitude or magnificence”, that indeed it was a “banqueting legend that will be told and retold in the coming days of peace…”
Nor were the palace’s first occupants royalty, for in 1943 following unusually heavy rains that brought down the roof of the Royal Air Force barracks in Jodhpur, Maharaja Umaid Singh extended his hospitality to “nearly eight hundred damp airmen” who occupied the palace for a month “revelling in the luxury of constant electric light, lofty ceilings, tiled bathrooms, mosaic marble floors, a swimming pool below stairs, spacious grounds, and the absence of all but the most sensible restrictions”.
The royal family, when it did move into the new palace from the unhindered freedoms of Mehrangarh, found the 347-room palace “too small”.
More From This Section
Umaid Bhawan is India’s newest and arguably grandest palace, one which still has to properly weather to gain the weight of history and heritage, though it has had its share of both celebration and tragedy.
Built as a famine relief project intended to provide employment to thousands, its creator, the flambouyant, gadget-loving Maharaja Umaid Singh “died suddenly of a burst appendix in June 1947” when “India was on the brink of achieving independence from Great Britain”. His heir, Hanwant “took over the reins of power and led Jodhpur into the new era”.
“Like Umaid Singh, Hanwant Singh was fascinated by twentieth-century technology and gadgets”, set up a “machine-tool factory in the Mehrangarh fort” and “found idiosyncratic weapons intriguing. He created a walking-stick pistol and a belt buckle with four crossbars that, at a touch, popped open to reveal four barrels. But by far his most famous invention was a fountain-pen pistol” tales around which built into myths, even after he had presented it to Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Hanwant Singh, like his father, died tragically young in a flying accident after the results of independent India’s first elections had gained him a landslide victory.
His four-and-a-half-year-old heir Gaj Singh was coronated and an administrative council set up, while he “studied with two female tutors, an Indian and an Armenian, and endured his birthday parties on the back lawn of the palace. Here he joined in the children’s games, supervised by adults over-anxious to have him win, all under the gaze of the gentry of Jodhpur. For Gaj Singh, the worst part was musical chairs, because the old bandmaster resolutely refused to stop the music unless the young maharaja was assured of a seat!”
Intriguing as these tales are, of profligacy and chivalry and loyalty, the real hero(s) of this book are not its occupants and the dynasty that created it, but the palace itself, its architecture and its impact on traditional Marwar which was to become — as Aman Nath, who besides designing the book also writes in its Introduction — “Jodhpore, pronounced joe-d-poor.
“Why are all Indian cities either ‘poor’ or ‘bad’?” asked a visiting dignitary, leading Nath to explain the origins of the terms pur (city) and bad, pronounced abaad (“settled, or built, inhabited or colonized by the person whose name it carried”).
“Not surprisingly, such Indian precedents were sought when naming the new imperial capital of India, once the impending move from Calcutta was announced by the emperor King George V at the Delhi Durbar of 1911. To honour the king as well as Queen Mary who had accompanied him, suggestions of ‘Georgebad’ and ‘Marypur’ were inevitable…but they gave way eventually to the natural simplicity of ‘New Delhi’, a city that was physically realized in 1931.”
The emperor and his coterie of imperial administrators “took to addressing the Rajput kings as ‘Dear Jodhpore’ or ‘Dear Bikanir’ or ‘Dear Maharaja Sahib’ or simply as ‘My dear friend’, avoiding the pitfalls of misspelling an Indian name.”
No matter how easy it is to meander into these tales of nostalgia, especially since Gaj Singh still “rules” over Jodhpur in perhaps a more intimate and endearing manner than even Queen Elizabeth in England, but that would miss the excellent examination and research that the writers Fred R Holmes and Ann Newton Homes have brought to their work. In its first avatar, their work was published on a more modest scale by Banyan Books.
The same, now revalidated, is a stunning pictorial book, somewhat crowded with information and pictures in the manner of the Jodhpur palace itself, that bears on the professional rivalry between Edwin Lutyens (who designed New Delhi and most notably what is now Rashtrapati Bhavan) and Henry Vaughan Lanchester (who designed Umaid Bhawan), and the great research into Hindu and Indian architecture that HVL brought to his palace, inspired most notably by the Hindu temples and Buddhist viharas of the subcontinent, and by Angor Wat in particular.
The inspiration, the building itself with enough sensitivity to its usage as royal residence, a place to impress the British lords and house women in purdah, its nod to the trendy Art Deco rage of the period, the clever use of Marwar symbolism “is evident in its tectonic form, sculpture programme and motifs”.
Even as countries battled and Asian countries were dragged into a European war, in Jodhpur, Umaid Singh — or the Monarch as he was known — built “[w]ater projects, hospitals, schools, public buildings, parks, a train station, a zoo, a museum, a library and an airport… His use of private and state construction projects, including Chittar Palace [as Umaid Bhawan was originally christened], to fuel the economy during a disastrous worldwide depression was state-of-the-art Keynesian economics.”
The Holmes’ study of the subcontinental architectural traditions took into view also the arguments raging across Europe on a consensus for twentieth-century design, “that design should rid itself of all history” — which though it found no sympathy with HVL, must have inspired the public works department that created many of this country’s most soulless buildings following independence!
While Lanchester grappled with European and Indian traditions, his life was not made any simpler by the Monarch’s demands: “Though HVL had no problem with Umaid Singh’s penchant for current technology, blending modern design into a temple-mountain palace was an extremely perplexing prospect.”
Lanchester’s stylistic shift to Art Deco may have been more accident than chance — “European dictators [Hitler and Mussolini] saw in Art Deco the symbol of empire” — but his “genius was realized in creating an Art Deco programme for all decoration, both inside and out. What could have become a jumbled, eclectic group of historically varied Hindu forms and motifs was united through Art Deco styling. HVL thereby remained true to his nineteenth-century education, using symbolically important Hindu form and motifs, but remaining on the cutting edge of twentieth-century design.”
Architects G A Goldstraw and later J Roslyn were made responsible “to recreate ancient Hindu motifs in the Art Deco style”.
Building the palace was an extraordinary task. “To solve the problem of efficiently transporting thousands of ton of stone to the palace site [the contractor] …completed a narrow-gauge railway from the Sursagar quarry”… [n]o mortar was used between courses… [e]ach stone was hewn to specifications… Roslyn commissioned Maples of London to create Art Deco furnishings for Chittar Palace. In London, Maples prepared watercolour washes of all rooms in the maharaja’s and viceroy’s quarters and sent them to Umaid Singh. When approved, the furniture, electric fixtures and carpets were assembled by Maples and shipped in August 1942. The ship and its special Art Deco cargo never reached Karachi — it was sunk off the coast of Africa.”
Fortunately, a Polish artist, Stefan Norblin, “engaged to work on the palace murals, was also a student of Art Deco. Once the Maples furniture was lost, Norblin was asked to prepare new watercolour washes based on which the interior decoration of the palace rooms could proceed… Fifty years later, the Umaid Bhawan suites decorated by J Rosyln, and lived in by the Monarch and his wife, looked surprisingly like the watercolour washes of room interiors provided by Norblin.”
Estimated to cost Rs 35,00,000, the palace in fact cost Rs 94,51,565 — a sum you could easily spend on a few days of hospitality at this now palace residence-cum-hotel. The Umaid Bhawan, one suspects, is surprisingly like when it was built, still gracious and warm of heart, still extant to its inherent architectural and design interpretations.
As to which is better — the palace or the book: at the risk of inviting the wrath of the maharaja, my vote (may HVL forgive me!) goes to the book.
JODHPUR’S UMAID BHAWAN: THE MAHARAJA OF PALACES
A Book by Aman Nath
Text: Fred R Holmes & Ann Newton Holmes
Photographs: Amit Pasricha
Publisher: India Book House
Price: Rs 2,500
Pages: 172