Checking In With India’s Maharajahs : Even the Most Jaded Guests Are Awed by the Opulence of These-Turned-Hotels

The porter who carries my dust-covered suitcases looks almost as if he’s been dressed for a scene in the movie “Plaza Suite.” Over navy pants he wears a traditional red and blue bellman’s jacket, but instead of a smart pillbox cap, he sports a saffron-colored turban.

“This was once the maharani’s suite,” he announces officiously, unlocking and pushing open the door to Room 402. “Maharani is the Hindi word for queen,” he continues without considering I may already know something of India’s exotic princely order.

Inside, the room is as black as the inky desert sky that has encased the former Jodhpur royal palace since my late-night arrival. The bellman, with a penchant for theatrics, steps silently into the blackness. When I see him again he is standing expressionless beside a white marble fireplace in a room with a 20-foot-high ceiling, plush Art Deco chairs, giant paintings and a bed that is larger than any I’ve ever seen or slept in. “Good God,” I mutter. The corners of the bellman’s mouth curl upward. “That’s American for Allah is Great,” I quip, determined not to be just another tourist gone gaga over a flashy hotel room.

The bellman bows slightly, showing respect for my blessing on the room, and walks to a set of double doors. With one grand sweep he reveals a private dining room with enough crushed velvet chairs for 12 guests. “Charming,” I offer coolly, touring around the long oak table and stopping halfway to admire a Belgian crystal chandelier that drops like a mountain waterfall from the center of the room. The cascading crystals remind me of another, more impending question.

“And the bathroom?” I ask casually.

As if prompted by a stage director hidden behind the stiff Aubusson drapes, the bellman leads me down a long stone terrace and back through the main room to another set of double doors where he announces: “The toilet.”

Stepping inside a room only slightly smaller than the others, I am accosted by mirrored images of me, mouth agape, looking disappointingly ordinary against this royal backdrop, which costs $155 a night. The bellman directs my attention to the dressing room’s inner chamber and points to the object of my desire.

“Shall I show you the servants’ quarters?” he asks.

The Umaid Bhawan Palace is otherworldly. Once the world’s largest private home, it rests on an outcrop of rock at the edge of the Thar Desert, overlooking the ancient city of Jodhpur. Today, like many of India’s royal palaces, it is used as a hotel.

Since 1970, when the late prime minister, Indira Gandhi, stripped the country’s royal families of their prestigious titles and state allowances (for some, more than $200,000 a year), many former rulers have had to choose between opening their ancient palaces to tourists or watching them crumble.

Gaj Singh became Maharajah of Jodhpur at the age of 4, when his father died. He still owns and lives at the Umaid Bhawan, although it’s tourists who now stroll the palace grounds, dine in the Great Hall and sip champagne on the marble terrace.

“I like having everything in running order again, not just a gloomy shell,” says Singh, who limits his use of the 347-room palace to five rooms on the second floor. “But as business increases, there are times when one must use the side door to avoid the crowds. Otherwise it doesn’t disturb me.”

By converting his palace into a hotel, Singh has managed to preserve the huge red sandstone structure, as well as employ palace servants who have been loyal to the royal family for decades.

At the moment, only 66 of the 347 rooms in the palace are livable. Nearly every suite includes original Art Deco furnishings created when Singh’s grandfather, Sir Umaid Singh, commissioned construction of the palace from 1929 to 1943.

Jodhpur was then the state of Marwar (Land of the Dead), and one of the Hindu Rajput states whose princes retained independence under British colonial rule. Like many princes, Sir Singh emulated British society and had English architects design the palace in the beaux-arts tradition fashionable across Europe at the time.

Propriety dictated that the palace, the future home of a potentate, be built on the highest ground in Jodhpur--which happened to be the outcrop of rock southeast of the old city. Building a monumental palace on a mountain of stone was not an easy task. The soil for the gardens had to be carried in from miles away, and pockets blasted into the rock to give root space for trees. A narrow-gauge railway was laid down to transport blocks of sandstone to the site.

From the outside, the Umaid Bhawan Palace looks oddly like an early 20th-Century municipal building, the kind that houses libraries and art galleries in London and Paris. Inside, however, the furnishings reflect a faster, more indulgent side of the 1930s, as well as the tastes of a young maharajah who flew airplanes and adored Art Deco and Jazz Modern styles.

When a shipload of palace furniture was bombed en route from England during the World War II, Sir Singh hired local craftsmen to re-create the lost pieces from pictures in magazines and catalogues. These streamlined furnishings, with rounded corners and exaggerated upholstery, seem at odds with their surroundings.

In fact, if it weren’t for the occasional tiger-skin wall covering, elephant-tail lamp or stuffed cheetah ready to leap off a staircase balustrade, the palace would look far more Western than Indian.

Like his Jazz Age grandfather, Gaj Singh seems entrenched in the trappings of Western society. He speaks with a clipped Oxford accent (he attended public school and university in England) and dresses in European designer shirts. With the exception of his off-putting habit of spitting into a small silver bowl he cups discreetly in his right hand, the 39-year-old Singh possesses none of the eccentricities that have made India’s royal dynasties infamous worldwide.

At the height of the British Raj, which ended with India’s independence in 1947, more than 565 maharajahs (Hindi for “great king”) controlled more than a half-million square miles of the subcontinent, often holding power over life and death. They dressed in jewelled turbans and gold brocades, enjoyed harems, planned their lives according to astrologers’ charts, made dynastic marriages with 12-year-old princesses and built palaces of marble and stone.

While some eroded their fortunes on gold Rolls-Royces and giddy English dancing girls, other, more enlightened princes, such as Gaj Singh’s father, built canals and turned deserts into granaries.

Today, in the eyes of democratic India, Maharajah Gaj Singh is plain Mr. Singh. His passport no longer lists “ruler” under occupation, and he has only one wife (his father had two). Yet, when he walks through the streets of Jodhpur, it’s not unusual to see a poor villager prostrate at his feet. Even the palace hotel’s general manager, Thakur Raju Singh, believes there is something mystical about his boss.

“He has a halo--an aura,” Singh said. “You see something in him that can only come from really being a maharajah.”

Jodhpur is among three of the oldest and most powerful royal dynasties that together once controlled a prosperous northwest corner of the subcontinent known as Rajasthan--Land of the Kings. Today, the three regions are grist for tourists and royal watchers seduced by historic tales of harems and tiger hunts.

Jaipur, the richest city in the royal triad, is a one-hour flight from Jodhpur. Here the old city, constructed for the most part out of a locally quarried pink sandstone, is a tangle of streets on which dark clouds of bicycles and motorized rickshaws jockey for position amid lumbering oxcarts.

A bazaar near the City Palace, I discover, is at the thick of the commotion. Women in bright yellow and saffron saris, wearing jingling silver anklets and bracelets, barter with merchants, their impassioned voices echoing from the city gates to the pink walls of the Palace of the Winds.

Less than 50 years ago, women of the royal court, bound by the ancient custom of purdah , hid behind trellis walls watching life pass by on the street below, forbidden to be seen by any male other than a husband or a trusted servant.

The chaotic market scene continues until a blue Mercedes with a flashing light on its roof pushes through the maze of pedestrians and cyclists like a time traveler in a B movie. Buyers and sellers recognize the sleek German car and line the street as it moves toward the City Palace. One merchant smiles as the car passes and tells me the interloper behind the smoked glass is Bubbles, the Maharajah of Jaipur.

Sawai Bhawani Singh, nicknamed “Bubbles” because his father filled the palace swimming pool with champagne to celebrate his son’s birth, is among India’s progressive princes. He and his family have been responsible for converting five of their palaces and hunting lodges into first-class hotels.

The Rambagh Palace, on the edge of the old city, is perhaps the most famous of Singh’s palace hotels and regularly attracts world celebrities and dignitaries. Actor Pierce Brosnan topped the celebrity guest list during my visit.

Like most of Singh’s palaces, Rambagh was constructed in the Hadoti-Bundi style--traditional Rajput architecture with ornamental arches of pink and white Makrama marble. Maharajah Sawai Jai Singh II, a warrior prince who dreamed of a city made of pink sandstone and then built it in 1727, was also the architect of Rambagh.

As he did with the old city of Jaipur, Sawai Jai Singh II applied sophisticated planning principles to Rambagh’s design. In 1956, more than 200 years after it was constructed, Rambagh’s rectangular blocks of rooms, long marble corridors and expansive courtyard made the transformation from palace to hotel an easy task.

In fact, little of the original structure had to be altered, which may explain why Rambagh is so compelling. In such authentic surroundings it’s easy to imagine devoted subjects pledging loyalty to their ruler at a ceremonial durbar, or the steaminess of the zenana, where cossetted women of the harem dressed in diaphanous silks, put henna in their hair and competed ruthlessly for the affections of the maharajah.

For the most part, guest rooms have also remained true to the palace’s original design. No two rooms are alike. Many retain original fretted arches and marble-inlaid floors, and each is accented by locally produced hand-knotted carpets, brocade sheets and Mogul paintings.

My room at the Rambagh, although not as unusual as the Maharani’s Suite I enjoyed in Jodhpur, had more practical comforts such as air conditioning, color television and a firm mattress, and cost $73 for a double.

Although the hotel has tennis courts and an indoor swimming pool, I discovered within a day of my arrival that life at Rambagh revolved around the Polo Bar. This was the place where visiting gentry sipped gin and tonic and lazed in white slipper chairs with pastel-colored cushions. It was also the sort of place where you found overweight men--wearing Rolex watches and heavy gold rings--in the company of the most exquisite women.

Then there was Margaret from Manhattan.

Margaret was not entirely fond of the “smell” of India, she told me one evening while I sipped a glass of Rosy Pelican beer. To make her point more convincing, she itemized all the smells that offended her, the worst of which she confessed was the smell of urine and the smell of sweet tea. Her problem was that she could no longer tell these two smells apart.

Indians drink large quantities of a heavily sugared tea, steeped in boiling milk and known as chai. Its sweet, pungent odor is everywhere. The Rambagh had become Margaret’s refuge from India’s air, and the Polo Bar, in its air-conditioned splendor, the only place where she could breathe easily.

In the days when Rambagh was a palace, the Polo Bar was the royal nursery. As the young heir apparent, Bhawani (Bubbles) Singh says one of his earliest memories is of racing his bicycle along the palace’s marble corridors--his British nanny in hot pursuit.

Today, in the gold-frescoed drawing room of his royal apartment--50 rooms he selected from the City Palace’s 1,500--Singh looks too reticent for a nickname such as Bubbles. He has spent 21 of his 57 years as a professional soldier. A decorated veteran, in fact, not just a rich kid who attended military school.

In 1971, he led India’s Para Commandos, and in 1972 he won a DSO for gallantry in the Indo-Pakistan War.

“I’ve been a professional soldier since 1952,” he says. “I never knew what it was like to be a maharajah.”

Still, Singh understands what it’s like to mix among the world’s rich and royal. Not far from where he sits on the afternoon of my visit, a wall of black and white photographs captures a generation of world figures: Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Prince Charles after a polo match, Jacqueline Onassis in front of the palace gates. The inscriptions are filled with sentiment.

Singh doesn’t like to talk about his celebrity friends. “Yes, Mrs. Kennedy first visited Jaipur on a presidential tour in the early 1960s,” he says, without mentioning her return visits and her friendship with his stepmother. Recent newspaper and magazine articles exposing a royal family feud in Jaipur have made him more protective of his private life.

A fight over family property has divided Singh from his second stepmother, Gayatri Devi, and her son, Jagat Singh. It’s believed that Singh’s father had once considered Devi as a bride for his son. Instead, he himself fell in love with the alluring young princess, and married her shortly after World War II.

Regardless, Singh and Devi developed a strong friendship--perhaps because of their closeness in age. Today the bond has been severed and the property dispute will likely drag on for years in the Indian courts.

Another royal intrigue makes regular headlines in Udaipur, the city that houses the third and most revered of Rajasthan’s royal families. This time it involves two brothers, whose battle over family palaces and royal titles has rocked the ancient city since the death of their father in 1984.

One of the properties in dispute is the Lake Palace Hotel--an eminent tourist attraction that sits on an island off the shores of Lake Pichola. Each day, hundreds of travelers board the canopied gondolas that take them to this world-famous resting spot.

“Do you know of James Bond’s ‘Octopussy?’ ” my boatman asks on the afternoon I traveled to the hotel. “It was filmed at this palace,” he says, pointing proudly to the creamy minarets and latticed windows reflecting in the murky lake water.

The Lake Palace Hotel, despite its age and location, can be compared to the most modern Indian hotel. Since it opened in 1962, the hotel has undergone a series of renovations, some to reinforce aging walls, others to upgrade and modernize hotel services and accommodations.

Although this means visitors can expect the latest in amenities--color television, in-house movies, a swimming pool, a bank, an airline office, a shopping arcade--it also means that there are fewer real surprises.

The best thing about my $61-a-night single room--small and simply decorated--was a view of the old City Palace, which rises like a mountain of golden sandstone blocks from the shores of Lake Pichola. It seems the hotel’s more expensive suites--with brocade paneling, ivory inlaid chairs and Waterford crystal chandeliers--personify the romantic qualities that have attracted lovers to Udaipur and the Lake Palace for centuries.

The prince who built the Lake Palace about 2 1/2 centuries ago did so for, well, romantic reasons. Jagat Singh II wanted a secluded spot to have moonlight picnics with ladies of the zenana. Although his father already possessed an island palace that was perfect for such amorous adventures, he had no intention of sharing it with his young son. “Build your own palace,” he told the boy.

When Jagat Singh II came to the throne, that’s exactly what he did. An ancient poem called “Jagatvilas” recounts the palace’s lavish inauguration in 1746. In attendance, according to the poem, were all the women of the zenana, including Jagat Singh II’s grandmother, stepmother, nine wives, four aunts, three daughters, 11 sisters-in-law and hundreds of concubines.

Fortunately, the romantic essence of the Lake Palace has survived its structural metamorphosis. In the evening, colored by the rosy hue of sunset, the palace looks unreal--like a floating apparition. White marble minarets, columns and fountains have an ethereal glow, and for one brief second you’re sure no romantic prose, verse or song has ever truly captured the magic of this place.

By the early 1960s, Udaipur’s last ruling maharana (a title similar to maharajah, but more distinguished) realized that India’s princes were in the twilight of their glory. He knew his palace on the water would make an attractive hotel for tourists, and an ideal hedge against an uncertain future.

“At that time Udaipur attracted only a handful of tourists,” says Mahendra Singh, the late ruler’s eldest son and one of the first managers of the hotel. “There was no air service to the city, and certain food items, unavailable in Udaipur, had to be imported.”

Dealing with the hotel’s erratic power supply and overwhelming mosquito population were challenges for the heir apparent, who grew up in Rajasthan’s largest palace, pampered by a royal staff of 3,000 servants.

Today, at his Samore Bagh home in Udaipur, where he lives with his wife and their two Pekingese dogs, he prefers a small staff of 10 servants. Singh speaks willingly of his days at the Lake Palace Hotel and of happier times before his father’s death. Talk of the present, it seems, only adds heartache to what was once a charmed life.

“Today I divide my time between Udaipur and Bombay, where I am occupied with my lawyers and the courts,” he says flatly.

Though old and distinguished, the Udaipur royal family never matched the wealth of other Rajput princes. Today, the dynasty’s riches amount to a number of palaces and a city museum held in trust. The controversy centers on who will ultimately control those family properties. Both Singh and his younger brother, Arvind, fell out with their father at different times before his death. In the end, however, it was Arvind who produced a will leaving him control of the Lake Palace Hotel and the family estate, while Singh, by right of succession, inherited an outdated royal title.

Despite his deflated life style, the 76th Maharana of Udaipur is highly regarded in Rajasthan, so much so, in fact, that the Congress (Indira) Party and the opposition party both asked him to stand as a candidate in the Indian elections late last year.

“My forefathers and the dynasty in Udaipur started 1,400 years ago,” he says. “The love and respect accorded our family is not about to change overnight.”