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Entering the Palace

It is the public face of the Deogarh rulers that we encounter first. The gateway into the front courtyard passes beneath the "Kacheri" where justice was administered - reminding us immediately that they held powers of life and limb over their subjects. Then the richly painted palace entrance leads us up, past a couple of small family shrines, through a series of narrow passages and staircases. (A grander entrance route would have been harder to defend!)

But notice how well-worn the steps are here, compared with other parts of the palace. This is the area that saw the heavy traffic, the villagers coming to pay their feudal dues or seek some judicial remedy. Their business took them only as far as the first floor, where the revenue and general administration departments were located at the front of the building.

The Central Courtyard

Emerging onto the second floor where the hotel's reception is now located, it is difficult to imagine that this little "piazza", proudly displaying the white marble Deogarh throne, was a relatively late addition to the palace. Not the surrounding buildings but the actual floor on which you are standing. It used to drop straight down to a garden on the level below. There is another room on the first floor, exactly like the bar lounge immediately above it on this level, giving the building a symmetry that has now been obscured. But originally, if you had wanted to cross from here to the bar on the other side, you would have had to use one of the narrow' galleries that once encircled this space. .

Perhaps more intriguingly, the back wall used to be a shallow, almost two-dimensional "screen",
with many more than the handful of "jali' windows that you can see today. It must have been remarkably like a rustic variant of the famous Hawa Mahal (or Palace of the Winds) in Jaipur that extraordinary building, little more than a facade that was designed to give the Maharanis in the City Palace a discreet view of the outside world from its dozens of jalis.

According to one version of events; this similarity is no coincidence. Pratap Singh ji, the younger son of Maharaja Madho Singh I of Jaipur and Princess Kundan Kunwar of Deogarh, came here as a child to escape the dangerous plottings of the nobility in Jaipur. His decision to build the Hawa Mahal in 1799 is said to have been directly inspired by his happy memories of Deogarh.

The bar opening off this courtyard, is a former reception hall. It is hung with numerous. portraits, including those of Maharana Raj Singhji of Udaipur (1754-1761) on the left wall, Rawat Gokuldas ji II (see Room 10 below) on the left-hand side of the back wall and Rawat Ranjit Singh ji (see Room 1) on the right wall.

There are also some interesting photographs here. On the left wall, top left is Sangram Singh ji II (see Room 19) with his two sisters - looking exactly like three brothers, except that the girls are given away by their ankle bracelets. Bijay Singhji (see Room 2) also appears bottom left, top right (with his staff) and bottom centre (with the two regents who were posted from Udaipur to "supervise" him when he overstepped the mark). On the right wall are two more photographs of Bijay Singh ji, top left and centre, and one of Sangram Singh ji, bottom centre.

There are a number of photographs that feature Mayo College where Rawat Nahar Singh ji II taught as a History master after Independence.

Mayo College

Mayo College, in the city of Ajmer, has often been described as the "Eton of the East". It was founded in 1875 by Lord Mayo, the British Viceroy and modelled closely on England's public schools. Its role was to prepare the young Princes for their royal duties, in a mould that would fit them comfortably into the British Empire.

Given the futures for which the pupils were destined, subjects like shooting and riding inevitably loomed larger in the curriculum than more conventional academic priorities. But the emphasis began to change after Independence when many members of the aristocracy were forced to consider the necessity of gainful employment. Indeed, the intake began to change as well- with a willingness to admit pupils from the Brahmin and business classes alongside the Rajput core as long as their parents could afford the fees.

In the college's heyday, however, many of the princely pupils lived in the most exclusive of lives.
Their families built them lavishly appointed mini palaces and staffed them with huge retinues of servants. The first pupil, the Maharaja of Alwar arrived with an entourage of horses, camels and elephants and a fanfare of trumpets and drums. A very far cry from the austerity of the English dormitory.

One of the most striking features of the Mayo College photographs is the "maturity" of the students. Indeed, when Nahar Singh ji started teaching there in 1956, at the age of 24, he hit one of the boys, who coolly replied, "I don't think you should do that -I'm older than you"!

A Hidden Treasury

Tucked away in the back left-hand corner of the bar lounge, is a small room known as the "kapardara" (a room for keeping jewelry and clothes). But this is no ordinary closet. It contains what are thought to be the oldest paintings in the palace probably dating from around 1710-1720 in the reign of Sangram Singh ji I, no more than 50 years after the foundation of Deogarh.

There are scenes of hunting and elephant fights, court scenes and episodes from the Krishna Lila decorating the dado and upper walls. Close similarities have been noted between these and the paintings inside the domes of the Jagmandir in Udaipur's Lake Pichola suggesting that painters from the capital were commissioned to carry out this early work before the development of a more distinctive Deogarh school.

The Mardana Rooms

A narrow staircase to the left of the bar lounge leads to an upper terrace and at the left hand end of this stands the Bada Mahal (literally "Big Palace"). It was the original "mardana" or men's section of the palace and probably dates from the late 15 Century. The windows in the central area now a delightful sitting room were originally open to the front courtyard far below. They were glazed much later by Bijay Singh ji, in the early twentieth century.

Through the doorway on the left is the dazzling Sheesh Mahal' or Mirror Palace, The blaze of multi-coloured light from the stained glass windows is bounced from mirrored wall to mirrored wall with such exuberance that you might almost miss the more subtle presence of some miniature paintings from the Deogarh School, set into frames of yet more tinted glass.

One of these miniatures is a portrait of Anop Singh ji, the son of Raghodas ji (see Room 15). Anop Singh ji died before he could inherit the throne himself but he is shown here hunting wild boar on horseback an activity that the Rajput aristocracy regarded as both excellent sport and an essential exercise for attaining equestrian proficiency.

Another painting shows the man who did succeed Raghodas ji - Anop Singh ji's own son,
Gokuldasji II (see Room 10) – hunting sambhar deer at night. Gokuldasji II was not only one of Deogarh's greatest patrons. He was also one of its most enthusiastic portrait sitters. But then, he does seem to have had a particularly striking presence. Colonel Tod was a first-hand witness and described him vividly in his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan: "I knew him well. He stood six feet six inches, and was bulky in proportion. His limbs rivalled those of the Hercules Farnese. His father was nearly seven feet, and died at the early age of twenty-two, in a vain attempt to keep down, by regimen and medicine, his enormous bulk. "