India Guide
Madhya Pradesh
The Jai Vilas Palace
Address: Due south of Gwalior fort
Opening time: Daily except Wed 10am–5.30pm
Price: Rs200, plus Rs30 camera, Rs80 video
In the heart of Gwalior's upper-class neighbourhood, the Jai Vilas Palace is one of India's most grandiose and eccentric nineteenth-century relics. It was built in 1875 by Maharaja Jayaji Rao Scindia, who dispatched his friend Colonel Michael Filose on a grand tour of Europe to seek inspiration. Filose returned with a vast shipment of furniture, fabric, paintings, tapestries and cut glass, together with the blueprints for a building that borrowed heavily from Buckingham Palace, Versailles, and Greek ruins and Italian-Baroque stately homes. The result is an improbable and shamelessly over-the-top blend of Doric, Tuscan and Corinthian architecture.
The Scindias, who still occupy part of the palace, have opened two wings to the public, though sadly the steep entry fee and lack of labelling and information make visiting an unsatisfactory experience. Eager to maintain the sense of a family home, they have placed innumerable photographs of their richly clad clan members on every available surface throughout the first wing, a museum of the more valuable and extraordinary artefacts accumulated by the rulers of Gwalior. Collecting dust in the dozens of rooms and creaky wood-panelled corridors are countless Mughal paintings, Persian rugs, gold and silver ornaments, and antique furniture.
A still more extravagant wing lies across the courtyard from the museum. The durbar hall was where the maharaja entertained important visitors, among them the Prince of Wales, who descended on Gwalior in 1875. Displayed in the banquet hall on the ground floor is a silver toy train used by Jayaji Rao Scindia to dispense brandy and cigars after dinner. Suspended from the ceiling of the gargantuan assembly hall upstairs are the world's biggest chandeliers. At over three and a half tonnes apiece, they could not be installed until the strength of the roof had been tested with eight elephants. The rug lining the floor of the hall is equally enormous. Woven by inmates of Gwalior jail, it took twelve years to complete and, at over 40m in length, is the largest handmade carpet in Asia.