India Guide
Rajasthan
Umaid Bhawan Palace
Price: Rs50; no photography
Opening time: Museum daily 9.30am–5pm
Dominating Jodhpur's southeast horizon, the Umaid Bhawan Palace is a colossal Indo-Saracenic heap commissioned by Maharaja Umaid Singh in 1929 as a famine relief project. It kept three thousand labourers gainfully employed for sixteen years and cost nearly nine and a half million rupees. When completed in 1944, it boasted 347 rooms, including a cinema and indoor swimming pool.
The palace's furniture and fittings, ordered from Maples in London at the height of World War II, were sunk by a U-boat en route to India, and the maharaja turned instead to a wartime Polish refugee, Stephen Norblin, who gave the palace its fabulous Art Deco interiors. Umaid Singh unfortunately had little time to enjoy his new home; he died three years after it was finished.
The present incumbent, Maharaja Gaj Singh, occupies only one-third of the palace. The rest is given over to a luxury hotel and a museum containing an exhibition on the building of the palace, a gallery of crockery and glassware, a salon with a peeling gold gilt ceiling, and a gallery of clocks and barometers, some in the form of railway locomotives, lighthouses and windmills. Far more interesting (and expensive) than the museum is the palace itself, its Art Deco furniture and fittings nearly all original, enlivened with lashings of typically Rajasthani gilt and sweeping staircases.