Jetwings, the in-flight magazine of Jet Airways,
profiles the achievements of Shriji Arvind Singh Mewar,
chairman-managing director of HRH Group of Hotels, Udaipur
as he develops ‘The City within a City’ project to
safeguard the future of Udaipur as a heritage destination
October 2003
The inflight pampering is quite ruined by a protocol tizzy. I spend my hour on board 9W 3301, Jet Airways flight to Udaipur, figuring out the correct way to address the Maharana with whom I am going to spend the next two days. Clearly, I can’t get away with the ‘er uhmm’ fudging with which I’ve managed my earlier social encounters. I am not to feudalism born, so Hukum, as his ‘subjects’ predicate their sentences, would tangle my tongue. ‘HRH’, as the Page 3 Princesses (and some dowagers too) simper is equally unacceptable. Should I then just say, dude, and derecognize a 1,500-year-old lineage with a single syllable.
I should have sat back and enjoyed the ride for the guy demolishes the dilemma with “Just ‘Arvind’ is fine”. He is at his office desk peering at a bank of computer. The ‘office desk’ is a turn-of-the-century gilt table covered with burgundy baize, and the visuals on the screens are of priceless antique jewellery. He is painstakingly documenting them – not to sell, but to secure for posterity.
The cameo sums up Arvind Singh Mewar of Udaipur. Past, present, future as perfectly blended as the spices for a dish of Rajasthani Laal Maas. Which, incidentally, he cooks by way of relaxation in the kitchen of what he refers to as “my one-bedroom flat above the store”. I wasn’t privy to the bedroom, but the “flat” is the elegant Shambhu Niwas Palace, and the “store” is the fabled royal complex. It spans mahals, museums, myths, mirrors, memories – and a mindset that has pole-valued this whole onerous legacy into the 21st Century.
Of the many institutions that flourish under the over-arching chhatri of the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation, I am fascinated most by the project they call the City Within a City (CWC). The Maharajas (and this, its sole Maharana) were derecognized in 1970 by imperious Indira Gandhi, who also took away the privy purses that had sustained the princely rulers after they had acceded their native states to the Indian Union in 1947. Now the CWC reflects in microcosm all that the original macro was, and should be in the new millennium. Here, business acumen and environmental concern whip life into a decadent heritage which otherwise would have collapsed under the weight of its own irrelevance.
The distinguishing feature of Arvind Singh Mewar – apart from the snowy beard, which he wears, parted down the centre like his great-grandfather, Fateh Singhji – is his refusal to wallow in an indolent past. He suavely rubbishes my romantic notions of the burden of noblesse oblige. He is as dismissive as his royal upbringing permits him to be of some of his peers who continue to live a treasury-to-mouth existence – ‘Sell-enjoy-sell-enjoy’.
“The past is inspirational and a reference point, but you have to move on. I had to think a lot about it. You understand the awesome scope of responsibility to make you occupy the chair (and it came to him not as a birthright, but because his elder brother forfeited the right to primogeniture when he insisted on a partition of assets during the lifetime of their father, Shriji). I hope I’ve been able to achieve the crucial crossing of the threshold”.
Perhaps the spirit of responsible custodianship, as opposed to self-absorbed ownership is also integral to his particular inheritance. The Maharanas of Mewar have never considered themselves rulers, but merely the mortal representatives of the resident deity, Shri Eklingji, to which they trace their dynasty. The princely state of Mewar sprang from a boon given by the sage Harit Rishi to Bapa Rawal, the cowherd who had chanced upon the Shiv lingam, Shri Eklingji, in the forest, Bapa Rawal could claim for his own all the land he could traverse.
In the steamy catacomb of storehouses, which has now metamorphosed into a sleek, air-conditioned library, are stacked the traditional, red-cloth-bound bahidas, the diaries and accounts maintained by 75 generations of Mewar rulers- the nij kharch and the hokum kharch, the personal and state spending kept meticulously apart. The income from the state now belongs to a democratic India; the Maharana’s challenge is to make the bequest of his forefathers self-supporting, and, more important, relevant.
The CWC project builds on the present-day reality. It nurtures back to pride the creators of age-old crafts who had been forced into soulless clerkhood: miniatures, wood painting, jewellery, textiles and inlay. It clears diesel-chocked air and lake by supporting research into solar-powered vehicles and boats, assisted ironically by oil majors. The upgraded sewerage system of this complex is now a model for the town beyond the ornate Tripolia palace gates. The courtyards of the fabled zenana earn their keep by becoming venues for the marriages of ersatz maharajahs: NRI grooms riding in on greenbacks.
It can’t be easy to be forced to have strangers trampling all over what was your private domain for 15 centuries, less so for a dynasty that fiercely protected its Hindu identity. Alone among the rulers of Rajasthan, the Mewars refused marital alliances with the Moghuls or martial arrangements with the British Raj. Now it is an enlightened exploitation of the patrimony. The Maharana needs foreign investors to bankroll his projects, but he cherry-picks them to ensure that they bring the right sensibility in addition to equity.
In a more deferential age, questioning a ruler’s intentions would amount to high treason. Today’s meddlesome media demands evidence on the table. Arvind Singh’s cast iron credentials lie in the activity closest to his heart: documentation. The energy and resources he expends on it is unique not just among the former fiefdoms, but also in India as a whole. As a people, we are criminally cavalier about the treasures in our custody, sometimes by default, sometimes by design.
As we sit down at our silver thalis that night, another guest, himself a much-vaunted collector and cataloguer, scoffs at our host’s plea of a difficulty of funding. “You? You’re sitting on a trove, selling off one artifact would underwrite a whole preservation project!”.
The Maharana’s lush beard absorbs the retort that must have sprung to his lips, but it finds expression the following day. Batul Raj, his fetching conservation expert, widens her kohl-lined eyes in incredulous indignation, and exclaims, “All his treasures are listed antiquities, and we are laboriously creating a public record of the rest. We are accountable for every engraving, every antique ink-stand.”
Selling goes against the core of everything Arvind Singhji has set out to do. That’s why he’s spending so much time, money and effort on these research and documentation cells”.
Young Batul is my hugely informed guide through Mewar’s heritage and its 21st century avatar. With her, I gawk at the Crystal Gallery in the Fateh Prakash Palace, with its massive durbar hall where, if you’ve read your Tod’s ‘Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan’, you can immediately visualize the glittering conclaves of chieftains. The gallery houses incredible suites of every possible item of furniture, from massive canopied beds to miniature altars, all in solid Belgian, Venetian and Austrain cut crystal. Many of these suites had lain crated because they got associated with a curse.
We have tea on the terrace of the Dove Cote restaurant as the monsoon paints a changing cloudscape, the laser rays of light spear down from the ever-altering panorama of the Aravallis to set in gold the gem-like Jag Niwas Palace ‘floating’ on Lake Pichola.
To our left is the 17th century Jagmandir Palace where Maharana Karan Singh gave refuge to the rebellious Prince Khurram from the wrath of Emperor Jehangir and he was still here when his father’s death in 1627 made him Emperor Shah Jahan. The soil of Rajasthan is soaked in blood, but shed for politics and pride, never for communal fratricide. Indeed, Mewar’s generals were mostly Muslim, and many of Udaipur’s gates have their kabars embedded in them, guarding the city in death as they did in life.
Raj Rajasthan, as well as its earlier persona canters in at Shikarbadi, the hunting lodge that’s now the favoured haunt of those in laidback pursuit of relaxation. Koi Hai colonial ghosts order a chhota peg at the bar, while Digvijay, the effusive front office manager, describes a magnificent painting as a “live telecast” of a hunt. Sure enough, it traces the progression of the emperor in his howdah matching his wits against the tiger through the forested hills, with a multiplicity of figures of the same protagonist and his prey.
Outside, a spirited foal from the polo stud farm expends his rampant hormones by manically galloping round the paddock, his heels kicking up clumps of clod. Before I annoy my host by sinking again into the quicksand of nostalgia, Batul manoeuvres me to the hangar housing the Maharana’s microlite aircraft. Once more I’m reminded of the raison d’etre of the present house of Udaipur. The planes aren’t for flights of fancy, but for the down-to-earth task of ferrying guests to the palace-hotels and consultants to the conservation and environmental projects. Yes, the historical hunting ground now also comprises a helipad.
I pass up the Vintage Car collection and the Museum for a plunge into the colourful commerce of Udaipur’s bazaar. The silver shops beckon, as does the neon-hued lehariya, a sinuous as a royal waist tinkling through the zenana. Arvind Singh, I know, will forgive me for foregoing the fossils in favour of supporting the local craftsmanship that he has stroked back to life.
As I check out of the Shiv Niwas Palace Hotel, I take away an image as symbolic as my first encounter with the thoroughly modern Maharana in his home. It’s the cameo of Spido and the squirrel. The harlequin Great Dane is as much the custodian of Shambhu Niwas, loping through the plush-hung and painted halls of Arvind Singh’s private palace.
As he sprawls like a tiger rug on the 156-year-old marble, a little squirrel scampers cheekily around him. Spido could ignore the audacious interloper, even swat him senseless with one swipe of his giant paw. But, instead, he looks the little fellow benignly in the eye, and lets him lighten the history-burdened hall with his vivacity.
It’s been clear in just a two-day encounter that Arvind Singh understands as instinctively as his Great Dane that a lumbering past needs the present to spark it alive.
Unknown to most, Arvind Singh Mewar is truly uncomfortable talking trivia. But the moment I touch upon the subject of the House of Mewar and its future, I can notice a sea change in his demeanour and feel the adrenaline pumping. The issue of taking Mewar well into the future is closest to his heart and he has voluntarily taken it upon himself to discharge the responsibilities of time immemorial as its custodian. Despite being stripped of his privileges and the headwind of perception that royalty encounters, Arvind Singhji soldiers on without rancour. In fact the apathy of the powers that be drives him to greater resolve. He is a befitting role model. A 21st century Corporate Maharana with 1500 years’ of lineage. To sum up in his own words, “nothing has changed and yet everything has changed”.
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