King Cool

GÉRALDINE LENAIN pictures Yeshwant Rao Holkar being installed on the gaddi of Indore in 1926, at 17, recalling heroic exploits of his Maratha forbears and wondering if he would be able to live up to it all. In truth it would have been remarkable if he turned out worse than his two immediate predecessors. His grandfather, Shivaji Rao, was forced to abdicate by the British. Though reluctant to take this extreme step, the colonial power became exasperated by Shivaji’s insolence, instability and neglect of his duties. His son (Yeshwant’s father), Tukoji Rao, outdid him. When Mumtaz Begum, a Kashmiri singer that he held captive in his harem, escaped into the protective care of a Bombay businessman, Tukoji sent hitmen to gun his rival down in the street. The assassins were hanged but Tukoji escaped trial by agreeing to abdicate in favour of his son. The challenge for Yeshwant was to stay on the throne for as long as it lasted, as India hurtled into a new political order.

Despite Lenain’s best efforts to paint a sympathetic portrait of a man of sensibility and taste, Yeshwant Rao emerges from her account as weak-willed. Plagued by poor health, and by the early deaths of some who might have given him strength, he seems buffeted by circumstances and unable to formulate strategies. He took no greater interest in politics than his grandfather had.

The last maharaja of Indore is chiefly interesting, and remembered today, as a patron of modern design and as a pioneer of Indian Art Deco. While studying in Britain (at Charterhouse school and then at Christ Church, Oxford) he made friends and contacts who introduced him to the work of some of the leading avant-garde artists and designers of the time. He acquired a taste for the sleek lines and restrained aesthetic of international modernism. In 1929 he commissioned the untried young German architect Eckart Muthesius to produce a radical makeover for Manik Bagh, a palace that his father had built in the first decade of the century.

Manik Bagh emerged as a cutting-edge modern dwelling, the most advanced in India of its time. Over the next few years, Yeshwant and his first wife, Sanyogita Devi, toured the showrooms of Europe to select the furniture and fittings to suit the architecture, with the aim of creating a total work of art: a comprehensive setting for modern living. It was completed in 1934, 20 years before Le Corbusier landed in India to commence work on Chandigarh.

Lenain sees Manik Bagh as “an embodiment of the maharaja”; as its severe elegance tokened a “rejection of the gilded pomp” that both Indian and Western observers expected of maharajas. It is hard to assess that now: with the abolition of the privy purses in 1971, the family sold the palace to the government, and it was occupied by a tax office. The contents have long been dispersed and now circulate on the international art market. Few images of the furnished palace have ever been published; and there are none in this book.

We get a clearer glimpse of him (and of Sanyogita) from the two pairs of large oil portraits that Yeshwant commissioned from the society portraitist Bernard Boutet de Monvel (which are illustrated here) and from the more intimate portraits by the celebrated American photographer Man Ray (which are not). De Monvel shows each of them in both traditional Indian costume and in Western evening dress, and both perform the two roles of their divided lives with exemplary ease and grace.

AesthetebooksGéraldine Lenainmaharaja of IndorePatronTragic PrinceYeshwant Rao Holkar II