During India’s mutinous events of 1857, the palaces seductively drifting on Udaipur’s Lake Pichola became an unexpected haven for a clutch of fleeing Europeans. The local ruler, Maharana Swaroop Singh, displayed his loyalty to the British by taking in the bedraggled bunch fleeing the rebellion at Neemuch. According to an observer, ‘the refugees were found in the last stage of destitution expecting no survival. Mehta Sher Singh and other Mewar officers made arrangements of palanquins, elephants, horses, carts and carriages. All English men, women and children were sent to Udaipur the same night.’ The ruler reputedly had all the boats in the city destroyed so the rebels could not reach the families in hiding. It’s an unusual chapter in the history of the now famed Lake Palace but, in a sense, prophetic of its future role as a hospitable sanctuary for far-flung visitors, from shahs to starlets.
Built between 1743–1746 as a summer pleasure palace by Maharana Jagat Singh, the Lake Palace was a marvel of its time even in a city filled with extraordinary buildings. Created using pure white marble hewn from the local quarry of Rajnagar and brought over 50 miles by bullock carts, the floating folly of the Mewar Sisodia dynasty was a mirage of royalty in retreat from the searing heat of the hot season. Supposedly built by the bon vivant prince for moonlit picnics with the comely ladies of the zenana away from prying eyes, the creation was extolled by James Tod in his volume The Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. He wonderingly described the rooms thus: ‘Nothing but marble enters into their composition; columns, baths, reservoirs, fountains, all are of this material, often inlaid with mosaics, and the uniformity pleasingly diversified by the light passing through glass of every hue.’
Descended from the great warrior and folk hero Maharana Pratap, the scourge of the Mughals, the Sisodia family is an ancient line whose members are considered guardians of the Mewar throne for deity ruler Shri Eklingji (an avatar of Lord Shiva). They are said to be the oldest ruling family in the world, with a tapestry of family history stretching back over 1,500 years over an astonishing 76 generations and lore attributing their roots to Surya, the sun god, whose emblem is seen all over the city. The water-strewn theatre of Udaipur is named for another ancestor, Udai Singh II, who in 1562 founded the city, which would become known as the Venice of the East. Having narrowly survived assassination as a child thanks to a devoted nursemaid who put her own son in his place with tragic results, Udai Singh left the much-besieged ancestral fort of Chittor to establish a new stronghold for his expanding court. The Pichola we see today is his work, after he flooded a village in order to make the pre-existing man-made lake made much larger.
Over the intervening centuries, it has seen a colourful cast of characters cross its shores, with a plethora of myths and ever more fanciful versions of its history conjured by the townsfolk who revel in the city’s romantic image. The other floating garden palace on its waters, called Jag Mandir, once harboured the Mughal prince Khurram before he was proclaimed Emperor Shah Jahan. It is said that the harmonious design of his old haunt inspired him when creating the Taj Mahal. Another lake legend is the story of a tightrope-walker being promised half the kingdom of Mewar by a drunken Maharana Jawan Singh in the 1830s if she could cross the water body on a rope. In true potentate fashion, the wily prince had the rope cut before she could make her triumph, with the story going that the poor lady cursed the family to heirlessness before she sank into the waves. It is notable that the next few generations almost entirely consisted of adopted sons.
Facing east to allow its devout residents to pray towards Surya, their divine ancestor, the Lake Palace shimmers with colonnaded terraces and courtyards of black and white marble, a whiff of Mughal meeting Mewar perfection of scale and form in each chamber. The culmination is the perfectly circular Upper Room, with its painted dome and its arabesques inlaid with glimmering stones. Over a century later, the building, then called Jag Niwas, had passed into a mausoleum-like state, with the French writer Pierre Loti describing it in his travelogue in 1900 as ‘slowly moldering in the damp emanations of the lake’. As well as the neglect, the style of the interiors, too, was found wanting – this time by the formidable Victorian explorer Fanny Bullock Workman. Cycling through India with her husband, the American adventuress wrote of the lake palaces witheringly as consisting of ‘an assortment of infirm European furniture, wooden clocks, coloured glass ornaments and children’s toys, all of which seems to the visitor quite out of place, where he would naturally expect a dignified display of Eastern splendour’.
Notwithstanding these doughty diktats, the palace continued to draw visitors with its ethereal allure. The nomadic theatre maestro Geoffrey Kendal (father of actress Felicity) sailed over to sit among the garden’s lotus ponds in 1950, and was surprised to find the space ‘completely deserted, its silence only broken by the humming of mosquitos’. Shortly afterwards however, the forlorn folly burst into the world’s line of sight with a 1961 visit by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, their sojourn in Udaipur captured – elephants and all – in detail by court photographers KL Syed. The following year, royalty of a different kind descended on the sleepy lake in the soignée form of sisters Jacqueline Kennedy and Lee Radziwill, who were photographed boating into its Belgian mosaic-lined entrance hall sheathed in apricot and raspberry silks.
Perhaps encouraged by the admiration of his illustrious guests, Maharana Bhagwat Singh converted the palace into a heritage hotel the following year – one of India’s earliest forays into princely hospitality. It was largely designed by American Didi Contractor, who wisely left the royal suites of Sajjan Niwas, Sarva Ritu Vilas, and Khush Mahal largely untouched in their atmosphere. ‘His Highness, you know, was a real monarch,’ she later wrote of the experience: ‘Really like kings always were. So one had a sense of being one of the last people to be an artist for the king. It felt the way one imagines it was like working in the courts of the Renaissance.’ A later chapter as a jewel in the treasury of Taj Hotels – after being leased by legendary hotelier, JRD Tata – has endured to the present day, ensuring that this palace of pleasure, with a 160-year-old heart-shaped mango tree still living at its centre, remains the most captivating place to wake up in on the subcontinent.
For more information about the Lake Palace, visit tajhotels.com
