Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts

'God created the maharajas,' wrote Kipling, 'so that mankind could have the spectacle of jewels and marble palaces.' Dismissed by later leaders as wasteful playboys, the princely rulers of 19th-century India left much of artistic beauty, as a magnificent new exhibition at the V&A shows

Musicians playing a raga for Raja Balwant Singh of Jasrota, c1745-50, by Nainsukh. Photograph: V&A

Even at the height of the raj, the British directly controlled only three-fifths of India. Two-fifths of south Asia's vast landmass always remained under the control of its indigenous princely rulers, split up between nearly 600 states. "God created the maharajas," wrote Kipling, "so that mankind could have the spectacle of jewels and marble palaces." Aldous Huxley came to more or less the same conclusion. Arriving in Delhi at the time of the Council of Princes in the early 1930s, he found the city "pullulating with despots . . . At the viceroy's evening parties, the diamonds were so large they looked like stage gems. It was impossible to believe that the pearls in the million-pound necklaces were the genuine excrement of oysters."

Not all observers, however, were so enamoured with India's princes. Indian nationalist politicians such as Nehru and Gandhi regarded them as foolish and wasteful playboys, spineless Quislings of the British and enemies of India's freedom movement. Lord Curzon took a similar view, and railed in his despatches home against "the category of half-Anglicised, half-denationalised, European-women-hunting, pseudo-sporting, and very often in the end spirit-drinking young native chiefs". Writing to Queen Victoria, the viceroy detailed at surprising length the failings of the "frivolous and sometimes vicious spendthrifts and idlers" who, he believed, constituted such a large proportion of her princely subjects. The Rana of Dholpur was "fast sinking into an inebriate and a sot"; the Maharaja of Patiala was "little better than a jockey"; and Maharaja Holkar was "half mad and addicted to horrible vices".

The viceroy's staff took an even dimmer view. In 1888 the assistant governor-general in central India informed the foreign secretary that in his zone of responsibility the result of "an English training for princely youths" so far was "sodomites 2, idiots 1 . . . and a gentleman prevented by chronic gonorrhoea from paying his respects on the Queen's birthday".

Typical of the sort of maharaja the AGG may have had in mind was Jaiaji Scindia of Gwalior. When he heard that the Prince of Wales was planning to visit him in 1875, he decided to build a palace named after himself, Jai Vilas. Believing that his present residence was unsuitable for entertaining such a guest, Jaiaji gave orders that work should begin on the grandest palace in Asia, even though the royals were only coming for one night.

A fortune was spent on the new building, a huge, wall-sized photograph of which forms a centrepiece of the V&A's magnificent new show,Maharaja. The exhibition examines the legacy of India's princely rulers, and especially their fateful friendship with the British. Jai Vilas is really as good a symbol as any of the misunderstandings that always beset that troubled relationship.

The sepia view of the long arcades of the new Gwalior palace shows how, in a small nowhere-town in the middle of the jungles of central India, there arose in just 18 months a palace built on the scale of Versailles. Jai Vilas was planned as a vast white marble extravaganza set in a green sweep of parkland. Pedimented gateways gave on to wide, echoing courtyards; arcades of arches rose to elegant pepperpot cupolas.

Particular care was lavished on the great Durbar Hall, which was to be the largest drawing room in India. Underfoot lay the largest carpet in the world, so enormous it had to be stitched in situ. Above hung the two biggest chandeliers in Asia, so vast that before these crystal enormities were hoisted into place the strength of the roof had to be tested by building a ramp a mile long and walking 12 elephants across its width. Only one thing was lacking: it never occurred to the maharaja to find a proper architect.

Instead, Jaiaji turned to a jobbing amateur, instructing a local Indian army colonel to knock something up. Col Michael Filose was the Gwalior's head of education, but he had no formal architectural training. In fact, prior to starting work on Jai Vilas he had worked on only one building: the Gwalior jail. Jaiaji didn't mind: he packed Filose off to Paris to see Versailles, sending instructions to come back quickly and build something similar in Gwalior before the Prince of Wales arrived.

Less than two years later, everything was ready for HRH's arrival. But as the building neared completion there were a number of warning signs that corners had been cut. A correspondent from the Madras Mail visited the building works and commented that the "apparent substantiality" of Jai Vilas was "merely a cloak for flimsiness". Worse was to follow.

Jaiaji's favourite toy was the silver train which carried the nuts, cigars and port around the Gwalior dining room. When you picked up the decanter, the train stopped. But Jaiaji, who was always a cautious ruler, had the train built with an override: on his instructions the engine would shoot past any courtier who had had a drop too much. It is not clear what went wrong with the mechanism on the royal visit, but on the great night, the train braked suddenly and toppled the port decanter right into the Prince of Wales's lap.

After the prince had departed, Jaiaji belatedly realised that he was going to have to live in this vast white elephant. There was nowhere he could lie back in a shady courtyard and watch his dancing girls, just 900 rooms the size of aircraft hangars, full of uncomfortable ranks of empire chairs. His first reaction was to fill it with knick-knacks in an effort to make it more homely. In 1877 the pre-Raphaelite painter Val Prinsep came to Jai Vilas to paint the maharaja as part of a vast panorama of the 1877 Delhi Durbar, shown in public for the first time in this show: "The palace," wrote Prinsep in his diary, "is full of a jumble of decorations of the sort one sees in lodging houses at home. It is also extremely uncomfortable."

Behind the comedy of Jai Vilas lies a genuine tragedy. For in adopting European architecture, as other princes did, in court after court across India, the maharajas turned their immense powers of patronage away from local Indian craftsmen. In this way they helped to kill off for ever a two millennia-old artistic tradition. It is a blow from which Indian art, miniature painting, sculpture and architecture have never really recovered. Only a few years after building his palace at enormous cost, Jaiaji decided to move out. The palace was abandoned, except for occasional use as a visitor's wing, standing as a monument to both the fabulously wasteful extravagance of the maharajas and the great gulf of misunderstanding that so often divided the British from their Indian allies – two themes that float like melancholy wraiths through this show.

The V&A's new exhibition is a serious attempt to put the myth of the maharajas in its proper context, as part of the history of courtly India, and to explore at the same time the visual and artistic expressions of Indian kingship both before and after the maharajas' Victorian heyday. Nevertheless the show is haunted by the sad story of the princes and the British, telling how the British first bullied the princes into submission, schooling them in western tastes, then both laughed at, and envied, the monsters they had created. Finally, they quit India, leaving the maharajas to be abolished.

The show opens in the 18th century with the fall of the Mughal empire. Old Indian textbooks, influenced by British imperial historiography, talk about this period as an era of decline, as the Mughal dominions shrank from an empire that commanded south Asia, to the diminutive holdings of the last Mughals: a series of puppet kings processing in ever-diminishing circles around the walls of the Red Fort.

Yet as the exhibition well demonstrates, while the 18th century may have been a time of political turbulence, and one of weak central government, it was also a period of great artistic ferment and invention, and by far the most interesting paintings in the show date from this period. My favourite is a newly discovered and characteristically surreal image of courtly life by the greatest of all post-Mughal Indian painters, Nainsukh of Guler. It shows Nainsukh's patron, Raja Balwant Singh, standing on a terrace one evening during the monsoon, as white egrets fly against the lightning-flecked stormclouds massing around them. A party of musicians play music for the raja as he looks out over the walls of his palace, while behind him his male attendants wait on his pleasure: one holds his hookah, while another shelters him with a red umbrella. It recalls a court scene from the same period observed by Edward Strachey, grandfather of Lytton. The ruler, Strachey wrote:

neither laid hold of his hookah nor did he open his mouth to receive the mouthpiece, but his servant watched him, and put the point of it close to his lips. Now and then he stroked the minister's whiskers with it and when a good opportunity offered itself poked it a little way into his mouth. The minister who did not appear to have observed it before took a whiff. When the minister made a movement as if he was disposed to spit, one of his faithful attendants held out both hands and received a huge mouthful of spittle, with great care he then wiped it on a cloth which was by him and wrapped it up carefully, appearing then ready to receive in his hands any such deposit, however precious, which his master might think fit to place there.

There are many other wonderful images of the court life of this period. Perhaps the most startling of all show the Holi celebrations in Udaipur, with tentacles of red and orange paint drifting like the legs of some great coloured octopus through the prancing horsemen and celebrating courtiers massing in front of the white walls of the City Palace.

The exhibition is also remarkable for its jewels: extraordinary assemblages of gems the like of which have rarely been shown in this country before: gleaming rubies and scatterings of lizard-green emeralds, superbly inscribed spinels and jewelled daggers of burnished gold and empurpled ebony. There are other, more effete, fopperies, too: enamelled flywhisks and bazubands set with the Nine Auspicious Gems including yellow topaz and the rarest chrysoberyl cat's eyes.

Into this dreamlike world, this apparent courtly Eden, step the British. They appear first as supplicants: a succession of wonderful textile paintings records the various embassies sent to woo the Maharana of Udaipur in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In the first the British sit meekly on the ground, barefoot, in front of the maharana, who alone of the assemblage is wearing slippers; to one side is a courtyard full of the elaborate textiles given as offerings by the British as they seek trading privileges. Slowly, however, the balance of power swings to the British, as does the position of cultural dominance. By the end of the series, the Rajasthanis are sitting on western chairs, and some of the courtiers are wearing European dress while the British loll around disrespectfully, hats on their heads.

The violent suppression of the Great Uprising of 1857 was a pivotal moment in the history of British relations with the Indian princes. It marked the end both of the East India Company and of the Mughal dynasty; they were replaced with undisguised imperial rule by the British government. This new world of the Victorian raj is represented by Prinsep's vast picture of the gathering of the Indian princes at the Delhi Durbar of 1877. Now it is the princes who come as supplicants to the British. The former traders are now the rulers; the former kings of kings are now puppets, dangling by the strings of British protocol.

The final room of the exhibition takes the story forward into the 20th century. Yet the photographs and early movie footage of these Rajput courts still have a strangely dream-like quality, for all that black and white and sepia have replaced the bright colours of the miniatures. Bikaner, lost in the camel-thorn wastes of the Thar, is revealed in these images as a princely oasis of spice caravans and nautch girls, of cumulus beards and moustaches waxed into astounding tooth-pick topiary. Behind the lattice screens of the Moon Palace, princesses fan themselves to fend off the summer heat: so great is the temperature that the princes are forced to play polo at night with luminous balls coated with sea sulphur. It was a world so desiccated that the maharaja ordered monsoon clouds painted on the walls of the palace nursery so that the young princes would know a storm if ever, in the later life, they saw one.

Into this make-believe kingdom, the turn of the century brings the severely practical figure of Maharaja Ganga Singh, whose photographs dominate the final room. Gangaji was educated by the British at Mayo College, where he learned "faultless English, excellent table manners and good cricket". Gangaji determined to drag Bikaner out of the pages of Sleeping Beauty, and to build some railways. Over the following half century he threw his desert kingdom into a manic construction programme, encompassing water works that irrigated an area the size of England, schools, hospitals, a representative assembly and some pukka roads for his fleet of Rolls-Royces.

Moustaches bristling, it was Ganga Singh who took the Bikaner Camel Corps to China to put down the Boxers. Later, though he was unable to use his camels in the trenches of Flanders, he did take the corps to Mesopotamia, where he led the last great cavalry charge in military history. With peace, Ganga Singh was a signatory of the Treaty of Versailles and a speaker at the League of Nations; he befriended George V and Clemenceau, and took them both tiger-shooting. Waterworks remained his constant obsession; his dying words were: "Bring me the file on the Bhakra Dam."

The princes outlasted the raj; but not for long. They were abolished in 1971, when Indira Gandhi finally withdrew their privy purses. Kipling's spectacle of jewels and marble palaces was slowly transformed into one of tour groups and palace hotels. But as this show demonstrates, for all their faults the princes left much that was beautiful; and much more to admire than either Curzon or Gandhi would ever have admitted.

Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts is at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London SW7 from 10 October to 17 January 2010. Tel: 020 7942 2000.