In Kapurthala town in the Doaba region of Punjab stands the Jagatjit Palace. A far cry from the Mughal style palaces that are strewn all over northern India, this palace takes inspiration from the palace of Versailles in distant France.
Kapurthala, a Versailles amidst the wheat fields, was the playground of one of princely India’s more colourful characters – the Francophile Jagatjit Singh. His lascivious life and the circumstances of his marriage to a Spanish woman make for exciting reading. It’s illustrative of the ways of many of pre-independent India’s monarchs who governed little but delighted in rambunctious pursuits that made for interesting tabloid tidbits, more delightful than any fictional story.
Jagatjit Singh was born in 1872. A scion of the Ahluwalia dynasty that traced its origins to the fabled Sikh warrior and founder of the Sikh kingdom, Jassa Singh Ahluwalia (1712-1783), he, later in life, came to be known as Major-General His Highness Farzand-i-Dilband Rasikh-al-Iqtidad-i-Daulat-i-Inglishia, Raja-i-Rajagan, Maharaja Sir Jagatjit Singh Sahib Bahadur, Maharaja of Kapurthala, GCSI, GCIE, GBE.
Though it started as an independent kingdom, under Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s rule (1801 – 1839), it developed close ties with the British. By the time of Jagatjit Singh’s birth, the kingdom was bound to the British by legal and administrative ties. You can watch a very interesting video from the archives below:
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