stuff like that,” says Prince Richard Holkar, the maharaja’s
son by a later marriage, an entrepreneur who runs the family’s
18th-century Ahilya Fort in Maheshwar as a heritage hotel.
“My mother was a California girl: She enjoyed comfort, rounded
corners, and cozy sofas. The furniture at Manik Bagh was the
antithesis of all that: You never knew where to put your elbow.”
The palace’s decoration was daring, though its art was
largely not, despite the mentoring of French dealer Henri-
Pierre Roché. “He introduced the leading artists of the day
to my father and his wife,” Holkar explains. “Alas, my father
didn’t cotton to Picasso, but he fell in love with Constantin
Brancusi’s Bird in Space and asked the artist to design a pavilion
to house two of them, one white and one black.” That project,
never realized, was intended as a memorial to Sanyogita; she
died in 1937 at 22, following an appendectomy, leaving behind
a toddler daughter, Usha, the present maharani. It wasn’t long
before Yeshwant’s aesthetic adventures also flatlined. “He just
stopped,” Gabet says. Dogged by emphysema and romantic dis-
appointments, the maharaja expired in Mumbai in 1961, after
burning personal papers that would have detailed his brief but
glorious reign as India’s champion of the cutting edge.
“He never talked about it,” Holkar recalls. “He was affec-
tionate but without any ability to expand on it; it was very sad.
If there’d been some sort of intimacy between him and either
of his two children about those early days, when he was quite
an unusual presence, it would have helped us understand
him.” Today, Gabet says, “Nobody knows about the maharaja
of Indore: Who is this incredible guy?” The Musée des Arts
Décoratifs offers some answers, but, its director cautions, “an
exhibition is not a book; an exhibition is an experience. Some
mysteries have no clues.”
singke
(singke)
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