Travel: The Splendor of India's Royal Court and Palaces of the Maharajas
"For confirmation of our love and friendship, I desire your Majesty to command your merchants to bring in their ships of all sorts of rarities and rich goods fit for my palace"
— The Great Moghul Jahangir: Letter to James I, King of England, 1617 A.D.
An exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London displays numerous photographs of maharaja's palaces :
"The word maharaja, literally ‘great king’, conjures up a vision of splendour and magnificence. The image of a turbaned, bejewelled ruler with absolute authority and immense wealth is pervasive and evocative, but it fails to do justice to his role in the cultural and political history of India. Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts re-examines the world of the maharajas and their extraordinarily rich culture."
"The exhibition spans the period from the beginning of the 18th century to the mid-20th century, bringing together over 250 magnificent objects, many being lent from India’s royal collections for the first time. It examines the changing role of the maharajas within a social and historical context and reveals how their patronage of the arts, both in India and Europe, resulted in splendid and beautiful objects symbolic of royal status, power and identity."
Royal Palaces of India on Flickr only adds to the reason so many have found travel to India seductive and inviting. Most seniors can recall when Jewel in the Crown was prime television viewing, and the lure of a trip to India became a goal of many travelers. Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet became a literary destination, an armchair trip that we made.
The author V.S. Naipaul completed a triology of books about India, the country from which his parents emigrated: An Area of Darkness, A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now. Two paragraphs from Naipaul's Nobel Prize for Literature lecture informs us about his view of travel writing, among other things:
"I had to go to the documents in the British Museum and elsewhere, to get the true feel of the history of the colony. I had to travel to India because there was no one to tell me what the India my grandparents had come from was like. There was the writing of Nehru and Gandhi; and strangely it was Gandhi, with his South African experience, who gave me more, but not enough. There was Kipling; there were British-Indian writers like John Masters (going very strong in the 1950s, with an announced plan, later abandoned, I fear, for thirty-five connected novels about British India); there were romances by women writers. The few Indian writers who had come up at that time were middle-class people, town-dwellers; they didn't know the India we had come from."
"Both fiction and the travel-book form have given me my way of looking; and you will understand why for me all literary forms are equally valuable. It came to me, for instance, when I set out to write my third book about India — twenty-six years after the first — that what was most important about a travel book were the people the writer travelled among. The people had to define themselves. A simple enough idea, but it required a new kind of book; it called for a new way of travelling. And it was the very method I used later when I went, for the second time, into the Muslim world."
For a another website of Indian History, consult the Internet Indian History Sourcebook compiled by Fordham University. Because of the Mumbai attack travelers should consult the State Department site for updated security notices.