A journey through memory and marble at Jagatjit Palace, Kapurthala

The winter sun was soft over Kapurthala when I first caught sight of the palace. Its domes shimmered faintly through the haze, rising above the Sainik School grounds like a dream half-remembered. From a distance, it seemed improbable — a mirage from Europe transplanted into the plains of Punjab, its cupolas and balconies echoing a vanished century. As I entered the great iron gates, I felt less a visitor than a pilgrim crossing into another time.

The Principal, Vice Principal, and a teacher from the Sainik School received me warmly, their courtesy reminding me that this was still a place of discipline and duty, though its original splendour had long faded. They led me through the quiet corridors, pointing to frescoed ceilings, chandeliers dulled by dust, and marble staircases worn smooth by generations of footsteps. The air was faintly perfumed — part age, part neglect — the scent of history itself.

I. The Maharaja and His Dream

It was here, more than a century ago, that Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala, the princely capital of the Ahluwalias dreamed of creating his own Versailles. Born in 1872, educated under British tutelage, and blessed with an almost Renaissance curiosity, he was a man of paradoxes — deeply Indian yet profoundly European in taste. At a time when the subcontinent was still under colonial rule, Jagatjit Singh travelled to Paris, London, and Rome, conversing with artists, architects, and diplomats with equal ease.

Paris seduced him utterly. He fell in love not only with its boulevards and salons but with the very idea of Europe — its refinement, art, and the illusion of permanence. To him, the French capital was not foreign soil but a mirror of his own aspirations. When he returned to his small princely state in Punjab, he brought with him the blueprints of that dream — a palace that would rival the best of Europe, built not merely of stone but of imagination.

He commissioned the renowned French architect M. Marcel, and work began in 1900. Materials and craftsmen were summoned from far and wide — marble from Rajasthan, chandeliers from Belgium, mirrors from Venice, tapestries from Lyon. From Italy came lapis lazuli pillars and marble fireplaces; from France, delicate plasterwork and furniture; and from Holland, the paintings that lined the salons. When it was completed in 1908, the Jagatjit Palace stood gleaming amid its manicured gardens, a rare union of East and West.

Modelled on Versailles and Fontainebleau, it rose over the flat plains of Punjab almost like a mirage from the Loire Valley. Its facades were dressed in the beaux-arts style of 19th-century France, crowned by mansard roofs pierced with oval windows like those of the Louvre. The reception hall was named for Louis XIV, the Sun King himself, whose reign had defined the grandeur of the French court that Jagatjit Singh sought to emulate in brick, marble, and light.

Contemporaries called it The Paris of Punjab. To visitors, it seemed the work of a man determined to make time stand still — a palace that spoke French in façade and Punjabi in soul.

II. The Paris of Punjab

The façade of Jagatjit Palace remains breathtaking even in decay. Its neo-classical columns, arched windows, and fluted pilasters seem to belong as much to the banks of the Seine as to the plains of Doaba. The domed pavilion, inspired by the Louvre and Fontainebleau, glows like an echo of the Belle Époque.

As I walked through its colonnaded portico, I could almost see the Maharaja himself — a tall, handsome man with a silk turban and a tailored coat, welcoming guests from Europe and India. It was said that when the Maharaja hosted banquets, the music of a live orchestra floated through these halls, and that the scent of roses from the palace gardens drifted up to the balconies where guests sipped French wine beneath the stars.

Jagatjit Singh himself cut a remarkable figure among the princes of his age. He was, as LIFE magazine described him, “the suavest and most continental of them all,” a man more at home in Paris cafés than in his own dominion near the Himalayas. He spent much of the year in Europe — dining at Maxim’s, attending operas, acquiring objets d’art — and returned to Kapurthala each winter, his trunks full of furniture, tapestries, and perfumes. The court language was French; his ministers addressed him in the tongue of Voltaire; and his palace became known, half in jest, as Château Kapurthala.

He dined off Sevres porcelain, spoke fluent French, and kept correspondence with European royals. Yet, for all his Western veneer, Jagatjit Singh never disowned his roots. The Maharaja of Kapurthala was a Sikh prince who sought not to imitate Europe but to equal it — to show that India, too, could create beauty on its own terms.

Inside, the palace was a world apart. The Durbar Hall was the heart of it — a space of dazzling opulence, lined with mirrors, oil paintings, and gilded furniture. From its ceiling hung a chandelier so vast that it was said to require a dozen men to clean it. Its frescoes, painted by Italian artists, glowed in the filtered light. Beneath them, carved thrones and sofas of rosewood awaited their royal occupants.

Each room told a story. The Maharaja’s private study was lined with leather-bound books — histories of Europe, volumes of French poetry, atlases, and treatises on diplomacy. His music room held a grand piano, imported from Paris, upon which visiting musicians once played Chopin and Tagore alike. In another chamber hung a collection of clocks, each a mechanical wonder, some tracking not just the hour but the phases of the moon and the movement of the stars.

The palace spread across two hundred acres of manicured gardens, fountains, and statues. To the Maharaja, it was not simply a royal residence but an assertion of modernity — a princely statement that India could equal Europe in taste and refinement. Yet, for all its European veneer, the life within was profoundly Indian: the rhythm of the court, the zanana where the women lived in seclusion, the durbar where subjects petitioned their ruler, and the faint scent of jasmine wafting through marble corridors at dusk.

From the accounts of his grandson, Brigadier Sukhjit Singh, the palace was less a cold monument than a place of constant motion — clerks, guards, servants, and musicians moving through its rooms like figures in a grand ballet. In the evenings, the Darbar Hall would be transformed into a ballroom, where the Maharaja would open the dance beneath the glittering chandeliers and the painted stars of the ceiling. The court orchestra, led by a Goan conductor named D’Souza, played waltzes and foxtrots while European guests whirled across the parquet floor in white tie and diamonds. By eleven, the Maharaja would withdraw, leaving behind a swirl of music and perfume — the echoes of a vanished world.

III. The World within the Walls

His taste for Europe extended even to his private life. In 1906, while attending the wedding of King Alfonso XIII in Madrid, Jagatjit Singh fell in love with a young Spanish dancer, Anita Delgado, performing at the Gran Kursaal cabaret. Their meeting was the stuff of legend — a fairy tale born of empire and desire. After a brief courtship conducted through letters and gifts, the sixteen-year-old Anita was taken to Paris, transformed by tutors into a suitable consort, and in 1908 arrived in India as Maharani Prem Kaur of Kapurthala— his fifth and, by most accounts, his favourite wife.Her arrival transformed palace life: she brought with her the rhythms of flamenco, the perfume of Seville, and the sensibility of fin-de-siècle Europe.

Prem Kaur’s story belongs to the same gilded, doomed age. Draped in emeralds and lace, she moved through the palace like a living emblem of its hybrid grandeur — half Europe, half India. Her most famous jewel, a crescent-shaped emerald once adorning the forehead of her husband’s elephant, became her signature ornament. “He told me I now owned the moon,” she later wrote, “and challenged me to wear it.” She did — suspended from her hair by a golden thread, glowing like a fragment of the heavens.

Photographs from that era show the royal couple posing in sunlit gardens, she in silks and pearls, he in regal uniform, moustache waxed to perfection. Theirs was a story that seemed to belong to the novels of E.M. Forster — an unlikely romance suspended between two worlds. Yet beneath the splendour, there were currents of loneliness and cultural dissonance. The Maharaja’s fascination with Europe was as much about belonging as about beauty.

By the 1920s, the Maharaja’s Parisian sensibilities had become almost mythic. He kept a pavilion in Paris, drank only Evian water, and commissioned his jewels from Cartier, who redesigned the Kapurthala headdress into a tiara carrying nineteen emeralds.

Within the palace, daily life was orchestrated like theatre. The Maharaja’s court musicians played sitar and violin in harmony; his chefs prepared both Punjabi delicacies and French pastries; his guests debated politics beneath portraits of French kings and Sikh ancestors alike. Jagatjit Singh’s palace became a bridge between civilizations — a living metaphor for the global imagination of early 20th-century India.

Yet beneath the surface of luxury lay the quiet melancholy of an age ending. The world of princes, palaces, and purdah was slipping away, soon to be overtaken by independence, austerity, and the slow decay of grandeur. The splendour of Kapurthala began to fade with the changing tides of the world. When the British Empire collapsed, so too did the small princely states that had lived within its shadow.

IV. The Eclipse

After independence, Kapurthala merged with the Indian Union, and the Maharaja — now an old man — retreated into memory. The palace that had once symbolized his vision became a relic. For some years, it stood silent and shuttered, its gardens overgrown, its fountains dry. Then, in 1961, the Sainik School was established within its premises — a noble institution training boys for service to the nation, but one that necessarily transformed a royal residence into a campus.

The laughter of princes was replaced by the commands of cadets; the strains of violins gave way to morning bugles. In a sense, the palace continued its tradition of discipline and honour — but its grandeur began to decay.

Even now, the Sainik School preserves much of the structure, but time and indifference have done their work. Walls flake, ceilings leak, frescoes fade. The palace, built as a hymn to art, survives today as an orphaned masterpiece — proud, wounded, waiting.

V. My Visit

It was with this awareness that I walked through its silent rooms. Gp Capt Madhu Sengar, the Principal, Cdr Sandeep Singh Virk, Vice Principal and Mr. Munish Sharma , the teacher and alumnus of the school guided me through the great halls, their voices echoing faintly in the stillness. They spoke with reverence of the Maharaja and of the school’s role in preserving what remains. I could see the passion and urgency in their hearts and the overwhelming desire for doing more to preserve the glorious heritage.

In one salon, sunlight filtered through stained glass and fell upon a century-old piano. On impulse, I pressed its keys. To my astonishment, a clear, perfect note rose from within — the sound of a ghost still alive in its shell. For a moment, I could almost hear music drifting through time — the faint memory of an evening long ago when the Maharaja’s guests danced to waltzes under chandeliers now gone dark.

Nearby, I noticed a clock of exquisite craftsmanship, a marvel of brass and enamel, its intricate gears still ticking faintly as if unwilling to die. Around it lay furniture of the era — carved chairs, velvet sofas, mahogany tables, each one a witness to lost elegance. Paintings and sculptures stood in quiet disarray, their subjects half-obscured by cobwebs.

These were not mere objects; they were fragments of a vanished consciousness — the sensibility of a prince who had sought to blend East and West, faith and modernity, art and politics. And now, they lay forgotten beneath layers of dust.

How, I wondered, could a nation so ancient, so steeped in heritage, allow such treasures to fade into oblivion? How can we boast of cultural pride while ignoring the very stones that bear our story?

VI. The Lament

The neglect is heartbreaking. The palace’s *Durbar Hall*, once the seat of regal authority, now stands in melancholy disrepair — its gilded ceiling peeling, its frescoes cracked. The chandeliers, dulled by time, hang like sighs of light. The marble floors bear stains of age, and the walls whisper of glory turned to ghost.

Even so, the spirit of the place remains. The very air vibrates with memory — of royal processions, of music and laughter, of evenings scented with rosewater and attar. In the soft Punjab light, the palace still looks magnificent, its beauty undiminished by neglect, like an old aristocrat refusing to bow to poverty.

As I stood at the central courtyard, the winter sun slipping behind the domes, I felt an ache that was both personal and collective. This was not merely a palace in ruins; it was a mirror of our apathy, a reflection of how easily we forget.

Surely, this monument deserves better. The professional bodies like Archaeological Survey of India must step in to preserve it. Restoration is not a luxury here; it is a duty to history itself. For once these frescoes are gone, once these halls crumble, we will have lost more than art — we will have lost memory.

VII. The Ghosts of Glory

Evening descended, and as I took leave of my hosts, I looked back one last time. The palace glowed faintly in the fading light, its domes catching the last embers of the sun. The lawns lay quiet, the fountains dry, yet the silhouette remained majestic — a dream persisting against indifference.

I thought of Maharaja Jagatjit Singh then — cosmopolitan prince, poet, dreamer — and imagined him walking these same corridors, gazing at the future with hope. Perhaps, if he could see it now, he would grieve. Or perhaps he would smile, knowing that dreams, like palaces, do not die; they merely sleep, awaiting rediscovery.

As I left through the great gates, I felt a mingling of wonder and sorrow. The Jagatjit Palace remains one of India’s most extraordinary creations — a palace that dared to speak the language of two worlds, a monument not just to a man but to an age of imagination. It stands today, weathered yet luminous, as both a warning and a promise.

If we choose to care, it can rise again — its chandeliers lit, its music restored, its marble shining as before. And perhaps then, in the hush of some future evening, the old piano will sound once more — its notes carrying, across time, the unbroken dream of a Maharaja who once built a little piece of Paris in the heart of Punjab.