Grandchildren win battle over Indian royals’ £260million
IN life Gayatri Devi was a jet-setting Indian aristocrat who took the Queen on elephant-back tiger hunts at her Rajasthan estate and was once named one of the world’s most beautiful women by
Vogue magazine. But since the socialite’s death in 2009, her descendants have waged an unseemly legal battle over the assets of the former royal family of Jaipur.
The Indian Supreme Court yesterday ruled in favour of Devi’s grandchildren, and against her step-offspring, over a fortune said to be worth $400million (£260 million), largely in the form of stunning royal palaces now converted into luxury hotels.
“All these years my sister and I have only been asking for our father’s shares in the family company,” said her grandson Devraj.
“Finally, I am one step further to be able to do my various duties towards my ancestral land.”
Although the princely states of the Raj were dismantled after independence from Britain in 1947, that ancestral land remained at the heart of Indian high society life throughout the last century. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, the Mountbattens, Jackie Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were all entertained there by Devi and her husband Sawai Man Singh, the poloplaying Prince of Jaipur.
Devi also served 15 years as an MP and spent five months in jail on apparently trumped-up tax evasion charges. She later renounced hunting after shooting dead 27 tigers.
Born to a Bengali royal family, she grew up in a home staffed by 500 servants and was educated at school in England and Switzerland.
After Man Singh visited her parents in Calcutta, the two fell in love, despite his existing two wives, and pursued a secret courtship in London while she attended finishing school.
The couple thrived at the centre of Indian social life.
In 1965 they celebrated their silver wedding anniversary with a London party attended by the Queen and the likes of Stavros Niarchos, the shipping magnate, and Fiat tycoon Gianni Agnelli.
Man Singh died five years later in a fall from his polo pony at Cirencester.
Since Devi’s death aged 90, her two grandchildren have wrestled other descendants for control of that legacy.
It was a tussle that would surely have upset a matriarch renowned for her charm and manners. As Vir Sanghvi, a commentator, noted at the time: “The demise of Gayatri Devi marks the end of the glory days of princely India.”