Gondal: Palaces, Vintage Cars and an Old Pharmacy

Gondal is a small town in Rajkot district with three palaces, a collection of vintage cars, an Ayurvedic pharmacy that has been making medicines since the 1930s, and a nine-volume Gujarati encyclopaedia compiled by one of its rulers. It is forty kilometres from Rajkot, it takes half a day, and it is comfortably the best princely-state visit in Saurashtra.

What makes Gondal interesting is not just the buildings but the man behind most of them. Maharaja Bhagvatsinhji, who ruled from 1869 to 1944, was one of the more remarkable Indian princes of his era — a trained physician, a serious scholar, and an administrator who abolished certain taxes, built roads and railways and introduced free compulsory education in his state well before most of British India managed it. The palaces are the visible part; the encyclopaedia is the point.

Three palaces, in order

The Naulakha Palace is the oldest and the best. Its name means nine lakh, supposedly the cost of building it, and it dates in parts from the seventeenth century. What you come for is the stonework: carved stone jali screens, a remarkable spiral staircase, carved balconies and pillars, and a durbar hall with chandeliers, mirrors and a collection of royal paraphernalia — thrones, howdahs, palanquins, silver, weapons, portraits, and cabinets of the miscellaneous objects that princely families accumulated. There is also a small museum-like display of the state's records and Bhagvatsinhji's own material.

The Riverside Palace, built in the 1870s on the bank of the Gondali river, was the residence of Bhagvatsinhji's son and has a different character — more domestic, with period furniture, photographs, hunting trophies and the atmosphere of a house rather than a court. Its outbuildings hold the collection that draws a certain kind of visitor from a long way: a considerable assembly of vintage and classic cars, including pre-war saloons and later luxury marques, in varying states of preservation.

The Orchard Palace, built in the early twentieth century as guest accommodation for the state's visitors, has been operated as a heritage hotel by the family, and it is where you stay if you want to sleep in Gondal properly. Between the three, plus the Swaminarayan temple in the town and the old darbargadh area, Gondal gives you a coherent picture of what a small, well-run princely state actually looked like.

Carved stone jalis, a spiral staircase and a durbar hall — in a town most people have never heard of.

The encyclopaedia, and why it matters

Bhagvatsinhji's largest project was not a building. Bhagavadgomandal is a Gujarati encyclopaedic dictionary — nine volumes, running to many thousands of pages and hundreds of thousands of entries, compiled over decades under his direction and published in the mid-twentieth century. It attempted to record the whole Gujarati lexicon with meanings, usages, proverbs, technical vocabulary and encyclopaedic entries, and it remains a foundational reference work for the language.

A nine-volume Gujarati encyclopaedic dictionary, compiled over decades at the direction of the ruler of a small Saurashtra state

That a princely state of this size produced such a thing tells you a good deal about Bhagvatsinhji's priorities, and about a strand of princely India that gets far less attention than the shooting parties and the Rolls-Royces. He was a qualified doctor with degrees from Edinburgh, wrote on Ayurveda and on the administration of his state, and pursued education, public health and language scholarship with real seriousness. Gondal also had free compulsory primary education, and girls' education, at a strikingly early date.

The other institution from that impulse is still operating. The Ayurvedic pharmacy associated with the Shri Bhuvaneshwari Pith in Gondal has been manufacturing Ayurvedic medicines since the 1930s, distributing them widely, and it remains a working concern rather than a museum piece. Whether or not you have any interest in Ayurveda, it is a striking example of an institution founded in a princely state that simply carried on through independence and after.

How to visit

Gondal is easy. The palaces are close together in the town, entry is by ticket at each, and a thorough visit — Naulakha, Riverside and the car collection, plus a walk through the town — takes three to four hours. Opening arrangements and ticketing are managed by the family trust rather than by the ASI, so hours can vary and it is worth checking locally, particularly if you are making a special trip.

The single best decision is to stay a night at the Orchard Palace, which turns a stop into a proper visit and is one of the more pleasant heritage stays in Saurashtra — period rooms, gardens, and the general atmosphere of a house that is still lived in by the family that built it. Otherwise Rajkot, 40 km away, has the full range of city hotels and is under an hour by road.

Gondal in a Saurashtra route

Gondal sits neatly on the road between Rajkot and Junagadh, which means it costs almost nothing to include in the standard Saurashtra circuit. Rajkot itself has the Kaba Gandhi no Delo — the house where Gandhi lived as a boy, now a museum — and the Watson Museum, plus a food reputation. Junagadh, with Girnar's ten-thousand-step climb and the Uparkot fort and Ashokan edicts, is an hour and a half on. Gir is beyond that.

For anyone specifically interested in princely architecture, the natural companion is Wankaner, about 90 km north in Morbi district, where the Ranjit Vilas Palace stands on a hill in an extraordinary hybrid of Italianate, Gothic, Mughal and Rajput idioms, also run as a heritage hotel by its family. Doing Gondal and Wankaner together, ideally sleeping in both, is one of the more rewarding and least-travelled itineraries in Gujarat. October to March is the season; April to June is hot across Saurashtra.

The other Saurashtra states

Gondal was one of a great many. Before independence, Saurashtra was a patchwork of well over two hundred princely states and estates, ranging from substantial entities like Junagadh, Bhavnagar and Nawanagar down to holdings of a few villages, and the region had one of the densest concentrations of princely authority anywhere in India. That fragmentation is why the peninsula is scattered with palaces, darbargadhs, guest houses and civic buildings in towns that now look far too small to have produced them.

It also means that comparing them is unusually rewarding. Bhavnagar spent its port revenue on schools, a library and a railway. Wankaner built an architectural experiment on a ridge. Morbi laid out formal civic spaces and imported European fittings. Gondal produced a nine-volume dictionary and free compulsory education. Junagadh built the Mahabat Maqbara and, in 1947, tried to accede to Pakistan. Doing three or four of these in a week gives you a picture of princely India that no single palace can, and Gondal is the best place to start.

If you go

• Allow three to four hours for Naulakha, Riverside, the vintage car collection and a walk through the town.
• Check opening hours locally — the palaces are family-run rather than ASI monuments and timings can vary.
• Stay a night at the Orchard Palace if you can; it turns a stop into a proper visit.
• Ask about Bhagavadgomandal and the Ayurvedic pharmacy — the intellectual side of Gondal is the interesting half.
• Pair Gondal with Wankaner, 90 km north, for the best princely-architecture route in Gujarat.

Gondal is what a small, unusually well-governed princely state left behind: a seventeenth-century palace with carved stone jalis and a spiral staircase, a riverside house full of period furniture and vintage cars, a guest palace you can sleep in, an Ayurvedic pharmacy still in production, and a nine-volume encyclopaedia of the Gujarati language commissioned by a ruler who trained as a doctor in Edinburgh. Forty minutes from Rajkot, and almost nobody stops.