Wankaner: The Palace on the Hill

There is a palace on a hill in Morbi district that appears to have been designed by a committee that could not agree. Ranjit Vilas has Italianate arcades and a Gothic clock tower, Mughal-style domes and cupolas, Rajput chhatris and jalis, a French-influenced facade, and a general air of a building that intends to try everything. Photographs make it look like a folly. In person, standing on a ridge above the town with the whole Saurashtra plain behind it, it works.

Wankaner was a princely state ruled by the Jhala dynasty, and the palace was built for Maharaja Amarsinhji in the early twentieth century — a ruler who was, by all accounts, closely involved in its design. It is still owned by the family, part of it operates as a heritage hotel, and it is one of the most enjoyable buildings in Gujarat precisely because it makes no attempt at coherence.

A palace of everything at once

The eclecticism is the point and it was deliberate. Indian princely architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a laboratory: rulers with money, European-trained architects or engineers, and a set of competing prestige vocabularies — the classical, the Gothic, the Mughal, the Rajput, the Art Deco later on — all available at once, with no strong reason to choose. Some states produced restrained hybrids. Wankaner went the other way.

So Ranjit Vilas has a long arcaded facade, a clock tower, pointed and round arches in the same elevation, domes and pavilions on the roofline, carved stone screens, cast-iron balustrades, and interior spaces running from durbar-hall formality to comfortable European domesticity. There are stained-glass windows, marble, chandeliers, hunting trophies, portraits, and a collection of the objects a ruling family accumulates over generations, including vintage cars and carriages.

The hill matters as much as the building. The palace was sited on a ridge above the town and the river, which gives it long views, a breeze, and a genuine sense of dominance over the landscape — the older architectural logic of a Rajput fortress, executed in an entirely twentieth-century vocabulary. Walking the terraces at either end of the day is the best thing here.

Italianate arcades, a Gothic clock tower, Mughal domes and Rajput detail — in one building.

The stepwell and the pool

Below the palace, in the grounds, are two features that visitors consistently remember more than the building. The first is a stepwell of some antiquity — a proper vav, descending in tiers, cool and dim and quite unlike the palace above it. The second is a large swimming pool, built in the early twentieth century in a scheme of some ambition, fed from the same water system and set among terraces and pavilions.

An old stepwell in the grounds and a 1930s swimming pool fed from the same water — the whole span of Indian water architecture in one estate

Taken together they compress a long history into one estate: the traditional stepwell that Gujarat has been building since the eleventh century, and the modern recreational pool that a Westernising princely family added when the technology and the fashion arrived. There is also a guest wing, the Purna Chandra Bhavan, and various outbuildings from the state's working days.

Access to all of this depends on the hotel operation. Parts of the palace complex function as heritage accommodation run by the family, and non-resident visitors are generally accommodated for a look around subject to arrangement, but it is not a ticketed public monument with fixed hours. The sensible approach is to telephone ahead, and the much better approach is to stay a night, which gets you the terraces at dawn and dusk and the run of the grounds.

Wankaner town, and Morbi next door

The town below is an ordinary working Saurashtra market town with a bazaar, an old darbargadh area and no particular sights, and it is worth a short walk rather than an afternoon. Its position, though, is useful: Wankaner sits between Rajkot and Morbi on the road north, which puts it in reach of several things at once.

Morbi, about 40 km away, is the ceramic tile capital of India and a genuinely strange industrial landscape, with a Mani Mandir palace complex and a darbargadh worth seeing in the town. Dhrangadhra, further east, is sandstone-quarrying country on the edge of the Little Rann. Gondal, about 90 km south, has the other great princely palace complex in this part of Gujarat. And the Little Rann of Kutch, with its wild asses, is within reach to the north-east.

Practicalities

Wankaner is in Morbi district, roughly 50 km from Rajkot and about 40 km from Morbi, on the Rajkot–Morbi–Kutch road. Rajkot is the practical gateway, with an airport, a major railway station and good connections; Wankaner has its own station on the Saurashtra network with limited services. Ahmedabad is around 200 km.

A car is the sensible way to do this, both to reach the palace on its hill and because Wankaner really wants to be combined with Gondal, Morbi or the Little Rann. October to March is the season — Saurashtra is hot from April — and the palace terraces are at their best in cool weather at either end of the day. Book the heritage accommodation ahead and telephone about non-resident access rather than turning up hopeful.

Why the palaces became hotels

Ranjit Vilas is a heritage hotel for a reason that applies across princely India. After independence and the integration of the states, ruling families lost their territories and administrative revenues; the privy purses that replaced them were abolished outright in 1971. What remained was very large buildings with very large maintenance bills and no income attached to them. A great many were sold, subdivided, given to institutions or simply allowed to decay.

Conversion to hotels was the strategy that worked, pioneered in Rajasthan from the 1960s and adopted across Gujarat later and more patchily. It has obvious costs — the buildings become commercial, the interiors get adapted, and access for ordinary visitors depends on a business rather than a public ticket — but the alternative in most cases was collapse. When you telephone ahead to Wankaner and negotiate a look around, you are dealing with the mechanism that has kept the roof on. It is worth staying a night on those grounds alone.

If you go

• Telephone ahead. This is a family-run heritage property rather than a ticketed monument, and access for non-residents needs arranging.
• Stay a night if you can — the terraces at dawn and dusk are the best of it, and you get the run of the grounds.
• Don't miss the old stepwell and the early-twentieth-century pool in the grounds; visitors often remember them best.
• Combine with Gondal, 90 km south, for the two finest princely palace complexes in this part of Gujarat.
• Come October to March; Saurashtra is hot from April and the hill has little shade.

Ranjit Vilas is the most enjoyable building in Saurashtra because it refuses to choose. Italianate arcades under a Gothic clock tower, Mughal cupolas on the roofline, Rajput jalis in the walls, a stepwell and a 1930s swimming pool in the grounds, and a ridge-top position with the whole plain behind it. Telephone ahead, stay the night, walk the terraces at dusk, and pair it with Gondal ninety kilometres south.