India’s erstwhile royal families have left us with memories of fantasy lifestyles, fabled riches, grandeur and romance, and, inevitably, family disputes over the opulent palaces and properties they owned. The Gaekwad royals battled each other over ancestral property worth Rs 20,000 crore till the claimants hammered out a settlement in court, ending a 23-year-old family feud. Descendants of Maharana Pratap fought a protracted legal battle over a Rs 450 crore legacy that includes Udaipur’s iconic Lake Palace hotel. The dispute (shades of Bahubali 2), involved two feuding brothers, one backed by the mother; the two sides were entangled in 55 different cases. The legal war is still on. The Scindia royals battle also witnessed the son (Madhavrao) taking on his mother (Rajmata Vijaya Raje) in court. The legal battle was prolonged when Madhavrao’s son, Jyotiraditya, filed cases against his paternal aunts, Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhra Raje and her sister Yashodhara Raje, over the family inheritance. The Scindia property is worth Rs 25,000 crore, and there are 50 cases in various courts.

Then there is the battle of Jaipur. Perhaps no other legal slugfest exemplifies the kind of palace intrigue, polygamy, succession drama and complex inheritance structure like that of the House of Jaipur. Among India’s near-mythical panoply of royal houses, Jaipur was the best known and certainly among the richest. While the legendary Maharani Gayatri Devi, widow of Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II, was alive, the inheritance issue and the intrigue, was kept in check. When she died, in 2009, the legal skeletons tumbled out of the royal closets, bringing into the open the messy, three-decade-old inheritance battle.

The legal contest involves the magnificent Rambagh Palace and the sprawling 18-acre Jaimahal Palace in Jaipur, and Sawaimadhopur Lodge in Ranthambore. The estimated value of Jaimahal alone is Rs 1,000 crore.

Gayatri Devi was Maharaja Sawai Man Singh’s third wife, and she had just one son, Jagat Singh, who spent most of his life in London. The inheritance issue is contested by two sides of the family—Prithviraj and Jai Singh (brothers born to the same mother and Jagat Singh’s stepbrothers), and Devraj Singh and Lalitya Kumari, Jagat Singh’s son and daughter from a Thai princess he met and married in London at a ceremony attended by the Queen and Lord Mountbatten. Devraj and Lalitya were grandson and granddaughter of the late Rajmata, as Gayatri Devi was called. Jagat Singh died in 1997; he was one of the four sons of Sawai Man Singh.

In fact, the original legal dispute pitted Jagat Singh, and later Gayatri Devi, against Bhawani (Bubbles) Singh, the son of Sawai Man Singh’s first wife, Marudhar Kunwar.

Gayatri Devi’s death, 12 years’ later, triggered a legal showdown between Devraj and Lalitya and their step-uncles. The half-Thai members of the family have mostly lived in Bangkok, and still do after Jagat Singh’s fondness for drink and partying led to Priyanandna divorcing him. He moved back to London where he died. However, Devraj and Lalitya continued to visit Jaipur to see their grandmother, and usually stayed at the lovely Jaipur City Palace.

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