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It was exclusively built to ensure a grand welcome at
Gwalior to the British monarch Edward VII (the then Prince of Wales)
in 1875. Sir Michael Filose (known as Mukhel Sahib), one of the great
Sardars of the Gwalior maharajah, was asked to make a tour of the West
and build it. He went to all major cities of Europe and came back
and built this huge mansion with a garden of over 400 acres. The
palace included 200 rooms that incorporated a mix of European style of
architecture embellished with Italian marble floors, ornamental gold
ceilings, Persian carpets and antiques from the capitals of various
Europeon countries. But its most important decoration is a pair of
custom-made Viennese chandeliers lit with 750 lamps, each chandelier
40 feet high and weighing 3.5 tonnes—then the largest in the world.
The late Maharani Vijayraje Scindia, the wife of the sixth Scindia,
has given a description of the chandelier in her autobiography, as
follows: "Mukhel Saheb (Sir Michael Filose) Sahib saw to it that
most of the other things in his palace matched the durbar hall in
scale and splendour, and nowhere else is his propensity for the
grandiloquent more in evidence than in the crystal chandeliers he
ordered for the durbar hall from Vienna. The two main ones which are
very nearly a pair are said to be the largest ever made, with the
possible exception of the one which hangs in the Czar’s winter
palace outside Moscow.’’ The story is told that when the time
came for him to hang these chandeliers with their combined weight of
nearly seven tonnes from the ceiling of the hall, engineering experts
feared that the roof might collapse. Mukhel Sahib rose to the occasion
and carried out a practical demonstration to test the strength of his
roof. He constructed a broad wooden ramp from the ground level to the
top of the roof, and coaxed a dozen elephants up the ramp and on to
the roof. These elephants who, between them, weighed at least twice as
much as the chandeliers, were made to go round and round the top of
the roof for several days. If it could sustain that sort of pounding,
Mukhel Sahib argued, it would surely hold the weight of his Viennese
chandeliers. It did , and still does. The larger of the chandeliers
holds 248 lamps, and when they and the pedestal and wall lamps are
lit, according to one writer, their effect is like stepping into a
"petrified waterfall’ with icy blue and gold of the room and
the lights reproduced infinitely on the wall mirrors strategically
placed on the opposite walls.’’ Today the Durbar Hall is the most
important part of the Jai Vilas Palace Museum, and foreign tourists
scarcely believe that these 3.5 tonne chandeliers made 130 years ago
are still the second largest chandeliers in the world. Museologists
say that there are two chandeliers larger than these in the world,
each weighing 4.5 tonnes. One is at the famous Hermitage Museum at
St.Petersburg (Russia) and the other at the Dohlabace Museum in
Istanbul. — MF
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