Home Tour: The New Palace

Four hours west of Ahmedabad, along a spectacularly straight road dotted with occasional settlements, sits one of India’s most surprising architectural masterpieces: a maharaja’s palace designed to conform to the purest precepts of art deco style.

When it was built in 1942, the palace represented a radical shift from traditional palace architecture of the time. Perhaps that’s why its owner, Maharaja Mahendrasinhji of Morvi, christened it the New Palace. He was the last maharaja of Morvi—a town which, historically, was a principality ruled by the warrior clan of Jadeja Rajputs. As remote as the New Palace feels geographically, it is a building firmly situated in the pivots of history. In the 1940s, when British colonizers still ruled, India’s royal families felt themselves sli...