Place · Indo-Saracenic palace · India
Lallgarh Palace, Bikaner
Also known as Bikaner, Ganga Singh's Lallgarh, Lallgarh Palace
Lallgarh at Bikaner, built between 1902 and 1926 for Maharaja Ganga Singh to Sir Samuel Swinton Jacob's design, in red Dulmera sandstone with carved jali screens, filigree brackets and Rajput cupolas applied to a European country-house plan with a billiard room and an indoor swimming pool.
- Date
- 1902–1926
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.010, 73.330
Worth knowing
It is the last phase of this architecture: a Rajput ruler building in a style British architects had invented to look Rajput. Ganga Singh raised the Bikaner Camel Corps, sat in the Imperial War Cabinet, and was the only Indian to sign the Treaty of Versailles; the palace library holds one of the largest Sanskrit manuscript collections in the state.
Connections (2)
- Succession in timeJunagarh Fort, Bikaner
Junagarh of 1589 and Lallgarh of 1902 are the two Bikaner palaces, three hundred years and one empire apart. The first was built by a general of Akbar's on flat ground and never taken; the second by a British architect for a ruler who sat in the Imperial War Cabinet, in a style British architects had invented to look Indian. Both were paid for by the same caravan trade.
- Site withinBikaner
Lallgarh Palace, Bikaner sits inside Bikaner and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Laxmi Niwas Palace”. Karni Singh, The Relations of the House of Bīkāner with the Central Powers 1465–1949 (1974); Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain's Raj (1989).
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