Having dealt successfully with changed circumstances, HH Gaj Singh II, popularly known as ‘Bapji’, lays great store by his historical legacy..

Text: Rachna Shetty and Reshma Jain
Photographs: Kunal Kampani

In the early 1970s, as the former royal families of India grappled with issues of recognition and privy purses, a 23-year-old youngster returned to India and watched his mother break away from tradition to enter politics. For Gaj Singh, that was just one of the many experiences to discover his family’s importance in the eyes of Jodhpur. It was also the beginning of precious lessons in public life for a man who would later serve as a Member of Parliament and High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago.

Still revered among the people as ‘Bapji’, a title for a father figure, Gaj Singh spoke about the legacies of history and service to the people, all inherited through 700 years of the Rathore rule in Marwar.

Among the first things that Singh did on returning from England was to work hard towards ensuring that tourism and tourists and found their way to Jodhpur. His grandfather had passed away in 1947 just before independence and his father in 1952, on the eve of the first general elections. With changes brought about by so much happening in the country, Jodhpur seemed to be have been sidelined. The Partition severed the city’s ties with Lahore and Karachi, the nearest port and with Jaipur becoming the capital of the new state of Rajasthan, the best officers and administrators went there. So he began work on the Mehrangarh Museum Trust and converting the Umaid Bhavan palace into a hotel.

Singh says he was helped at this time by his mother’s astute judgment. She had zeroed in on Jaswant Singh who had then just left the army to try his luck at politics and had lost his first assembly elections. The ex-soldier and the England-returned prince thus worked together despite their relative inexperience to set up companies that would do things differently.

As a young man he felt the weight of living up to people’s many expectations of him but perhaps his childhood had prepared him. As he points out, “My rajtilak ceremony took place in 1952, when I was just four and I was officially recognised as a ruler of Marwar. It was tough attending social functions and events and sitting with adults, when other children were running about.”