The Maharanis Who Shaped Indian Taste

Taste is rarely accidental; it is usually commissioned. In the courts of princely India, the women of the royal household were not passive consumers of luxury but its principal directors. A Maharani's preference for a particular weave, a particular gem, a particular cut of sari was enough to sustain an atelier, elevate a craft and set a fashion that radiated outward from the court to the rest of the country.

This is patronage understood in its fullest sense. The Maharanis commissioned embroiderers, jewellers, weavers and painters, and in doing so they functioned as the editorial board of Indian aesthetics — deciding, season by season, what was worthy of a royal eye. Their choices were then copied, adapted and circulated through the aristocracy and, eventually, the wider public.

To study these women is to understand that what we now call Indian elegance was not an accident of geography but a record of decisions — made, often, by a small group of women whose authority over taste was absolute and whose influence has outlived every court that produced them.

No two figures illustrate the inheritance of style more cleanly than Maharani Indira Devi of Cooch Behar and her daughter, Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur. Indira Devi, a daughter of the Gaekwads of Baroda, is often credited with introducing the chiffon sari to India — a garment of lightness and drape that transformed how royal and aristocratic women dressed, and that remains a staple of Indian fashion to this day.

Her daughter Gayatri Devi inherited both the wardrobe and the authority. Widely regarded as one of the most elegant women of her era, she became an international byword for Indian grace — photographed by the world's press, received in the drawing rooms of Europe, and always, unmistakably, herself. Her style was not ornamental but structural: an insistence on simplicity, quality and precision that read as modern even while it drew on a deeply traditional vocabulary.

Together the two women span the arc of twentieth-century Indian style, from the strict formality of the court to the globalised elegance that followed — a reminder that Indian taste was never static, but continuously refined by those who wore it.

Not all the great taste-makers of India expressed their authority through dress. Rani Ahilyabai Holkar, who ruled the Maratha state of Indore in the second half of the eighteenth century, expressed hers through stone. Her reign, spanning nearly three decades, is remembered as an extraordinary period of building, patronage and civic care — a ruler whose legacy is written in the temples and ghats she commissioned and restored across the subcontinent, from the banks of the Narmada to the sacred sites of Varanasi.

Ahilyabai's patronage was directed not at personal adornment but at the public realm, and it is precisely this that makes her a taste-maker in the deepest sense. She decided what ought to be built, where, and to what standard, and in doing so shaped the physical and spiritual landscape of a region for generations. Her court at Maheshwar became a centre of craft — particularly the handloom weaving now known for the sarees that bear the town's name.

She stands as the reminder that taste is not only a matter of fashion. It is a form of governance: the exercise of judgement about what a society should value, build and preserve.

The Begums of Bhopal occupy a singular place in the history of princely India — a succession of women who ruled the state of Bhopal through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and who governed with a confidence that challenged every assumption of their time. Their authority was political, but their influence over taste was equally deliberate.

The Begums were builders and patrons on a grand scale, commissioning palaces, mosques and civic works that gave Bhopal a distinctive architectural character. But their refinement was equally visible in the texture of daily life at court — the etiquette, the hospitality, the sartorial standards — which set a benchmark for cultivated conduct across the region.

Their legacy complicates the familiar image of the Indian royal woman as primarily a figure of the boudoir and the zenana. The Begums were public rulers who understood that power, to be respected, must be visible — and that the visible expression of power is, above all, a question of taste. In this they were as modern as any of their contemporaries, and more influential than most.

THE ROYAL GALLERYS writes about these women because their influence is not a historical curiosity but a living current. The sarees, the jewellery, the embroidery and the architecture they commissioned are still being made, worn and admired; the standards of elegance they set still govern how Indian luxury presents itself to the world.

For the contemporary fashion house, jewellery maison and craft brand, this lineage is the source material of genuine authority — a provenance that cannot be invented, only inherited or carefully, respectfully engaged. We document it with the seriousness it deserves, and we connect the institutions that carry it forward with an international audience increasingly drawn to stories of real lineage rather than manufactured narrative. To place your work within that tradition, we invite you to explore our advertising page at /advertise.