Avant-garde Desires

Yeshwant Rao Holkar II's tryst with modern art, sartorial experiments, and the Art Deco design.

- UPASANADAS

Hair slicked back, a young maharaja smiles to himself as he attempts to light a cigarette, waiting for Man Ray to finish photographing him. An image of candid poise, the double platinum links of a Cartier Tank watch almost hide away the dial, adorning his left hand daintily, while on his right hand is a ring designed by the French jeweller Raymond Templier—the only two pieces of jewellery on the young Yeshwant Rao Holkar II. “Minimalism, avant-garde, modernism, and simplicity,” notes art historian Géraldine Lenain, the author of The Last Maharaja of Indore, an upcoming book on the life and times of the maharaja. “That was his chic.” 

Ray had been introduced to the maharaja by the latter’s new-found friend Henri-Pierre Roché. “The Maharaja of Indore came to the studio to be photographed,” he writes in his autobiography. “Also in Western clothes— sack suits and formal evening dress.” By the roaring twenties, Paris had become a shopping destination for the affluent, which included Indian royalty who were spending extended amounts of time abroad—Gayatri Devi recalled her mother placing orders for mousseline de soie nightgowns in Paris before her wedding, while Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala would enter the House of Worth every time he was in the city.