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The Royal Indian Car Conclave on the Beach!
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Given India's place in the global scheme of things, and with a booming automotive industry, it was always when and not if for an event such as the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance to have a class for cars of the Maharajas. Today and tomorrow, on the hallowed turf at Pebble Beach in California, we will have no less than 16 to 18 of the greatest Maharaja cars assembling together to celebrate both the vain and the glorious, a bit of the former and quite a load of the latter
1928 Rolls-Royce Phantom 17EX – Alexander Schaufler, Austria
This is surely one of the greatest cars with not just a royal Indian provenance but also one of the milestone cars in Rolls-Royce history. It was one of the handful of experimental cars built by the British firm (hence the EX in the model designation) as it began exploring an all-new model to supercede the Silver Ghost. Maharaja Haris Singh Bahadur who was a Rolls-Royce aficionado was sufficiently impressed enough to prevail upon the firm to sell it to him. It was against RR policy to sell any of their experimental models but then when one didn’t displease a patron who had purchased more than 25 cars from Rolls-Royce in a short span of time!
1910 Brooke Swan Car & 1919 Cygnet - The Louwman Museum, Holland
They said that our royals displayed idiosyncracies in varying degree but this surely must have taken the cake as well as the biscuit! Sadly for those Brits who harped on this line of thought the joke was on them for the car was created by an eccentric Scotsman – Scotty Mathewson who resided in Calcutta. He brought the Brooke 20/30H.P. chassis and had it clothed in a theatrical fashion with wooden coachwork replete with gold-lined filigree work and a swan beak on the bonnet. The nostrils of the swan would belch steam and hiss whenever the car had to negotiate traffic, frightening the bhadralok! This car was used as the personal runabout of Mathewson until the Maharaja of Nabha chanced upon it. Having acquired this he also commissioned his garage personnel to build a smaller replica for his children to drive in the palace grounds. Thus came into being the Cygnet, a smaller scaled down rendering of the Brooke but now with electrical power to drive it. Mention must be made that this car was built in India, in Calcutta no less! Both cars along with a Rolls-Royce were smuggled out of India in the 1990s and after being auctioned are now displayed in the large Louwman Collection in Holland.
1930 Mercedes-Benz 27/140/220PS Type SS Sport – Mercedes-Benz Classic
Truly the surprise among the Maharaja cars at Pebble Beach is this glorious car of which very few were made. It had a massive 7.1-litre engine, the famous M 06 unit designed by none else than Dr. Ferdinand Porsche and also used in the fearsome SSK sports racers. This car was one of the most handsome and powerful sports cars of its day, being able to deliver crushing performance with handling to match. No wonder the young performance-seeking Maharaja Hari Singh Bahadur fall for its charms and prowess!
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John
You do realize that this has as much to do with India's automotive industry as it does the Nigerian auto industry? Which of these cars, precisely, is Indian? If anything, I would castigate these rich spoiled dilettantes for not having encouraged coach and motor building in their fiefdoms. At that time, in the UK, cars like Alvis, Hillman, Morgan and dozens of others were being hand-built, and incrementally improved. Elsewhere in Europe, hundreds of small manufacturers were hand-casting engines and gearboxes. Mass manufacturing was not a survival requirement at the time. A corollary effect was the development of engineering ancillaries and expertise. India, unfortunately, only had these spoiled rich b*tches playing at being Englishmen, buying Rolls-Royces and Bugattis and killing off India's wildlife while their subjects lived off a handful of rice a day.
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Chandrachur
Great article
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