Afer spending his early childhood in India, Yeshwant Rao had been sent to England to be educated: frst at Charterhouse and then at Oxford. It is here, and on his travels to Europe and America, that he acquired his celebrated avant-garde taste. Under the infuence of friends like Eckart Muthesius, whom he had met at Oxford, he became an early patron of Modernism, including a collector of the works of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi. His wife, Sanyogita, to whom he had been married in 1924 at the age of 16, had also been educated in England by the Indore State so that she could prove a suitable companion for him. However, rather than preparing them for a life in India, this arrangement gave the royal couple a taste for the free, cosmopolitan life aforded by the European capitals, and a reluctance to return to the duty-flled and tradition-bound life in Indore. The young couple went on frequent tours abroad, becoming enthusiastic patrons of western artists, designers, jewellers and couturiers until the death of Maharani Sanyogita in 1937. However reluctant Yeshwant Rao was to stay in India, he did make a sustained efort to modernise his state, starting a series of public works including roads, hospitals, schools, a university, an airport and introducing modern laws in the labour sector. Manik Bagh, designed and built by Muthesius, was started in 1930 as a reminder of the avant-garde world of ideas and friends the Maharaja had lef behind in the west. It was an homage to a break from tradition, from a conformity of taste and politics and from the aged orient of his perception. It was thus both a celebration and a rebellion. Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Portrait of Maharani Sanyogita Devi of Indore, circa 1929 Š ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016.
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