India’s royal families were known for their bizarre wealth spending. Let’s take a look at some of the things they did.
Maharani Indira Devi of Cooch Behar, British India (1892-1968)
She was a big fan of Italian shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo. She once ordered a whopping 100 pairs of shoes from him, some of them even encrusted with diamonds!
Maharaja Sawai Madho Singh II (1862-1922)
The highly pious Hindu King took two giant sterling silver vessels on his trip to England. He had them created by melting 28,000 silver coins.. Each vessel measured 5.2 feet in height and 340 kg in weight, with a capacity of 4000 liters. He wouldn’t drink foreign water, so he filled the vessels with Holy Water (“Ganga Jal”).
Maharaja Jai Singh of Alwar (1882-1937)
He ordered a fleet of Rolls Royce cars as garbage trucks.
Do you know the story behind using Rolls Royce as for cow and buffalo dung? Apparently Rolls Royce insulted this King when he went abroad and really liked the car and wanted to purchase it. He wasn’t dressed in a thousand jewels but Indian clothes, though they might have been lavish as well.
But given that he wasn’t dressed in suit and all, he was taken lightly as just another brown Indian first time in that country. He was told that the company chose their customers not the other way around.
So what he did was.. actually place order for like 4 of them (could be less or more like 3 or 5) on reaching India and ordered the servants to use it to dump animal excreta. Then they apologized and requested him to stop it as it was a huge tarnish on their brand.
Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala (1872-1949)
The last Emperor of Kapurthala City in Punjab, Maharaja Jagatjit Singh loved his Louis Vuitton bags so much that he bought as many as 60 LV trunks for his travels.
Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV of Mysore (1884-1940)
He was the 7th richest person in the world then. He ordered a Rolls Royce for his servants to protect them from the heat. The Wadiyars bought the city of Bengaluru from the British for Rupees 3,00,000.
Mir Osman Ali Khan of Hyderabad (1886-1967)
The Nizam used the million-dollar 185-carat Jacob diamond, which is the 5th largest diamond in the world, as a mere paperweight.
Abundance of a commodity loses its value, same goes with money.
