奥斯本宫“印度风格”御前会议厅丨英国丨约翰·洛克伍德·吉卜林,拜·拉姆·辛格

Inside an ‘Indian-style’ Durbar Room at Osborne House, Queen Victoria's holiday home

For the style issue, we visit the Durbar room at the Osborne house, Queen Victoria’s holiday home, that remains a striking example of “Indian style” interiors in Britain.

Although every major city in India is dotted with British

colonial architecture

, only a handful of buildings were ever built in the “Indian style” in Britain. Perhaps the most fascinating of all those that survive is the Durbar Room at Osborne House. Situated on the Isle of Wight, the largest of the windswept Channel Islands, Osborne was bought by Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert in 1845 and remodelled as an Italian Renaissance palazzo, with Ionic Venetian windows and Tuscan-inspired towers.

For the most part, the interior is full of the usual gold-hemmed Victoriana that we might expect from Queen Victoria’s holiday home. But in the west wing of the building you will find Mughal jalis, Rajput chattris and a series of coffered muqarnas (decorative vaulting) inspired by the ceilings of Mount Abu. Leading into the room are portraits of prominent individuals ranging from the last Nizam of

Hyderabad

to Maharaja Duleep Singh—the last maharaja of

Punjab

who became Victoria’s godson. It’s a virtual who’s who of Victorian India.

Victoria was made the empress of India in 1876, and although she never actually visited India, she grew increasingly obsessed by the country in the subsequent years. “I have such great longing to go to India,” she wrote to her daughter in law after the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. “You may think we are crazy for saying this—but I can assure you I have been thinking of it—very much of late.” Victoria soon began learning Urdu from her “Munshi” Abdul Karim and in 1890 she commissioned an “Indian room” for Osborne House. Her son, the Duke of Connaught, had recently hired John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s father and director of Mayo School of Arts in Lahore, to build a Punjabi-style billiards room for Bagshot Park near Windsor and now Victoria herself wanted her own such room: an imperial Durbar Room for Britain.

Although it was Kipling who got the contract, the true mastermind of the Durbar Room was his protégé Bhai Ram Singh, a fascinating Indian architect of the 19th-century who Victoria described as an “intelligent, pleasant, nice man”. Born in the town of Gujranwala, Punjab, Singh had come to Kipling’s notice after repairing the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar’s piano at the age of 13, and in later decades he would help to redefine Punjabi architecture, designing the Lahore Museum, Amritsar’s Khalsa College, and Peshawar’s Islamia College among others.

The Osborne commision would be his first time on British soil, however, and Bhai Ram Singh set out for England in January 1891. He was given a stipend of £5 a week and over the next two years he constructed one of the most intriguing rooms in Britain, complete with teak torans, Agra “jail” rugs, and Solanki-inspired papier-mâché. The peacock overlooking the fireplace took over 500 man-hours and 26 craftsmen to build. The result was a masterpiece and Victoria hailed the new durbar as “unique in Europe”. Perhaps most intriguing of all, however, was the way that it began a new trend in British architecture of adding Indian interiors to British country houses.

In the following years, the “Indian style” swept Britain, with Punjabi interiors added to Elveden Hall in Suffolk, and a new series of Indian rooms added to the Hotel Cecil in London. For a brief moment, Indian architecture found fertile ground in the very heart of the British Empire.