Maharajah of Bikaner: India

Makers of the Modern World: The peace conferences of 1919-23 and their aftermath
By Hugh Purcell

Ganga Singh (1880-1943) was the 21st maharaja of his desert kingdom in Rajasthan and one of the last Indian princes to play an important part in the politics of the British Empire. Dashing, autocratic and a formidable public speaker, he was born to rule.  He is best known internationally for that iconic painting of the signatories to the Treaty of Versailles but he is best remembered at home as a ruler who supported the British Empire in two world wars while also leading the way towards an independent India.
He was a keen soldier who commanded his own camel corps called the Ganga Risala. Later he fought on the Western Front and in Egypt – the story of Indian soldiery in the Great War needs a new telling – and he became the first Indian general in the British Indian army. During the war he persuaded the maharajas (or rulers) to unite into a Chamber of Princes. As a result of this and his war record he was invited by Lloyd George to attend the Imperial War Conference in 1917 and then the Versailles Peace Conference two years later.
He played an active part. He persuaded the Conference to include India in the new League of Nations, quite an achievement as it was not an independent nation. Less successfully he tried to prevent the dismemberment of Turkey. Had he succeeded leads to one of the ‘what ifs?’ of history for Lloyd George might then have stayed in power and Great Britain been a very different country.


Hugh Purcell is a writer, documentary film producer and lecturer with a long-standing interest in India, the Raj and the First World War. He worked for many years producing history programmes for BBC radio and television. Prominent among them were The Roads to War, the obituary of Oswald Mosley and the BAFTA-winning American Civil War. His previous books include Fascism, The Spanish Civil War, Revolutionary War, a biography of Tom Wintringham, The Last English Revolutionary, After the Raj’ – the Last Stayers-On and the Legacy of British India and a biography of Lloyd George. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an FRSA. He has visited India continuously since 1964, and his partner runs a tour company specialising in India, and knows the Bikaner family. Hugh has filmed for the BBC in India and has taken tour groups round the sites of the Indian Mutiny.