Past resurrected

What emerged, at one level, was a mammoth automobile engineering challenge, requiring multidisciplinary expertise in restoration, craftsmanship, transfer of electrical and mechanical technologies and skills. As a metaphor, the meticulous restoration of Rolls-Royce GLK 21 could be read as a resurrection of the past. It was as if the time past and the present were being bridged to forge a new life. The living were now conversing with the past, searching archives and warehouses as if on a do-or-die mission, while the Rolls-Royce GLK 21 awaited its rebirth

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Is there life after death? After millennia of Vedic-Puranic teachings and learnings, the answer is definitely a resounding 'Yes'. Nothing dies; it changes form; nothing is born, it assumes new forms. What applied to human life applied equally to objects, both man-made and those bestowed by nature. At the Palace Motor Garage of the former Royal Family of Mewar in Udaipur, the rebirth of a 100-year-old Rolls-Royce is worth recounting a thousand times. It is akin to a modern Vedic saga where Maharanas, their Princes and clansmen engaged in an engineering battle, resurrecting not just a motor car but rescuing a legacy of prestige.

At the centre of the epic struggle was the 1924 Barker bodied Tourer 20 HP Rolls-Royce (chassis no. GLK 21) acquired by the State of Udaipur-Mewar in 1936. Shortly after Rolls-Royce GLK 21 arrived in the Palace Motor Garage, it was cannibalized and its engine removed for another Rolls-Royce, a favourite of the reigning Maharana Bhupal Singh. The Rolls-Royce GLK 21 was left abandoned, surrendered to the ravages of time, to put it more dramatically. It lay neglected in the Zenana Mahal (Palace for Royal Ladies) inside the City Palace of Udaipur for almost 60 long years. Was the Rolls forgotten, left for the dead? Had it lost its soul, reduced as it was into a physical heap of rust, dust and dismembered interiors?

Not so. In 1999 Shriji Arvind Singh Mewar, the 76th Custodian of the House of Mewar and chairman-managing trustee of the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation administering the City Palace Museum, asked the Palace Motor Garage to take full stock of Rolls-Royce GLK 21. Typical of a military-like operation, lists of available and missing parts were made; work required to restore it was listed, and restoration experts in India and the UK were contacted.