India’s Living Maharajas: The Royal Dynasties Still Standing

India abolished its princely states in stages between 1947 and 1971, and the 26th Constitutional Amendment finally stripped away titles, privy purses, and any remaining legal recognition of royal status. On paper, there has not been a maharaja in India for over half a century. In practice, more than five hundred former ruling families are still very much present, running heritage hotels out of their old palaces, sitting in Parliament and state assemblies, managing trusts that fund temples and schools, and in a few cases quietly disputing who actually gets to hold the title their ancestors once ruled by. Here is where several of India’s best known royal dynasties stand today.

Jaipur: A Polo Playing King And A Politician Mother

Maharaja Sawai Padmanabh Singh became the twelfth Maharaja and head of the Kachwaha Rajputs in 2011, inheriting the title from his grandfather Bhawani Singh at the age of twelve. Now in his mid twenties, he has built a genuine international reputation as a polo player, ranked among the sport’s most accomplished names with close to a hundred titles to his credit, alongside managing the family’s heritage properties and cultural institutions. What sets the Jaipur royal family apart from most others on this list is how directly the next generation has moved into public life. Padmanabh Singh’s mother, Princess Diya Kumari, sits as Deputy Chief Minister of Rajasthan for the Bharatiya Janata Party, having built a political career of her own well beyond the family’s ceremonial role. His grandmother, Padmini Devi, remains the titular Rajmata. Between the polo circuit and the state assembly, the Jaipur royals have found a way to stay visible in two very different Indias at once.

Jodhpur: The Man Who Owns The World’s Largest Private Residence

Maharaja Gaj Singh II has led the Rathore royal family of Jodhpur since 1952, when he inherited the title at the age of four following his father’s death in a plane crash. He still resides at Umaid Bhawan Palace, a sprawling art deco residence that ranks among the largest private homes on earth, part of which the family has run in partnership with the Taj Group as a working hotel since the 1970s, most famously as the venue for Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas’s 2018 wedding. The family’s approach to modern relevance has leaned heavily on sport and hospitality rather than politics, and his daughter Shivranjani Rajye now runs the Jodhpur Girls Polo team, extending the family’s long association with the sport into a new generation.

Udaipur: A Family Still Working Out Who Wears The Turban

Mewar offers the most complicated succession story on this list, and one that has played out publicly and sometimes acrimoniously in recent years. Maharana Bhagwat Singh’s two sons, Mahendra Singh and Arvind Singh, spent decades disputing who held the true headship of the family after their father’s death in 1984, with Arvind Singh controlling the City Palace and its associated hotel business while Mahendra Singh maintained his own claim to the title. Both men have since died, Mahendra Singh in November 2024 and Arvind Singh in March 2025, and the dispute has passed directly to their sons. Vishvaraj Singh Mewar, Mahendra’s son and a sitting BJP legislator from Nathdwara, was crowned head of the family through the traditional line in late 2024, while Lakshyaraj Singh Mewar, Arvind’s son, was installed as the 77th custodian of the City Palace itself weeks later, backed by the charitable foundation and hotel business his father built. Both men currently use royal titles, and the City Palace has, at points, restricted the other branch’s access to family rituals held there. It is a rare, very public example of what happens when a title carries genuine commercial and cultural weight but no legal enforcement mechanism behind it.

Mysore: From Adopted Heir To Member Of Parliament

The Wadiyar dynasty’s current head, Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar, took an unusual route to the throne. Born outside the immediate royal family, he was adopted by Pramoda Devi Wadiyar following the death of her husband, Maharaja Srikantadatta Wadiyar, and became the 27th Maharaja of Mysore in 2015. He has since built his own political career, winning the Mysuru Lok Sabha seat for the BJP in 2024 and now sitting as a Member of Parliament while continuing to lead the family’s cultural institutions, including its associations with the historic Mysore Dasara festivities that the family still helps oversee each year.

Gwalior: A Union Minister At The Head Of The House

Jyotiraditya Scindia leads the House of Scindia, one of the wealthiest former royal families in the country, while serving as a Union Cabinet Minister in the current BJP government after a widely reported switch from the Indian National Congress in 2020. His family’s story runs directly through some of modern India’s most consequential political figures, his grandmother Vijaya Raje Scindia and aunts Vasundhara Raje and Yashodhara Raje Scindia all built substantial political careers of their own, making the Scindias arguably the most politically embedded of any former ruling family still active today.

Baroda: Custodian Of The World’s Largest Private Home

Samarjitsinh Gaekwad holds the titular headship of the Gaekwad family of Baroda, whose Laxmi Vilas Palace in present day Vadodara is widely cited as the largest private residence on the planet, several times the size of Buckingham Palace. The family’s wealth today runs through real estate, trusts, and the palace’s own commercial ventures rather than any political office, a quieter model of continuity than the Scindias or Wadiyars have chosen, but no less firmly rooted in the original Maratha era fortune the dynasty built.

Travancore: A Title Passed Through The Mother’s Line

The Travancore royal family follows one of the more unusual succession systems among India’s former ruling houses, a matrilineal tradition known as Marumakkathayam under which the title passes through the female line rather than father to son. The current titular Maharaja, Moolam Thirunal Rama Varma, took on the role in 2013 following the death of his uncle Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma, and serves as managing director of the trading firm Aspinwall Ltd while also holding the hereditary position of head trustee of the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, home to what remains the largest temple treasure ever documented anywhere in the world.

Bikaner: A Champion Shooter Carries The Line

Princess Rajyashree Kumari, an Arjuna Award winning shooter with an accomplished international competitive record, stands as the current heir of the Bikaner royal family, one of the few instances on this list where a woman holds that position directly rather than through a male relative’s title. The family continues to operate Lalgarh Mahal, their early twentieth century palace, as a heritage hotel, and Rajyashree Kumari’s own athletic career has given the family a very different kind of public profile than the polo circuits and political offices that dominate most other former royal houses.

Indore: A Dynasty Now Led Through Its Daughters

The Holkar dynasty of Indore has also passed its titular headship through the female line since 1961, when Usha Devi Holkar succeeded her father, Yashwant Rao Holkar II. Her brother, Richard Holkar, has become internationally known in his own right for restoring Ahilya Fort on the banks of the Narmada and turning it into one of India’s most distinctive heritage properties, work that has done as much to keep the Holkar name culturally relevant as any formal title has.

What “Royal” Actually Means In India Today

None of these titles carry legal weight, and none of these families exercise any formal governing authority. What they still hold, in varying degrees, is genuine cultural capital, working palace hotels, temple trusteeships, polo teams, national sporting records, cabinet portfolios, and in Mewar’s case, an active and unresolved argument over who gets to sit where during a family ritual. It is a strange kind of afterlife for a system India formally ended in 1971, neither fully vanished nor remotely restored, surviving instead through business, sport, religion, and, increasingly, electoral politics. If it has left you curious about the palaces themselves rather than just the people who still carry their names, Real Shee Power’s guides to Udaipur’s palace culture, the best royal palace stays across Rajasthan, and Jaipur’s own royal landmarks are a good place to see where several of these families’ stories are still being lived out today, one heritage suite at a time.