The durbar hall of Jai Vilas Palace Gwalior was built with these massive glass chandeliers.
It’s architect Michael Filose, popularly known as Mukhel Sahib, saw to it that most of the things in the palace matched the durbar hall in scale and splendour, and nowhere else is his propensity for the grandiloquent more in evidence than in the crystal chandeliers he ordered for the #durbar hall from Vienna. The two main ones, which are very nearly a pair, are said to be the largest ever made, with the possible exception of the one which hangs in the #Czar’s Winter Palace outside Moscow.

The story is told that, when the time came for him to hang these chandeliers with their combined weight of nearly six tons from the ceiling of the hall, engineering experts feared that the roof might collapse. Mukhel #Sahib rose to the occasion and carried out a practical demonstration to test the strength of his roof. He constructed a broad wooden ramp from the ground level to the top of the roof, and coaxed a dozen #elephants up the ramp and on to the roof. These elephants who, between them, weighed at least twice as much as the chandeliers, were made to go round and round the top of the roof for several days. If it could sustain that sort of pounding, #Mukhel Sahib argued, it would surely hold the weight of his Viennese chandeliers. It did, and still does.

The larger of the #chandeliers holds 248 lamps, and when they and the pedestal and wall lamps are lit, according to one writer their effect is like stepping into a petrified waterfall’ with the icy-blue and #gold of the room and the lights reproduced infinitely on the wall mirrors strategically placed on the opposite walls.

By sshashank404