Gaekwads of Baroda

The house

Pilaji Gaekwad established Maratha authority in Gujarat in the 1720s, and the family held Baroda as one of the confederacy's four great houses. Baroda entered British protection early and retained an unusually large degree of internal autonomy, ranking as one of the five premier princely states.

Sayajirao III

Sayajirao Gaekwad III was adopted into the ruling family as a village boy of twelve and ruled for sixty-three years from 1875. His administration made Baroda a model state: compulsory and free primary education across the whole territory from 1906, decades before British India attempted it; a state library system built with advice from American librarians and among the first public library networks in Asia; a bank, a university, textile mills, and codified civil law.

He legislated against untouchability, child marriage and polygamy, and funded the education of B. R. Ambedkar, who studied at Columbia and the London School of Economics on a Baroda scholarship. Ambedkar's brief and humiliating period of employment in Baroda service afterwards, unable to find lodging because of his caste, is described in his own account and is a reminder of the distance between a ruler's policy and a society's practice.

Baroda acceded to India in 1949. The Laxmi Vilas palace, built in the 1890s and several times the size of Buckingham Palace, remains the family's residence.