Sheesh Mahal, Patialaਸ਼ੀਸ਼ ਮਹਿਲ, ਪਟਿਆਲਾ

Where is Sheesh Mahal, Patiala?

Sheesh Mahal stands in the Old Moti Bagh grounds of Patiala, behind the Moti Bagh Palace, facing its own artificial lake. From across the water the view takes in the whole composition at once: the pale three-storey palace, a round watchtower at each end of the lake, and the iron suspension bridge that leaps between them. It is the most picturesque royal building in Patiala, and the one most visitors photograph first.

Who built the Palace of Mirrors?

Sheesh Mahal was built in 1847 by Maharaja Narinder Singh, who ruled Patiala from 1845 to 1862 and was remembered as a great patron of art and literature. He chose much of the palace's design and decoration himself, and he raised it as a place where the artists, poets and scholars of his court could work and be seen. The building mixes European and Mughal manners: a formal, symmetrical palace front of arched windows and domed corner towers, dressed in the pale plasterwork of a Punjabi royal house. Behind it in his day lay forest, terraces, gardens and fountains, a pleasure ground at the edge of the city.

Narinder Singh's Patiala was a court that collected talent the way other courts collected horses. Painters from the Kangra hills and Rajasthan, poets, musicians and scholars all found patronage there, and Sheesh Mahal was built partly as their stage: a residential palace, but also a place designed for expression, where art was not decoration added afterwards but the reason the rooms existed. That is why the palace, for all its mirror glitter, feels intimate rather than grand: it was made for evenings of poetry and music beside the water, not for armies or durbar crowds.

Mirrors, murals and the medal gallery

The palace takes its name from one glittering section where coloured glass and mirror mosaic cover the walls, turning lamplight into a kaleidoscope. Around it, walls and ceilings carry floral designs and frescoes painted by artists brought from Kangra and Rajasthan, their subjects drawn from literature, mythology and legend, including the love poetry of the Geet Govinda. The palace now works as a museum. One gallery displays objects of Tibetan art, especially metal sculpture. Another, the medal gallery, holds the extraordinary collection of medals, decorations and orders gathered by Maharaja Bhupinder Singh from countries across the world, among them England, Austria, Russia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Thailand, China and Japan. His son, Maharaja Yadvindra Singh, gifted this collection to the Punjab Government Museum.

The lake, the watchtowers and the Lakshman Jhula

The artificial lake in front of the palace, the Banasar tank, is part of the design, not an accident of the grounds. A watchtower stands at its north end and another at its south, and joining them runs a suspension bridge modelled on the famous Lakshman Jhula at Rishikesh. The bridge also connects to the Banasar Ghar, a repository where the maharajas kept stuffed animals from their hunts. Standing on the far bank, with the palace doubled in the water on a still day, it is easy to see why the court came here to escape the formal rooms of the Qila across the city.

Visiting Sheesh Mahal today

Beyond the two famous galleries, the museum rooms hold a notable collection of paintings and sculpture gathered by the court, and the grounds keep something of the old pleasure garden: lawns, mature trees and the long water frontage. Honesty requires one qualification: like many of Patiala's royal buildings, parts of the palace show signs of neglect, and not every room is open. What survives, though, survives in concentration: mirror work, murals, medals and lake architecture within a few hundred metres of each other, in a way no other Punjab palace quite matches.

The museum keeps daytime hours, 10 AM to 5 PM, and is closed on Mondays. Most visitors come for the mirror work and the medal gallery, then walk the lake bank for the classic view of the palace and towers. One warning for the confused: Patiala has two mirror palaces, because a smaller Shish Mahal also survives inside Qila Mubarak. The famous one, the palace on the lake, is this Sheesh Mahal at Moti Bagh. Pair both buildings in one day and you see the two poles of Patiala's royal life, the fortress where the state began and the pleasure palace of its most artistic king.