Fifteen years ago, when automotive historian Manvendra Singh Barwani approached executives at the Oberoi Group with the idea of bringing a version of the world’s most prestigious car show to the lawns of their grand hotel on the shores of Lake Pichola in Udaipur, India , he was met with a flat no. “We don’t do that,” an Oberoi executive told him, explaining that the crowds and heavy vehicles could be ruinous for the hotel’s pristine grounds. But on a sunny morning this past February, eight 1930s Rolls-Royce limousines were arranged in a perfect semicircle at the gate to the Oberoi’s main courtyard, while an ultrarare 1935 Delahaye roadster was parked on the front lawns, and a 1938 BMW 328, flown in from Munich, sparkled at the edge of a turf-covered roadway built especially for the event.
Singh Barwani had won over the company’s current boss, Arjun Oberoi: The hotel had gone all in to host the latest edition of the Concours d’Elegance, which most famously occurs each August at Pebble Beach in Monterey, Calif. Outside of the clubby world of car collectors, many people remain unaware of India’s deep connection to automotive craftsmanship. From the 1910s through the 1940s, the maharajas were an obsessively acquisitive clan of car geeks, ordering Bentleys and Rollses by the boatload for their private caches.
Their unorthodox customization requests—hood-mounted searchlights for tiger-hunting expeditions, extra seats for their multiple wives—resulted in some o.