History · the people
Who was Maharaja Ganga Singh?
- Title
- Maharaja of Bikaner
- House
- Rathore
- Kingdom
- Bikaner
- Reigned
- 1888 – 1943
The short answer
Maharaja Ganga Singh ruled Bikaner from 1888 to 1943 and turned a desert kingdom into a functioning modern state — a canal, railways, famine relief, and a camel corps that fought in China, Somaliland and Egypt. He signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as the only Indian among its signatories. He is the most consequential Rajput ruler of the twentieth century and almost nobody outside Rajasthan has heard of him.
He brought a river to the Thar
The Gang Canal opened on 26 October 1927, inaugurated by Lord Irwin: eighty-nine miles of lined channel carrying Sutlej water into the desert via the Ferozepur headworks. It took a tripartite agreement signed in 1920 to get past Bahawalpur's objections, and two engineers — A. W. E. Standley did the feasibility study, R. G. Kennedy the technical plan. Northern Bikaner is farmland because of it.
Versailles, precisely
The treaty's signature block lists two names for India: Ed. S. Montagu, the British Secretary of State for India, and Ganga Singh, Maharaja of Bikaner. So the accurate claim is that he was the only *Indian* signatory — not the only signatory for India, which is a different and false statement.
He also sat in the Imperial War Cabinet and attended the Imperial War Conference of 1917. Wikipedia's article on him says he was not a signatory; the treaty's own signature page says otherwise, and the treaty wins.
The Ganga Risala
He raised the camel corps in 1889. It served in the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, in Somaliland from 1902 to 1904, and in Egypt during the First World War, where it routed Turkish forces at the Suez Canal in 1915. It fought again in the Middle East in the Second World War and against Pakistani raiders in 1965, and the name survives inside the Border Security Force.
What he built
Lalgarh Palace, between 1902 and 1926, to Sir Samuel Swinton Jacob's Indo-Saracenic design in red Thar sandstone. Laxmi Niwas is its first phase, finished in 1902 — not a separate palace, whatever most sources say. The Shri Sadul Museum in its west wing holds what is described as the fourth largest private library in the world.
Where you can stand in it
Ganga Singh, in places you can visit
What the chronicles claim, and what the record shows
Rajput houses wrote their own histories, and those histories had a job to do. These are the claims worth knowing the status of.
Reign from 1887
Wrong. He succeeded his brother on 16 December 1888
The only signatory for India at Versailles
Wrong. The only Indian signatory — Montagu signed alongside him
DATES CHECKED · AUGUST 2026Dates from our own research dossiers. Where tradition and record disagree, we say which is which.
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