SHE was a princess routinely described as one of the world's most beautiful women. Her irresistible magnetism charmed all among her friends were the Kennedy clan and Clark Gable and she was elected to the Indian parliament in the '60s with a record landslide of 192,909 votes out of 246,516 cast.

But when Gayatri Devi's celebrated life came to an end in July, a very public spat erupted in the Rajasthani royal house she presided over concerning how her fortune —estimated to be more than £200m — should be split.

The unseemly feud centres on the magnificent pink palaces of Jaipur, the state capital of Rajasthan, 300km south of Delhi. The last ruling maharajah, the polo-playing Man Singh II, had four sons by three wives. His complex love life has left long-running legal battles between kin. Dozens of cases have languished in the courts for decades.

However the death of Devi — the maharajah's last wife known as rajmata, or queen mother — has marked a turning point for the family. The row pits two of her stepsons, one of whom was her lawyer, against her grandchildren, who had been estranged from her and brought up in Thailand until they returned to India and became reconciled a few years ago.

With the air thick with allegations of fraud and forgery, the young royals took the unprecedented step of giving a news conference.

Devraj Singh, 21, and Lalitya Kumari, 24, children of Devi's late son Jagat Singh by his former wife, a Thai princess, said they were the legal heirs to their grandmother's estate and should inherit family property including shares in luxury hotels, forts, paintings, crown jewels, tiger-hunting lodges and polo grounds.

Although their father died without a will in London in 1997, the rajmata named them as heirs to her share of the royal fortune. However, the siblings' lawyer, DK Malhotra, said a plot had been uncovered to defraud the young aristocrats. Their share in the Jai Mahal palace hotel had dwindled from 99 per cent to seven per cent.

— The Guardian, London