Not since 1950, when the sister of the previous Maharajah of Jodhpur was married, has this Rajasthani fort city undergone such a nuptial hullabaloo.

The lawns have been plucked, swept and rolled. The chefs and the Veuve Clicquot have been flown in from Europe. Scenes reminiscent of the glory days of the maharajahs were being played out around Jodhpur yesterday as Elizabeth Hurley and Arun Nayar began their traditional Indian wedding celebrations.

The couple had already held a civil ceremony in Gloucestershire on Friday, followed by a reception at Sudeley Castle on Saturday, and then more parties in Bombay on Monday and Tuesday. But, lavish as they were, those festivities pale in comparison with the three-day celebrations that began last night at the Umaid Bhawan Palace – the Maharajah’s magnificent Art Deco residence. “It’s exhausting,” said Shobha Kanwar Baiji, the 88-year-old great-great-aunt of the Maharajah, Gaj Singh II. “But it’s nice to see the palace full again.”

The wedding party has taken over the entire Umaid Bhawan, which was the largest private residence in the world when it was completed in 1943 but has since been partly converted into a hotel. The bride and groom are occupying a $4,000-a-night suite, which has also hosted the Prince of Wales and Sir Mick Jagger, while 120 of their guests are staying in the hotel’s remaining rooms.

At least a hundred more guests are being put up at other hotels and ferried through the streets of Jodhpur in a fleet of 80 cars, six buses and three of the Maharajah’s vintage Cadillacs. The festivities began last night with a traditional Indian wedding ceremony in a white marble gazebo on the front lawn of the palace, surrounded by 400 guests, mostly British and Indian.

Today the couple will host a poolside lunch party at the 17th-century Balsamand Lake Palace, another of the Maharajah’s properties. Next on the schedule is a four-hour drive to an evening party at the recently restored 12th-century Nagaur Fort, which is 90 miles (145km) from Jodhpur and also belongs to the Maharajah.

The climax will be a wedding dinner tomorrow evening on the ramparts of the Meherangarh Fort, the former residence of the maharajahs, which was built in 1459 on a hill overlooking Jodphur. Camels, acrobats, puppeteers, dancers, jugglers and singers will entertain the guests as they walk up the steep slope to the fort, where the current Maharajah was crowned, at the age of 4, in 1952.

The wedding is in some ways a throwback to the days when the maharajahs, granted autonomy in exchange for allegiance to Britain, enjoyed fabulous wealth and rubbed shoulders with European aristocracy.

The Maharajah is not a close friend of Ms Hurley or Mr Nayar, the founder of a software company, and is away in New York. So his decision to host them is as much about promoting Jodhpur as doing a favour for friends. The extravagant wedding has raised eyebrows in this city of 850,000 people where dozens of beggars live in squalid tents just outside the Umaid Bhawan. But most people seem to regard the event as good for business.

Vikram Bachawat, 25, who runs a shop selling sarees, turbans and other textiles in Jodhpur’s old city, said: “I’m not sure who Liz Hurley is, but she is welcome in my shop.”

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