Facing the media earlier this week at the preview for “Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts,” Matthew Teitelbaum, the director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario, sounded as much like a welcoming foreign diplomat as the head of one of the country's largest art institutions.

With this vast, well-designed exhibition of the cultural riches left behind by dozens of Indian dynasties from a century before British rule, through colonialism and all the way into independence, “we're into something new, with a different spirit,” Teitelbaum said.

“We thought this exhibition could be a signal of a new Art Gallery of Ontario,” he added, “one where different communities in Toronto could feel at home. We've created something here where new communities, young and old, can come together and understand something about the spirit of diversity.”

And there it was: In his eloquently amiable way, the gallery director had deftly stickhandled the elephant in the room, so to speak: That the AGO hadn't found common ground with the GTA's fast-changing demographics, and that Maharaja, a crisply planned import from the esteemed Victoria and Albert Museum in London chock-full of true cultural treasures, could at least be part of the remedy.

The show's major corporate sponsors, who also spoke at the event, clearly agree on the merits of reaching out to the burgeoning South Asian communities, and so the Maharaja is something of a no-brainer for the AGO: A highly professional, fully-fleshed out 200-piece exhibition mounted by one of the world's great museums tailor-made to score points with a community the gallery had already identified as underserved by their programming.

Other museums in Canada had wanted it, but Teitelbaum was in before the V&A had even finalized its own exhibition, agreeing in principle, over a friendly cup of tea in London back in 2007 that the AGO would be the Maharaja's exclusive Canadian partner.

But the show presented unique challenges for the gallery. Teitelbaum convened an advisory committee composed of members of the South Asian cultural community, and the hand-wringing began in earnest: On a blog accompanying the Maharaja's main site at AGO.net, the deliberations were subject to an almost confessional openness: It detailed committee worries over everything, including what language to set their billboards in — just Hindu, Urdu and Punjabi, or would that offend the Tamil and Bengali communities? — to deal with what, internally, was starting to be seen as a fatal disconnect.

“The AGO voices around the table recognize that minorities still don't feel like the AGO is theirs,” blogger and committee member Piali Roy wrote. What had begun as a brainstorming session for a catchy slogan had become institutional soul-searching: “So the question shifted — how important is it to a minority community to see themselves in a mainstream space? Pretty darned important is a paraphrase of the answer.”

The really big question: How to make an appeal, or better yet, a “home” of an institution for a disconnected community, without it seeming like pandering or tokenistic?

In this, Maharaja serves up the ideal solution: Make it really, really good. After seemingly endless diversity-friendly blather — most of it the predictable corporate-speak from sponsors like Rogers and Scotiabank; Teitelbaum's remarks were, to my ear, utterly sincere — we finally got to see the show, and not a second too soon.

For all the feelgood multi-culti rhetoric that preceded it, Maharaja quickly erases those sensitivities and preconceptions with the arresting quality of its artifacts, but just as much, its staging: The exhibition begins in a the reconstructed corridor of a royal palace, low Hindu music rumbling softly through a space dappled with the shifting, golden glow of simulated equatorial sunlight filtered through branches.

The first piece, at the end of that corridor, is an otherworldly stunner: An eight-foot-tall painting, watercolour on cloth, of Amar Singh II of the western Indian region of Mewar, rendered in delicate pale pastels. It's a hell of a teaser — an esthetic confection, really, before delving into the meat of the exhibition, which are remarkable objects built into the service of an ultimately sad narrative: Indian royalty withering from absolute rulers to over-privileged puppets of their colonial masters.

While the objects delight, the narrative drives the viewer through with quietly coercive force: In the first room — notably spare, fresh and modern for its opulent subject matter, with bare concrete floors and a black and white archival film projected on adjacent walls — we're introduced to the Maharajas' procession obsession — literally, the staging of mass, pageantry-filled parades as a show of authority and force.

One piece, Procession of Krishnaraja Wadiyar Through Mysore, 1825-1830, seems to go on for miles, and in real life, likely did; it's an unfurled scroll painting, some 30-plus feet long, depicting hundreds of figures — peasants, soldiers, royalty, elephants — and, tellingly, an outsize British soldier looming over them near the end.

Other rooms focus on the cushy daily lives of the Maharajas, from their typically noble predilections towards hunting, warfare, lounging and sex, to their observance of their various faiths (they were predominantly Hindu, but also Sikh and occasionally Muslim). This is done through dozens of intricate, lovely small watercolours and drawings, and a conspicuous clustering of rugs, pillows and tapestries; but this is a show less about objects than a master narrative, as it were, of a monarchical system slowly being eroded.

The trajectory is mildly pathetic: For an assured, opulent ruling class confidently preserving the culture of their fiefdoms through often-exravagant patronage, the Maharajas were well and truly duped: The British first arrived as supplicants, then businessmen, and finally rulers, subsuming aspects of the Maharajas' culture and ritual to assert their own authority.

One stunning room details “The Raj,” the period of British colonial rule from 1858 to 1947. It's summed up neatly with a colossal oil painting by Roderick Mackenzie, of an outsized procession (even by Indian standards) celebrating the coronation of Edward VII in central Delhi in 1903, two years after he took the throne. A similar procession in Delhi celebrating Queen Victoria's confirmation as India's ruler is no less patronizing in its appropriation.

The British took control via the expedient route, declaring themselves the rulers' ruler and letting the Maharajas maintain dominion over their kingdoms so long as they reported to the top. Slowly, though, over ensuing decades, the Maharajas' authority seemed to fade through attrition, or sheer laziness, and the final room, The Modern Maharaja, suggests this whether it means to or not.

Maharajas like Yeshwant Rao Holkar II cavorted in New York and Paris in the '20s with the likes of Man Ray and Cecil Beaton, ingratiating themselves into cultural scenes with the cash-greased ease of the idle rich. Without any governing power — or, apparently, interest — self-indulgent extravagance seemed all that remained of a formerly staunch ruling system that yielded extraordinary cultural treasures and traditions as some (though not all) became entranced by the burgeoning popular cultures of the west.

Given that the arguable centrepiece of the AGO exhibition is the saffron-coloured 1934 Rolls-Royce cabriolet built for the Maharaja of Rajkot, it's hard to see that the Maharajas ended up as much more than idle, well-kept toadies for British rule (Indira Gandhi must have thought as much in 1971, when she made them officially commoners and ordered them to pay large taxes on their lands).

But ultimately, the Maharaja show dissects what one culture can do to another when it adopts a paternalistic stance that strips it of its sense of purpose. This is more their story — British and Indian — than ours, but that's the thing about colonialism: it never stops unravelling, as the spawn of both coalesce and intermingle nowhere so much as right here — or so the AGO hopes. For once, it seems not only a good guess, but a gentle, generous nudge in the right direction.

Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts, opens Saturday at the AGO and continues to April 3, 2011.