For my 16th birthday, I got a backpack. Abhimanyu Alsisar got a 1953 United States Army Jeep. It was manufactured for the Korean War, given to Pakistan as military aid, captured by India in the 1962 war and bought by Abhimanyu's grandfather at auction. This is the type of thing that distinguishes the "prince" from those he sometimes calls "normal people".

Thirty-year-old, six-foot-tall Abhimanyu is the Raja of Khetri, a luxury hotelier, husband, marathon runner, and co-organizer of India's hippest music festival, Magnetic Fields, in Rajasthan -- though he'll be the first to remind you that his family, who've ruled over this area for nearly four centuries, are technically noble, not royal. The "prince" title has been applied by festivalgoers over the three days of electronic music and bacchanal held on his family's ancestral grounds, Alsisar Mahal, which for the rest of the year operates as a heritage hotel. He's also got a Jaipur haveli, a second palace in Ranthambore, and a third property currently under construction in Khetri. Bejewelled ear studs connote Abhimanyu's Rajput caste and sharp dimples accentuate a grin that often overtakes his face over the days he allows me into his kingdom. And into his sweet-16 present.

It was in that US Army jeep, barrelling over sand dunes at barely controlled speeds, that I was first confounded by Abhimanyu Alsisar. We were riding to the top of a dune for a photo shoot that Abhimanyu had choreographed. His guards were instructed on what clothes to wear and what spears to bring. The appropriate cars -- safari-modified Gypsies -- were carefully selected to provide a backdrop for the shoot, the timing of which would make maximum use of a setting sun. Snacks and drinks would be laid out. He double-checked every shot with the photographer, ensuring each angle had been exhausted in the hour-long shoot. Once satisfied, he began his transition from a conscientious nobleman to a kid playing with his toys.

Revving the jeep, Abhimanyu burst over an embankment and into adjacent pastureland. The next 20 minutes were spent chasing down quail and chinkara, mindless of whose fields we traversed, whirling in a mad rush of sand and brush and wildlife dashing for cover. As we flew down a steep dune, the Prince turned to me, and with that face-invading grin shouted, "Lisa Haydon thought this was wild."

As our jeep tour came to an end, I asked Abhimanyu if he would be allowed to tear across the fields of Alsisar with such abandon were he anybody but who he is.

"Who will say something to me?" he asks. I try to clarify: "I mean, if you were somebody else?" He shakes his head as if I've asked a very silly question. "No, no." he chuckles. "This is not allowed."

For the past couple of days, Alsisar Mahal has been buzzing with two busy camps: the bedraggled hipsters that make up the Magnetic Fields festival team and the army of local labour sawing, hammering and sanding every stage, bar and table into place. But the night before the second edition of the festival begins, the palace is nearly silent.

Sitting with Abhimanyu in the billiards room, local folk musicians supply the thin, mournful tone of an ektaara and the voice of a single singer, drifting on the crisp winter air of the palace courtyards. We're sipping whisky, surrounded by antique weapons that double as works of art. Nearby is the pelt of a tiger that his greatgrandfather reputedly killed with a sword. "I try and be very normal," says Abhimanyu, sporting crisply pressed linens, the obligatory pocket square and one of his countless pairs of trendsetting sunglasses, "but sometimes you can't be." No kidding.

"The whole region was scared of him. He was a very tough ruler. There was so much fear in people's minds that nobody did any crime in his days", says Abhimanyu about Chander Singh Ji.

"But that's who I am," he says. "You have to keep up with your persona. You have to live both lives. I try to bring them together." The two lives he leads are as the Prince and the Businessman -- and they're what he's trying to bring together at Magnetic Fields. It appeals to Abhimanyu's innate sense of luxury while also serving to one-up the fellow nobility. As a self-avowed patron of the arts, the festival gives him an opportunity to continue an age-old tradition of patronage, and as a hotelier, Abhimanyu looks at it as a chance to promote both the Shekhawati region and his three-hotel Alsisar chain.

"I had been to RIFF," Abhimanyu later recounts, "so I had that in mind." But Jodhpur's Rajasthan International Folk Festival, also held on palace grounds, is a far cry from the electronic dance party style of music fest he would help create. For Abhimanyu, Magnetic Fields provided a chance to pay homage to both Lakshmi and Saraswati. "I came up with this festival," Abhimanyu said, "to put our properties on the map."

Alsisar Mahal is as much a part of the festival as the eclectically throbbing music, the carefully curated light and visual design, where on one night I spot Abhimanyu on the side of the stage dancing the running man. After the secret late-night parties, its gardens and lawns are perfect places to recover from the madness, soaking in both the low rays of winter sun and the soothing indie electro sounds of the day stage.

But the whole thing came about as something of an accident. "A mutual friend invited me to go spend the weekend at her friend's palace in Alsisar, and I couldn't really say no to that," says Smita Singh, Magnetic Fields co-organizer, thinking back to spring 2013. "Six hours on a state highway later, I had lost all hope that this palace even existed. And then we turned a corner on a dusty track in this sleepy village and I was looking at Alsisar Mahal."

Sitting by the pool, the pair began discussing new uses for the palace. "We were talking," Abhimanyu explains, "and I said, 'Let's do a fashion show here'," but Smita told him it was too far from Delhi to pull a crowd. Smita then began to muse about potential venues for a music festival, suggesting that perhaps an old fort would do the trick. "He... cut me short quite abruptly," Smita recalls. "I thought I'd crossed the line... He is sort of a prince and I barely knew him. "And then he said, 'But we can do it here in Alsisar.' I was shocked. He had no idea what a music festival was."

Upon graduating from the prestigious Mayo College, Abhimanyu wanted to study fine arts at Baroda's MSU. Instead he pursued a degree in hotel management at the direction of his father, the retired army officer who saw the family through its darkest days, during the post- Independence period when the Indian government reclaimed much of the property of formerly feudal lords.

"You have to keep up with your persona. You have to live both lives. I try to bring them together."

"My mentor is my father. He is everything. He is my god," explains Abhimanyu. "When my father told me to get married, I said 'Okay'. I've never questioned my father ever in life." And just as Abhimanyu feels the weight of tradition, he also demands it from the generation that is yet to be born. "They should always feel the pressure of being born into a family like this... I am a Rajput. If I had married a girl who wasn't... My son wouldn't be a Rajput. It's all about breeding. You have to be a purebred to be a custodian to a house like mine. I hope my children will do the same as I did."

After university came practical training at the Taj Palace, Delhi, where Abhimanyu was inducted into a new world of work. "I used to work 14- or 15-hour [shifts]. When you work for a hotel, there are no timings. It's until the last person is gone... When you do your training, you do everything... I cleaned the WC, and the first time I did it, I thought, 'Oh, shit. What am I doing?' But it was a learning experience."

From the Taj Palace, Abhimanyu went to work at The Oberoi in Ranthambore, the city in which his family now own their grandest palace hotel. "It was the best experience ever. The amount of work I used to do!" he marvels, shaking his head. "I knew I didn't need the job, but I worked so hard so I could get everything out of it. I knew I wouldn't be there for even a year, but whatever months it was, I'd work like crazy."

The attention to detail shows at Alsisar Mahal. In contrast to many other immense Rajasthani heritage properties, every corner of every room is free of even a speck of dust, but more remarkable is the way that the opening of the hotel has proved a boon for artists and craftsmen in the area. The palace walls are decorated with finely hand-painted motifs, and the halls are often filled with the sounds of local performers and dancers on the palace payroll. Many of the artists are the sons of those who worked for Abhimanyu's father, the same feudal positions going back sixteen generations.

"They love me," Abhimanyu says of the artists, "because I've made them popular and I love music. They even sing songs for me now. They sing a song about all the great deeds of my ancestors and they name me as the one who loves music and art." The story is charming, but also mildly comical. Mere hours before, Abhimanyu had dismissively told me that such histories are rarely to be trusted: "You always write boasts about the king and how powerful he was when you're working for him... You have to be sceptical."

In the reception area of Alsisar Mahal, the durbar hall where Abhimanyu's forefathers once held court, the walls are festooned with oil portraits of generations of rajas. The tiger-slaying great-grandfather, I learn when I ask Abhimanyu to identify a favourite among them, is Chander Singh Ji. "The whole region," Abhimanyu recounts, "was scared of him. He was a very tough ruler. There was so much fear in people's minds that nobody did any crime in his days. Go," he challenges me, "ask anyone in the village about Chander Singh Ji."

"My mentor is my father. He is everything. He is my god".

When I do, the villagers confirm the iron-fisted cruelty of this man who died more than half a century ago.

As Abhimanyu regales me with tales of Chander Singh Ji, a half-dozen tragically hip twenty-somethings are scattered across the wide floor of the hall. They have come from India's tier-1 cities, garbed in Brooklyn dayglo and Bedouin chic. They are carefully stitching together the decorations that are to adorn Alsisar Mahal and its environs during Magnetic Fields.

"Come on," he says with a mischievous, dimpled smile, "none of them did any festivals... That was another era. I live both the lives. I live the life of luxury, but I work for it. They were rulers," he says, rings glinting in each ear. "I'm a businessman."