As she sits in the front seat of her SUV, she interrupts herself to talk about the places that rush past -- the lone tree with yellow flowers, the circuit house built by the Scindias, the temple revered by the Rawats.
"I had gone to meet the Rawat community in that village and climbed all the way up for a darshan," she says, pointing to the temple in the distance. "All 810 steps."
There are 1,300 villages in her constituency and she has been trying to impact her 1.45 million voters, working hard to improve her performance at the hustings. The November assembly election in Madhya Pradesh is something that she takes immense pride in, explaining how she led the charge in wresting 7 out of 8 assembly seats for the BJP in Guna, where her nephew is the powerful Congress MP.
"That was singularly one of the better achievements of my life," she says, and has been telling voters to brave the heat and the peak wedding season to come out and vote for the kamal (the lotus, the BJP symbol) on April 30.
Along with her, there are two more Scindias in the fray -- Jyotiraditya, of course, and Dushyant Singh, seeking a second term from Jhalawar in Rajasthan, which his mother represented in the Lok Sabha before she was deployed in Rajasthan politics.
There are two other family campaigners this election -- her niece Devyani, who canvassed votes for her mother-in-law Veena Singh, Arjun Singh's daughter, in Sidhi, and Yashodhara Raje's son Akshay Bhansali, an MTV producer in New York.
"Devyani has always been helping her father who has been a politician for the last 40 years in Nepal. From the time she was born, both sisters have been helping their father. The only difference here was that she was speaking in Hindi this time rather than Nepalese."
"Once my election gets over, all my people will go across and help Dushyant. It is a different constituency, a different state. But I will be there to help him. We are always there to help each other," she says.
What she is very concerned about is winning with a strong margin. An impressive margin of victory coupled with having your own party's government in the state can determine how an MP performs during the five-year tenure, she adds.
The campaign has been grueling, covering the vast expanse of her constituency in the summer heat. As the former royal carries her burden of history and legacy forward, another baptism of fire awaits her on April 30.
Image: Gwalior has 1.45 million voters; some based in the town, most scattered in villages in the arid heartland.
Also see: The crowds are here to see Devyani | India Votes 2009
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