Elizabeth Hurley, actress-turned beachwear designer is planning the ultimate Indian wedding to Indian businessman, Arun Nayar on March 3, 2007. She has sent out pre-wedding invitation letters – and told her friends to keep a week free for what promises to be the most lavish ceremony of the year. The groom will arrive on a white horse, flanked by family members on lavishly caparisoned camels and elephants. The couple will exchange vows at a ‘house of flowers’ before retiring to a presidential suite complete with black marble swimming pool.

This hospitality is the best India can offer – what bride could ask for anything more? Rumours have it that Hurley has drawn up a list of special requirements for her marriage. They say she is determined to have the ultimate Indian wedding and wants only the best.

The ceremony is to take place, according to a manager at the hotel, at the Devi Garh, an 18th century palace and fort in Rajasthan that has been converted into one of the most exclusive boutique hotels in the world. Although it offers the last word in opulence – four staff members dressed in immaculate white for every suite, Indian haute cuisine, a traditional Ambassador car and chauffeur at hand for each guest – Hurley is said to be insisting on alterations.

The hotel says that Hurley, not content with its first-class reputation for cuisine, plans to fly out three specially hired Michelin starred chefs from London to create a series of menus for the wedding.

And wary of the notoriously erratic local electricity supply, she is said to have ordered that ‘silent generators’ be transported from New Delhi – a 14-hour drive away – to ensure the party is not disturbed by Devi Garh’s own generators, which make a barely audible groan when they start up.

The former Estee Lauder model will not get her own way on every detail, however. It is understood the Indian government bluntly refused to give air traffic control clearance for a fleet of helicopters to shuttle the star guests from Udaipur’s tiny airport. Instead an arduous, twisting road journey through the hills of the Aravalli Range awaits guests who are expected to include Sir Elton John and David Furnish, David and Victoria Beckham, and Pamela Anderson, as well as Hugh Grant, her one time boyfriend and his partner, Jemima Khan.

What impact the arrival of Hurley – who achieved instant fame in a Versace dress fastened together with safety pins at the 1994 premiere of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” – and her entourage will make on people in the nearby village of Derwala is anyone’s guess. On a typical day there, farmers sweat beneath the sun while sari-clad women fetch water from a stagnant holding tank.

There have been rumours in the British press of a coverage of the wedding in a leading celebrity magazine. As well as overrunning the Devi Garh, the wedding guests will apparently also take over suites at Udaipur’s famed Lake Palace, the setting for the James Bond movie “Octopussy,” and rooms in the city’s $1,000 a night Oberoi Udaivilas resort, the most expensive hotel in India.

But Hurley, who has a five-year-old son by Hollywood producer Steve Bing, will not stop there. Several newspapers have reported that she is planning two weddings and a total of 13 designer gowns.

The first ceremony, described as a small family affair, is set to take place imminently at Gloucestershire’s Grade II listed Barnsley House hotel, close to her 400-acre estate in Ampney Knowle. Hurley, who has a home in Fulham, a suburb of London, is a member of the ‘Gloucestershire set’ of celebrities that includes Kate Moss and Damien Hirst, who have second homes in the country.

The second ceremony will be at the Devi Garh. All 39 suites – each embellished with marble and semi-precious stones – have been arranged for 80 of her closest friends and relatives for an event in honour of Hurley’s future mother-in-law, the Indian textiles millionaire Gunar Nayar.

The manager of the hotel said that a wedding of such magnitude was unprecedented. If this wedding gets picked up by a magazine, these should be some dynamite wedding pictures.