Inside The 132-Year-Old Hyderabad Palace That Played Salman Khan's Home In Sikandar

NDTV

3 days ago

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Falaknuma Palace in Hyderabad, Telangana, was once one of the world's most coveted addresses.
The 132-year-old palace was completed in 1893, originally built by Nawab Viqar-ul-Umra.
Over the years, the palace has hosted multiple dignitaries from India and abroad.
When Princess Esra Jah received a phone call from her ex-husband in Hyderabad, she knew she could not let the request go unheard. Esra had been married to the 8th Nizam of Hyderabad, Mukarram Jah, and then divorced for three decades when Jah rang her up with a desperate cry for help. His palaces were in tatters. The slums were climbing up the walls of the Falaknuma estate. The mansion lay crumbling and he no longer had the might or the means to take it back to its former glory. And what former glory was he speaking of? That of a palace that floats between heaven and earth.
When you leave the city of Hyderabad and climb up the 2,000-foot Koh-e-toor Hill (named after Mount Sinai in Egypt), the serpentine road doesn't betray a glimpse of what lies at the end of it. The vehicles stop at the dot marked by the erstwhile Nizam's carriage.
You are made to enter Falaknuma through a metal detector and on the other side of the massive doors - the portal between earth and that juncture between earth and heaven you are about to see - you are transported to an era where excesses were celebrated. The colonnaded Falaknuma comes into view. You gasp. Above you, a slice of the moon nods in agreement: it is, indeed, an embodiment of its Urdu name, a mirror of the sky.
A Coveted Address
The Falaknuma Palace today is the last word in India's palace hotels. The Taj Group took over the painstaking restoration and spent a decade transporting it back to the era of the Nizams, under the zealous eye of Princess Esra Jah. Not one crystal out of place; not one chandelier astray. Looked at by Princess Esra, the story goes, the exterior walls of the palace were painted 15 times before the shade of the overcast Deccan sky could be achieved. It was the mirror of the sky, after all.
In 2010, Taj threw open the doors of Falaknuma for the world. You no longer had to be at least a viceroy to spend a night at one of the world's most coveted addresses. Location scouts followed soon after. Falaknuma became a recognised structure in movies from Mumbai to Madras.
Salman Khan, in his latest movie Sikandar, plays the King of Rajkot whose home Falaknuma doubles up as. The structure meets all regal requirements that a grand movie would want. Regal might actually be an understatement considering what the Falaknuma Palace holds within its sky-hued walls. But let's begin at the beginning.
Where It All Began
Nawab Sir Viqar-ul-Umra of the distinguished Paigah family of Hyderabad went on a trip to Europe. His travels convinced him that he wanted his home to reflect that European style, while housing the best of Hyderabad. So, in 1884, he laid the foundation stone of the Falaknuma Palace 609 metres above the city of Hyderabad, on the hillock we told you about. It took the Nawab nine long years to build and furnish the place.
It took a financial toll on the Nawab, but as is the norm with nawabs, Viqar-ul-Umra continued filling the palace in with the best of furniture and art and artefacts from all over the world.
In 1893, Falaknuma was complete.
A few years later, in 1897, the Nawab invited the 6th Nizam of Hyderabad, Nizam Mahboob Ali Pasha, to stay at the palace. The Nizam stayed for a week, which extended to a month, and Nawab Viqar-ul-Umra soon realised that it was a gamble he hadn't thought through. The Nizam loved Falaknuma. So, the Nawab "gifted" Falaknuma to him. The Nizam is said to have paid most of Falaknuma's Rs 4-million cost to the Nawab.
The Nizam spent the next 22 years stuffing Falaknuma with all the riches that came his way. Think statues and priceless ornaments from all corners of the world, British stained glass, Bohemian chandeliers, Chinese silk furnishings, thousands of rare books in its in-house library, a private telephone exchange, and a zenana where he banished all women who he spent a night with. The palace interiors became a reflection of its Nizam: ostentatious, whimsical, and lacking discipline.
A Curse
Then there was the cardinal flaw. Falaknuma was in the shape of a scorpion. Folklore attached a curse to that shape and the 6th Nizam drank himself to death at a young age. His heirs had similar fates marred by debt, drinks and destitution.
The 7th Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Bahadur, inherited Falaknuma from his father, the 6th Nizam. Osman Ali was the richest man in the world in the 1930s and 40s. The Nizam of the City of Pearls; his pearl collection is said to have filled an Olympic-size pool. He used the 400-carat Jacob Diamond as a paperweight and left piles upon piles of pearls by his bed. But the riches weren't to stay with Osman Ali. He did not much care for the palace either. It remained the guest house where the Nizams hosted royal guests. Falaknuma last hosted a formal guest in 1951, when India's President Dr Rajendra Prasad visited the palace.
Fall From The Firmament
Then, it fell into disrepair.
It was the time when the palace had passed on to the Crown Prince of Hyderabad, Mukarram Jah. Jah wasn't invested in anything Hyderabad. He was crowned the 8th Nizam, by then a ceremonial title at best, in 1967. The Nizams of Hyderabad had been stripped of their powers after fighting on the wrong side of the Indian Independence movement.
Mukarram Jah went to British military college in Sandhurst, England, and married Turkish beauty Esra Birgen. His marriage with Esra fell apart when he fell in love with an Australian outback. Jah became a sheep farmer. He had no interest in fighting the legal battle that he had inherited in the form of Hyderabad.
Falaknuma and Chowmahalla Palaces, part of his estate, were gasping for breath. That's when the Nizam dialled up his ex-wife, Esra Jah. It was 1996. Esra moved back to India to oversee the restoration of the two palaces.
The Taj Group of Hotels came on board and leased the palace from the Nizam's family. Work began on the Falaknuma and Taj agreed to foot the massive restoration bill. In 2005, Chowmahalla was done up and opened to the public. Falaknuma was a task Herculean. It wasn't going to be so easy to re-do the 93,970-sq-m palace to its better days.
Back To Glory
Esra Jah oversaw the restoration of Falaknuma, including the dyeing of a carpet 300 times to match the colour it originally was. Years of careful work took Falaknuma to the lost glory of the years when the Nizam would host parties, dine under the stars, and wait for his guests to marvel at this architectural marvel that floated between the heaven and the earth.
Today, the two-storied palace invokes sheer awe in visitors. When you enter the main building of the Falaknuma Palace, a cantilever staircase greets you. The stairs were so constructed that each step could be crafted out of one single slab of Italian marble. By the stairs are portraits of the owners of the palace who look at you in amusement and disdain, in equal measure.
The dining hall at Falaknuma houses the world's longest dining table. At 80 feet and with 101 chairs, it is made of seven pieces. The green leather chairs are all the same, except for the one the Nizam sat on. That one is three inches higher - the host wasn't your everyday host, after all. He was the Nizam of Hyderabad and Falaknuma had to reflect, along with the sky, that lineage too.
"I didn't do it for personal glory," said Princess Esra Jah in an interview to Architectural Digest, "but only to be able to give back to Hyderabad something of the unique culture the Nizams had created over generations. It upset me very much to see it go to ruin."
Well, her work worth of decades paid off. The palace that her husband ran to the ground is a mirror of the heavens once again. Reflecting the same Deccan sky.