Place · Italianate nawab palace · India
Hazarduari, Murshidabad
Also known as Hazarduari, Hazarduari — Murshidabad, Murshidabad, Nawabi palace of a thousand doors
The 1837 Hazarduari Palace at Murshidabad in West Bengal — the thousand-door Italianate palace built by British architect Colonel Duncan MacLeod for Nawab Nazim Humayun Jah (ruled 1824-1838) of the Bengal Nawab-ate. The three-storey palace has 1,000 doors (914 real, 86 false, intended to confuse intruders) and 114 rooms. The palace was commissioned to house the Nawab's library, armoury and ceremonial court. The 1837 completion marked the Nawab-ate's architectural peak under British paramountcy — Humayun Jah's wife Rais-un-Nissa was present at the inauguration. The palace now houses the Nizamat Museum with 20,000+ artifacts including the Nawab's collection of weapons, paintings, Chinese porcelain, and the massive Krishna chandelier. ASI protection since 1985. The adjacent Imambara (1848 by Nawab Nazim Mansur Ali Khan Feradun Jah) is the largest in India.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 24.186, 88.269
Connections (3)
- Succession in timeKolkata: Fort William & the Maidan
Hazarduari was designed in 1837 by an officer of the Bengal Engineers, in Greek revival, for a Nawab Nazim who by then had no revenue, no army and a British Resident in the compound — while the actual government of Bengal sat in Calcutta a hundred and eighty kilometres downstream. The thousand doors, several hundred of them false, are as complete a statement of a pensioned dynasty's position as any building in India.
- AnalogueNoor Mahal, Bahawalpur
Two palaces built by Indian princes to European designs within about fifteen years of each other, at opposite ends of the subcontinent. Hazarduari at Murshidabad went up in the 1830s for the Nawab of Bengal, Greek Revival by a Company engineer, after the Nawabs had lost everything but the title. Noor Mahal at Bahawalpur was built 1872–75 for a Nawab who still had revenue, Italianate and neoclassical by an English engineer. Both are a princely state photographing itself in the architecture of the power that had reduced it.
- Site withinMurshidabad
Hazarduari, Murshidabad sits inside Murshidabad and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Hazarduari Palace”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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