“We are expensive, but we aren’t a typical five-star hotel you see,” says Holkar, pithily summarising the emerging category of heritage hotels, of which the Ahilya Fort in Maheshwar, Madhya Pradesh, is one. “We don’t have TV, we don’t have room service,” he adds. The 73-year-old Beatles fan is the son of Yeshwant Rao II, the last maharaja of Indore, and one of the descendants of Ahilya Bai, the Maratha queen who ruled the region in the 18th century and after whom the palace on the banks of the Narmada is named.
In 1971, Holkar and his ex-wife Sally came back to India from the US, took over the derelict Ahilya Wada, restored it and opened it as a heritage hotel in 2000. What started with four rooms back then is now an elegant property with 14 rooms in six different areas, “so that you don’t really feel that you are living in a hotel”.
While restoring a royal residence stems its structural decay, transforming it into a commercial entity helps in its upkeep by maintaining a steady inflow of capital to deal with the prohibitive costs of managing large estates. As Faiz Rashid, the director of Jehan Numa Group of Hotels in Madhya Pradesh and the great grandson of General Obaidullah Khan, who built the Jehan Numa Palace for his mother, the Begum of Bhopal, says, “When you run a luxury hotel, you need to ensure the upkeep is as per the standards of international luxury hotels. It helps you restore a property and keep it the way you want it to. If you don’t maintain an old property, it gives way.”
“I don’t want to build anything new,” Holkar, too, had told conservation architect Ravi Gundu Rao while handing over the Ahilya Fort. Among the necessary structural changes was the rot that termites and water had caused to the interlocking wooden members, weakening the pillar and beam construction. It caused the first floor to shift up by 12 inches and the front of the building, including the drive-in, went belly up by about 20 cm. So, in some places, the architects replaced the wooden members with steel and clad them with old wood. While that retained the aged look, it also brought down the exorbitant costs of replacing teak logs. Besides, the interlocking quadrangles with courtyards in the middle, typical of Marathwada architecture, were tweaked—walls pulled down and put up at different places—to reorganise spaces to make them comfortable for guests. That apart, in close to two decades since it was thrown open to guests, there has been little visual change to the 18th century Maratha fort.
One of the crown jewels in Taj’s portfolio is the Falaknuma Palace, where the group collaborated with architects from across the globe and Princess Esra, the first wife of Mukarram Jah, the last Nizam of Hyderabad, to restore the glory of one of the richest royal dynasties in the world. According to historian and author William Dalrymple’s article ‘The Lost World’ in The Guardian, when the British left India, Sir Mir Osman Ali Khan, then the Nizam of Hyderabad, was the richest man in the world and had an estimated personal fortune of £100 million in gold and silver bullion, and £400 million in jewels. But when Jah was crowned the eighth Nizam in 1967, the state was mired in debt, financial chaos, and a legal wrangling over inheritance. In 1973, Jah divorced his wife Princess Esra and fled to a sheep farm in Australia to shirk the mess. In 1996, when the Falaknuma Palace was in complete disarray, he turned to Esra again, asking her to sort out the chaos. With the help of celebrated Indian lawyer Vijay Shankardass, she settled the jewel claims of nearly 3,000 litigants, paid off the debt and signed a 40-year lease with Taj to turn the famed palace into a heritage hotel.
Among the grandest Baroque mansions in the country, the Falaknuma Palace’s interiors were done up with the finest materials and finishes, ranging from leather upholstery and velvet tapestry to the best marble and Burma teak, which had to be vetted by the tastes of Princess Esra. For instance, only the fourth or the fifth iteration of the leather work at the palace was approved and it took almost a year for the project to be completed.
“The royals are very attached to the residences, so we work closely with them. In some properties, like the Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur, the royal family of Maharaja Gaj Singh stays on the premises. The commonality between us is their passion for restoring their residences and our passion for sticking to their ethos while delivering great guest experiences,” says Sharma.
But despite its exclusive and somewhat restrictive nature, heritage tourism is picking up in India. Both Holkar of Ahilya Fort and Nath of Neemrana Hotels peg the number of domestic bookings to more than 50 percent in the last season. The rise in Indian tourists can be attributed to a bouquet of unique experiences reminiscent of the royal era that the hotels offer. Jehan Numa is perhaps the only heritage hotel in India to keep thoroughbred horses on the property. “Before we got into the hotels business, the family was into breeding racehorses. While we have shut the stud farm, we continue to keep some of the horses and, every morning, while guests have their cup of tea, the horses are exercised around the property,” says Rashid.
“At Taj Falaknuma,” says Ritesh Sharma, general manager, “right from the arrival in the Nizam’s buggy painted in arabesques of gold to guests being showered with rose petals as they climb the white marble stairs at the entrance, the hotel offers a royal getaway to travellers. Guests can access the Nizam’s study table for writing on the palace’s impression book as well.” The hotel has a librarian to guide guests through the collection of rare books and manuscripts—that includes one of the most acclaimed collections of the Quran selected by the Nizam himself—in a library that is a replica of the one at Windsor Castle in England.
Living life king-size may be a cliche, but it may well be worth it.
First Published: Oct 01, 2017, 06:56
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