You walk up thirty-seven stone steps between great white columns, and inside there are doors everywhere: along every corridor, at the end of every hall.
Open the wrong one and there is nothing behind it but wall.
That, the guides will tell you, was the point. An intruder in a hurry would never find the way out.
Hazarduari, “the one with a thousand doors”, stands on the bank of the Bhagirathi in Murshidabad, once the capital of the Nawabs of Bengal. It has around a thousand doors, real and false together; how many of them are false is something the sources disagree on, though a hundred is the number most often given.
The Nawabs’ city
Murshidabad takes its name from Murshid Quli Khan, the Mughal official who moved the capital of Bengal here from Dhaka early in the eighteenth century. For fifty years it was one of the richest cities in Asia. Robert Clive, arriving after Plassey in 1757, wrote that it was as extensive, populous and rich as London.
Plassey ended all that. The Nawabs stayed on, with their titles and their palaces, but the power and the revenue passed to the East India Company in Calcutta.
The palace
Hazarduari was built for Nawab Humayun Jah between 1829 and 1837, long after Plassey, by Duncan MacLeod, a Scottish officer of the Bengal Engineers. It is a European palace in Bengal: Italianate and neoclassical, three storeys high, with 114 rooms and a portico held up on Doric columns. It was meant to impress, and it still does.
Since 1985 it has been a museum run by the Archaeological Survey of India. Inside are the Nawabs’ paintings, furniture, arms and armour, a great chandelier, and a library of thousands of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Urdu.
What else to see in Murshidabad
- Nizamat Imambara, facing Hazarduari across the lawn, one of the largest imambaras in India, built after an earlier one burned down.
- The clock tower and the Madina mosque, on the same lawn.
- Bachhawali Tope, the old cannon on the lawn, whose name local legend explains with a story about the effect of its roar.
- Katra Masjid, the great mosque Murshid Quli Khan built, under whose entrance steps he chose to be buried so that worshippers would walk over him.
- Jahan Kosha, “destroyer of the world”, a huge cannon cast in the seventeenth century.
- Kathgola garden and its palace, built by a Jain merchant family.
- Khushbagh, across the river, where Alivardi Khan and Siraj-ud-Daulah lie buried. Read the story of Plassey before you go.
- Namak Haram Deorhi, the “traitor’s gate”, the name the town gives to Mir Jafar’s palace gateway.