HYDERABAD: One of the first palaces to come upon a hillock facing the Hussain Sagar, Errum Manzil had set the precedent for several other buildings like Bella Vista and Shah Manzil around the lake -- thus opening up a rather new side of the city for development. Several scholars have noted that the palace was built at a time when the Punjagutta-Khairatabad area was considered beyond the city limits and was largely an empty, rocky expanse.
This was noted in the Harriet Rocket Lynton’s book, Days of the Beloved, where she writes that the palace was built between 1894 and 1900, on a hilltop ‘outside the city walls’. Begum Fatima Shehnaz, the great-granddaughter of Errum Manzil’s patron, Nawab Fakhrul Mulk said, “It is interesting to know that nobody wanted to live there at the time. There were only jungles in the area.”
Before shifting to the Errum Manzil, the ancestral devdi (mansion) of Fakhrul Mulk was housed close to Charminar and within the walled areas of the city, ‘where the alarms or religious symbols were housed’. As Lynton writes, Fakhrul Mulk had a ‘habit of building palaces’. The story goes that Errum Manzil was the result of a wager between the Nawab and Sir Vicar ul Umra as to who could build a higher palace.
Apart from being located on a hillock, Errum Manzil was marked by its distinct Indo-European baroque style of architecture. As Lynton in her book described, “He was also the first of the nobles to mingle freely with the British officers.” Conservation architect Anuradha Naik opines, “Given his interactions with British in the capacity of a nobleman, adoption of their culture reflected not just in his social life but also in his dress, lifestyle, and the architecture of his homes, including the Errum Manzil.”
In 2017, when the Hall of Nations, world’s first and largest-span space-frame concrete structure was brought down by the Delhi government for not being old enough to be called a heritage site, historian Narayani Gupta had famously said, “A truly world-class city is not one that destroys to build, but one where icons from different pasts live together happily.”