Benazeer Palace
Adaptive Reuse: Literary & Cultural Center
Bhopal, India
90,000 sq. ft
Design Dissertation (B.Arch.) | 2016
 

For my final design dissertation, I chose to work on adaptive reuse of a dilapidated palace situated in the central Indian city of Bhopal, called the Benazeer palace, and convert the space into a literary and cultural center. As much as I took up this topic for its untapped design potential, it was the city’s history that inspired me more.

​

Bhopal is my place of birth and where my forefathers have resided for generations. A princely state in British-colonized India, Bhopal has a striking feature of being ruled by four female Muslim rulers consecutively for more than a century until 1926- women who broke barriers, challenged the ‘purdah’ tradition, learnt martial arts, fought battles and drastically improved the economy.

​

However, today the city holds no reminiscence of its trailblazing past. The ruins of the structures made by these rulers are a physical manifestation of the attenuating status of women in that society today. With a shocking disparity in the literacy rates of men and women, and most women forced to marry early, I remained oblivious to the prevalence of these statistics until I realized that despite coming from a family of well-educated people, I was the first girl in the family to move to a new city alone to pursue higher education.

 

My design dissertation was thus an attempt to revive not just the run-down palace, but the activities- literary and commercial, which helped people, especially the women, to aspire and participate in work outside of their designated domestic responsibilities.

​

The Taj Mahal Complex comprises of the Taj Mahal Palace (now being converted into a heritage hotel) , Taj-Ul-Masajid (mosque) and Benazeer Palace. It was constructed by Shah Jahan Begum in 1875. Taj-Ul-Masajid is the largest mosque in India and used to be the largest Mosque in Asia at the time. Benazeer Palace, built in 1877, was used as a summer palace overlooking the Motiya Talab, one of the three cascading lakes built around the same time to harvest the run-off from the neighbouring Eidgah Hills. 

​

​