The new India Until recently, the 19th-century Baradari Palace was little more than a glorified government warehouse. The elegant building was built in 1876 by Maharajah Rajinder Singh, ruler of the once powerful and independent state of Patiala in India’s fertile Punjab, so that he could move out of the massive, centuries-old red brick fort that still dominates the centre of Patiala.
The palace was taken by New Delhi after India’s 1947 independence from British colonial rule and, for years afterwards, the stately colonnaded-building – with its cool, airy rooms and spacious verandas overlooking a sprawling garden – was the little-visited Punjab State Archives, storing dusty old files and gradually disintegrating with neglect.
Today, however, the Baradari Palace has been reborn, lovingly restored by hoteliers Aman Nath and Francis Wacziarg so as to give out-of-town visitors and the local citizens of Patiala a taste of the lives of the traditional potentates of Punjab’s cultural capital.
The palace’s impressive main hall – with its soaring, elaborately moulded ceiling, bevelled glass windows and intricately carved stone balcony from where the royal women once peered down on the proceedings – is now the heritage hotel’s restaurant, popular among locals for special occasion dining.
The 17 high-ceilinged guest rooms are simply yet sensitively decorated with period furniture, and offer expansive verandas and terraces. Inviting public sitting areas include an enclosed porch with large windows, and a sitting room with a huge fireplace for chilly winters. At night, carefully placed spotlights and traditional fire lamps give the white palace an incandescent glow.
“It’s a historic place,” says Ritesh Chaddha, a 24-year-old businessman from Delhi, who, along with a large group of his relatives, stayed at the palace while in Patiala for a wedding. “The rooms are very old, the furniture. We can see the lives of maharajas and queens. These things we normally read only in books, but we never see.”
The Baradari Palace is the latest of 15 once-dilapidated heritage buildings carefully restored under the Neemrana Hotels banner by Mr Nath and Mr Wacziarg, one of the pioneering teams of India’s heritage hotel development, a movement now gaining momentum across the country.
The pair were inspired to try to protect India’s cultural patrimony after working together on a book about the wall frescos in ageing havelis (private mansions) in Rajasthan’s Shekawati region. They began their foray into restoration in 1986 with the abandoned ruins of the 15th-century Neemrana fort, 122km from Delhi. Today, the imposing stone fort is a popular 55-room weekend getaway spot and romantic wedding venue.
The Neemrana portfolio also includes a diverse array of other properties scattered across India, including a majestic home once used by Portuguese and Dutch governors in the southern port of Cochin; a seaside port masters’ bungalow in an old Danish settlement in Tamil Nadu; 19th-century British colonial bungalows in hill stations and tea estates; traditional Tamil-style joint family homes built around massive courtyards; a late-19th-century joint family home in Bangalore; and a 20th-century Rajasthani haveli.
Neemrana is restoring the state-owned stone Tijara Fort in Rajasthan, and the group has hundreds of requests from property owners across the country who are seeking partnership arrangements to convert ageing or dilapidated semi-abandoned properties into revenue-generating hotels. “We are about the future of yesterday,” says Mr Nath.
India is littered with dilapidated yet architecturally appealing buildings from across the ages: ruined forts; palaces built by the numerous princely families that once ruled large swathes of the country; official buildings constructed by the British and other European colonialists; and large, traditional joint family homes built by affluent Indian land-owning and trading families.
Many properties that once belonged to royal families or the colonial administration are now in the hands of various Indian government arms, some of which – like the Punjab and Rajasthan state governments – are gradually recognising their potential as a spur for the tourism industry.
“They are sitting on wonderful things and they are now waking up to that fact,” says Mr Wacziarg. “Before, there was very little care for colonial buildings. We went through a phase of rejecting everything colonial as non-Indian.”
Yet many other heritage properties, often in small towns that were once of economic or political importance but have since faded, remain in the hands of private owners, who have moved to pursue better opportunities in India’s booming cities or even abroad.
These so-called “ancestral properties” are often semi-abandoned.
“Everyone who has ancestral property has unmanageable liabilities that just burn a whole in their pocket,” says Mr Nath. “We try to make these things viable. People phone us all the time and say, ‘Come and see my fort; come and see my palace.’ We are turning waste into asset.”
While Neemrana owns some of the properties in its portfolio, it also enters into lease agreements with owners that vary in length depending on whether the owner or the company bears the refurbishment costs. The Neemrana team’s selection criteria for a property, says Mr Wacziarg, is “love at first sight”.
Neemrana is not the only player in India’s growing heritage hotel business. A few of Rajasthan’s royal families began taking guests into their huge palaces to help pay for the cost of upkeep decades ago. Today, some of Rajasthan’s most splendid palaces – and a handful of colonial-era buildings – are managed by top hotel chains such as Taj Hotels, part of the Tata Group.
But many Indian heritage properties are too small for big players. ITC, an Indian conglomerate, has set up WelcomHeritage, a joint venture with the HH Gaj Singh II, maharajah of Jodhpur, to assist owners of a range of idiosyncratic properties with refurbishment and marketing. Many individual property owners are also trying to refurbish projects themselves, with mixed results.
The rapid surge of interest in India’s heritage hotels is being driven partly by the fast-growing domestic tourism market. In Neemrana’s first decade of operation, for example, some 60 per cent of its guests were foreign. But today, affluent Indians account for the majority of visitors to the Neemrana properties.
Heritage hotel development has also been spurred by the improved ease of travel within in India. Private airlines such as Jet, Kingfisher, Indigo and Spicejet have brought improved service, greater capacity and lower fares than in the days, not so long ago, when the skies were monopolised by a complacent state-owned carrier. Train tickets, once available only by standing in long, painfully slow queues at crowded, dilapidated stations, can now be booked online.
India remains a challenging destination, especially for foreigners easily rattled by large crowds, anarchic traffic, aggressive touts and pervasive dirt. And while international tourist arrivals to India have fallen since the terror attacks on luxury hotels in Mumbai last November, heritage hotels have been shielded from the full impact of the blow due to the resilience of the domestic tourist market.
However, there is a downside to the current heritage hotel boom, namely the increasingly unrealistic expectations of many heritage property owners about the potential profits. “Everybody thinks they are sitting on a gold mine,” says Mr Wacziarg. “They think restoration is easy. It’s not easy. They have no idea how difficult it is.”
Amy Kazmin is the FT’s New Delhi correspondent
