Inside the Nizam’s Museum in the bylanes of Purani Haveli is the shimmering gold trowel and a small gold pan that were used by Nizam Osman Ali Khan for the groundbreaking ceremony of the Arts College building of Osmania University on July 5, 1934. Beside them, mounted on the wall, is a sepia-tinted photograph of the ruler helping set a dressed stone in place.
One year earlier, in July 1933, the Belgian architect Ernest Jasper had submitted the first plans for the university and also imaginative sketches about how it would look from inside, including the foyer, the senate hall as well as the hostel buildings. Using golden tools, the selection of a world renowned architect, issuing a firman within two days of the request; the Nizam didn’t want to spare any expense for his pet project of a Urdu university.
Architectural evidence
But tantalising evidence is now available to show that the architectural design of the Arts College building, is a hand-me-down and not made to order. The first clue is the trefoil arch at the entrance of the Arts College building. The second came in the form of an article by Ismat Mehdi: ‘Belgian architect came up with a superb blend of Indo-Saracenic design with some characteristics of Cairo’s Mamluk style of architecture’.
It was in Cairo that Ernest Jasper left his mark when he created the township of Heliopolis for Belgian business magnate Baron Empain. While Empain wanted a specialist in Arabic art and someone who loved mosques, he had to settle for Jasper. According to Jasper’s papers, the plan was drawn up by 1908 where another-architect Alexandre Marcel was drafted to design the pièce de résistance: The central dome over salle a manger (dining room) for the 440-room luxury hotel.
By 1930, the Osmania University had expanded from 225 pupils and 25 faculty members on the temporary premises to 958 students and 81 faculty members. Mir Osman Ali Khan asked his officials to finalise an architect to design a permanent structure for the varsity. Engineer Ali Nawaz Jung and architect Zainuddin Khan Yar Jung began their hunt and landed in Antwerp in 1930 where Ernest Jasper proposed a sunlit pavilion as his vision of African architecture. He was sounded out by the duo and the Nizam asked Ernest Jasper to design the university. This, nearly twenty years after Mr. Jasper had executed the Heliopolis Palace Hotel.
Modified structure
Work began in 1934 under the supervision of Zainuddin Khan Yar Jung, who was the state architect and later the commissioner of Hyderabad Municipality. The architectural drawing now housed in ‘Vision of Osmania’ shows a tapering dome like a Hindu temple from Cambodia with a crescent on top. Zainuddin Khan dispensed with that and flattened it to change the elevation of the building. The resemblance of the Arts College building to archival photographs of Heliopolis Palace Hotel is striking. But that’s not the only evidence.
Moorish motifs
“The Giralda tower in Seville is a testimony to the typical features that bear resemblance to our Osmania University. The lancet arch, the horse shoe arch are typical Moorish architectural features. Given the influence of Spanish architecture in the region explains the possible influence on the Belgian architect,” says architect Shweta Balasubramoni about the resemblance between Heliopolis Palace and OU. “The Indo-Sarcenic style, on the other hand, is characterised by the dome, lotus motif (or inverted bell) which are missing in the OU building,” she says.
Incidentally, when a photograph of the Heliopolis Palace Hotel in Cairo was passed around, dozens of students of OU identified it as the Arts College building.
But who cares, for Hyderabad, the Arts College building will be the one with memories of bunked classes, studious students, rebellious ones, chats in the sunny corridors, strict teachers and a university which gave birth to the newest state of Indian union within 100 years of its foundation.
