The 400-year-old glazed tile wonder of Baadshahi Ashoorkhana, built during the reign of Mohammed Quli Qutb Shah in Hyderabad, will finally get an entrance befitting its heritage stature. This follows an undertaking by the Government of India through its Deputy Solicitor General of India to construct a boundary wall around the heritage site, which was completed in 1611 CE.
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“The revised estimate has been prepared, and the boundary wall shall be completed and compliance report in this regard shall be submitted latest by the last week of June, 2024,” read a submission by the Deputy Solicitor General of India following an interlocutory application for protection of the historical monument.
Currently, tourists and visitors have to cross concertina wire, hop across rubble and squeeze through a small window of the doorway to get into the complex.
“We have been fighting the case to protect the Ashoorkhana so that it has an entrance matching the heritage value of the site. But it is being eyed by encroachers, who want to construct shops,” says Mir Abbas Moosavi, the 11th generation mutawalli of the site. The Ashoorkhana is a Shia house of mourning, where the 10th day of Muharram is marked in a day- long ceremony to commemorate the death of Husain at the Battle of Karbala.
The commitment to build a boundary wall caps a long drawn out struggle for the Moosavi family and the city to save the heritage site. It was turned into a warehouse in the aftermath of conquest of Hyderabad by the Mughal armies of Aurangzeb. It was only in 2009 that the Department of Archaeology and Revenue Department cleared the premises of encroachers after High Court orders.