In Search of Marble Palace

In the morning, Mike was battling some gastrointestinal distress, so I decided to venture out on my own in search of the much talked about Marble Palace. When I say “much talked about”, I’m largely referring to what foreigners and guidebooks written by foreigners have talked about. With the exception of the lady in the India Tourism office the previous day who provided us with the “permit” required to be able to visit the site, it seemed that almost nobody that I came into contact with in India had any clue what I was talking about…beginning with my cab driver.

I left the hotel and crossed the street to a line of waiting taxis. I was in a take-no-prisoners kind of mood when it came to cab drivers. I walked up to the first car. “Marble Palace?” I said. The guy stared at me with a blank expression. I quickly moved on to the next car. “Marble Palace?” I said.

“Marabelle Plants?” he said attempting to repeat what he thought I said. I walked on.

Finally I approached a car with a youngish looking driver behind the wheel.

“Marble Palace?” I asked.

He muttered something.

“Marble Palace.” I said louder and slower.

“Ohhh, Marble Place. In, in.” he said, still not getting it quite correct, but it was close. I jumped in.

The driver proceeded one block north and made a sharp left turn through The Maiden, the park that runs through the center of the city. I jolted forward. “Hey, where are you going?” I shouted. "It's the other direction."

“Marble Place…Marble Place…” he said, as he made another left turn.

"What are you doing?” I yelled. “Pull over. Pull over.” He continued down the road. “Stop!” I screamed. He stopped his cab in the left hand lane without pulling off the side of the road. I braced for a potential impact from behind while simultaneously pulling my map from my bag. I showed him where the cab was and where I wanted to go and also, how I wanted to get there. “Ok, Ok…I drive.”

He made two more lefts and proceeded past the exact spot that I first met my captain. I considered hurling myself from the moving car and starting all over again, but instead I decided to go with it. After all, today I had a map.

Within a few minutes, it seemed as though we were near the neighborhood of Marble Palace. My driver had already stopped three times along the way to ask for directions: one cabbie and two policemen.

Apparently most the confusion lies in the diction. Marble Palace spoken by an American sounds like Marble Place to the ear of a Kolkatian. Marble Place is the enormous marble and stonecutters district that surrounds the neighborhood where Marble Palace lies.

The driver kept pulling over and pointing at a marble shop, “Here, here,” he would say. “No,” I would say. “That’s not it.” He thought he was so close. Again, in typical Kolkata fashion, we circled my hoped for destination at least four times before I caught a glimpse of the building two blocks down a side street. “Stop!” I screamed. I pointed down the street. He insisted on driving me all the way to the front door. He also demanded full fare. I relented realizing that the full fare amounted to a dollar and a half. I figured it was worth the ride around the neighborhood. Plus I got some pretty good pictures from the car.

A small wooden sign near the enormous gate and next to the guards read “Marble Palace”. My bizarre commute was about to be severely upstaged by the destination itself.

In the guidebooks, and on several websites that I had visited when researching the palace, it said that bribes where expected by the guards inside in order to see any of the house. I assumed that meant that I would be allowed to walk around and take pictures of what was inside. I was mistaken.

I quickly realized why there were practically no photographs of the interior of the house: photography is strictly prohibited. Strictly. No matter how much you attempt to bribe the guards. The one photo of the inside of the house posted here was found on random website.

At one point, before entering the house I attempted to get my camera out to take a picture of the exterior. I was swarmed. The same happened when I tried to get my super small Flip video camera out. “Cell phone, cell phone,” I lied. The guards wouldn't relent.

Plainly put, the house is enormous. It sits on what I estimated to be a five-acre site in the middle of the city. Lush overgrown gardens stretch away from the main covered entrance designed to receive horse-drawn carriages. Balconies hang from the sides and front of the building itself, which is in complete tatters. Vines and brush have grown up on all sides of the house. Parts of the facade are visibly crumbling.

The main gate sits on the north side of the house, but the entrance (the photo above) is on the west side of the house. When you get there, you realize the structure is twice as big as it seems from the road. The covered carriage entrance is probably 200 feet long and 40 feet tall. There are probably fifteen columns three feet in diameter that support the portico. Its colonial presence is oppressive as you approach it - even for Kolkata. On either side of the front door there are two taxidermy moose heads (labeled with antique brass plaques as “Moose Deer”) next to an armed guard and a handful of “tour guides” waiting for their bribe to start the “tour.” Let the weirdness begin.

I signed a waiver, handed over my permit, was asked to remove my shoes, and was led inside. An open courtyard in the center of house revealed a huge fountain more than 20 feet across. The crisp blue sky overhead cut through the devastated central interior of the building. Balconies surrounded the courtyard. I was slack jawed both at the building’s size and its condition.

My guide shuffled me into a parlor just off the main entrance. It’s hard to keep the order of the rooms I visited correct, but I’ll give you the gist of what I saw. The marble floors in each room mimicked the design of an over-sized Oriental rug; the ornate patterns were magnified to match the scale of the room. Each room had a unique design and there had to be 10 to 20 different kinds of marble jig sawed together.

The rooms, including the “simple” billiards room, each measured at least 100 long by 20 to 40 feet wide with ceilings that soared 20 feet up. Almost all of the coffered ceilings had intricate hand-carved wood or plaster moldings. Their complexity made the rooms feel even bigger and more confusing. Then I noticed all of the stuff.

The tour guide wasn’t a whole lot of help in the "stuff" department. “This is a lamp,” he would say straight-faced. “This is a chair. Louis the 14^th. This is a bird cage.” Now granted, the cage he was talking about was almost 15 feet tall, but I could damn well see it was a bird cage. As for the chair, I could not figure out if he was saying it was in the style of a Louis the 14^th chair or if King Louis himself sat in it.

This went on and on, room after crowded room. Sheets covered much of the furniture, and some of the rooms were so full that I found myself backtracking just to make it to the other end. The walls of each room were covered with countless paintings hung salon style.

There were elephant tusks in glass cases, collections of “gifts”, as the tour guide put it, including rare books and manuscripts, china and silverware. I think I even saw a gorilla paw ashtray. There was a huge wooden sculpture probably 10 feet tall that the guide pointed out was carved from “one piece” of wood. At the either end of the ballroom were identical single pane mirrors that stretched 25 high and 10 feet across. They had to have been 200 years old and were built into ornate hard-carved gold leaf frames that in places were two feet wide and housed even smaller and more intricately cut mirrors.

He showed me to a staircase and we climbed up. When we got to the second floor I noticed a few more cages at the end of the balcony. When we got there I could see that there were actually live birds in most of the cages. The guide said they were carrier pigeons. I balked. Looking back, he might have been right.

I soon learned that descendants of the family that built the house still own it, and they live there. Of course there is a three story servant's and cook's quarters adjacent to the palace, and from what I could gather, that is where the owners spend most of their time, but I was also informed that they were at home during my tour.

Despite the lack of depth in the tour, he did manage to point out the home’s supposed Ruebens painting, albeit without much fanfare. He simply turned expressionless and with a small sweep of his hand said, “And this is the Ruebens.”

We made out way downstairs and out the front door. I sat underneath one of the looming moose heads and put my shoes back on. I was in shock. Two other tourists approached. They could sense my disorientation and asked what I thought. I tried to explain to them in brief what they were in for. The guards who spoke English laughed. I wished them luck, and went out to tour the gardens.

It was at this point of my visit that it started to lose it. A series of fountains led to a path that I followed down to a row of caged fencing. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something run. It was large. It was an antelope. The next few cages held several different kinds of deer and hoofed creatures several of which were sporting impressive racks. Then came the birds.

There were peacocks and toucans and pheasants. There were jungle birds, desert birds, and forest birds. The cages went on and on. There had to have been 250 different rare birds on the property. Eventually the cages stopped. I walked a little farther and reached the back of the property.

There was an apartment building full of tiny open rooms and people were outside cooking over open fires and bathing half naked near a hand-pumped well. There were a couple of small children who looked at me and cocked their heads, but nobody said a word.

I looped back around and headed toward the house. I came to another building. This one had enormous cages with thick bars on the windows. After seeing everything that I had, I could tell what this building was. This is where they kept the elephants and the tigers.

I wandered toward the exit, and walked out of the gate. I made a short video once outside. I think I know what I was trying to say when I said "Going into the house felt like walking into Europe." What I wanted to say was that the house reeked of Dickensian decay. It was overwhelming, ornate, and falling apart. It was pretty much perfect.

Untitled from Ryan Schulz on Vimeo.