Marble Palace

Address: Muktaram Babu Street
Timings: Tuesday-Wednesday, Friday-Sunday, 10am-4pm
Entry: Free; photography limited
In the old “Thieves’ Garden” quarter of Chor Bagan stands a mansion named for its floors of patterned Italian marble in pink, grey and white. Raja Rajendra Mullick began building it in 1835 at age sixteen, completing it around 1840. Orphaned young and raised alongside an English guardian, he combined Bengali upbringing with early exposure to European art, and built a private repository of Oriental and Western art unlike anything else in the city: Flemish and Dutch oils, works attributed to Rubens and Titian, a marble Leda and the Swan, a rosewood Queen Victoria carved from a single trunk, Belgian mirrors and Venetian chandeliers, all accumulated across three generations with more passion than system, gathering dust in rooms never quite organised, which is part of the charm. Behind the house survives what’s widely described as India’s first private zoo, predating Alipore Zoo by decades: peacocks on the marble, pelicans and storks by a pond, deer and caged parrots and hornbills. The Jalsa Ghar music room displays a sitar donated by Ravi Shankar; descendants of the founder still occupy part of the house.