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Actor Soha Ali Khan spoke about her royal lineage, and the ancestral Pataudi Palace that she said belongs primarily to her brother, Saif Ali Khan. Soha said that because Saif was born when royal titled hadn’t been abolished, he is an actual prince. He owns the Pataudi Palace, but Soha has been assigned what she described as a ‘generator room’, and is a ‘caretaker’ of the sprawling property along with her siblings.
In a chat with Cyrus Broacha on the Housing.com YouTube channel, she also said that her mother, veteran actor Sharmila Tagore, still keeps a tab on the palace’s daily maintenance expenses. “My mother sits with her hisaab-kitaab; she knows daily expenditure and monthly expenditure. For example, we whitewash Pataudi, it’s not painted because it’s a lot less expensive. And we haven’t bought anything new for a long time. It’s the architecture of the place that’s most inviting; it’s not the things, it’s not the objects,” she said.
The Pataudi Palace in Haryana. (Photo: Myntra/YouTube)
Also read – Inside Saif Ali Khan’s palatial Pataudi Palace with high ceilings, old family pictures and lush green lawns
Opening up about the palace’s history, Soha said, “I was born after the privy purses and royal titles were abolished in 1970. My brother was born a prince, because he was born in 1970… With the titles comes a lot of responsibility and bills… My grandmother was the begum of Bhopal and my grandfather was the nawab of Pataudi; he loved her for many years but was not allowed to marry her… The Pataudi Palace was built to impress his father-in-law…”
Kareena Kapoor, Saif Ali Khan’s vacation at Pataudi Palace
Soha said that her grandmother’s father was perhaps a little jealous of her grandfather, because he was a competitive sportsman. But while building the palace to impress him, her grandfather ‘ran out of money’. “So, if you go to Pataudi, you’ll see there’s a lot of carpets. He ran out of money for the marble, so underneath the carpets there’s a lot of cement,” she said.
Saif Ali Khan at the Pataudi Palace.
Soha said that because the ‘generator room’ belongs to her, she has to pay maintenance for it. The ‘generator room’ is actually a two-BHK. “The palace was leased to Neemrana Hotels, and when it was, my parents needed a place to live, so the generator room was made into a very nice equivalent of a two-BHK,” she said. In the past, Saif has said that he had to buy the palace back after it had been leased out to a hotel chain. The family now uses it as a vacation home, and rents it out to film productions to shoot in. The recent film Animal, and Saif’s own streaming series Tandav, were filmed at the iconic property.
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