The provincial government in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa has decided to purchase the ancestral houses of iconic Bollywood actors, Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar to preserve the heritage buildings which are in ramshackle condition and also facing demolition threat.
The Department of Archaeology in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province decided to allot adequate funds for buying the two houses, which have been also declared as the national heritage, an official said. An official letter has been sent to the Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar to value the cost of both the historic buildings, where the two great actors of the Indian cinema were born and brought up in their early days before the India-Pakistan partition, said Dr Abdus Samad Khan who is the head of the department of archaeology.
Raj Kapoor’s ancestral home, famously known as Kapoor Haveli, is situated in the Qissa Khwani Bazar. It was erected between 1918 and 1922 by the legendary actor’s grandfather, Dewan Basheswarnath Kapoor.
Veteran actor Dilip Kumar’s ancestral home is over 100-year-old and is also located in the same locality as the Kapoor’s. The house is in a dilapidated state and was declared as a national heritage in 2014 by the then the government of Nawaz Sharif.