Dilip Kumar asks for photos of ancestral house in Peshawar, shares memories from childhood

Dilip Kumar took to social media to ask people to share more images of his ancestral house in Peshawar, after receiving a glimpse of it, thanks to a journalist from Pakistan. Journalist Shiraz Hassan posted four images of the actor’s ancestral house, which is over a century old, on Tuesday.  The actor thanked him for the pictures and requesting “all in Peshawar” to share photos of the house, where he had spent the early days of his life before Partition. Here is the post

In a series of tweets, the veteran actor wrote of the fond memories of his parents, grandparents and others in this house. He remembered his mother who was “frail and delicate” and always in the spacious kitchen. He mentioned the sitting room where the family often gathered for high tea in the evenings, the large room where the ladies prayed, and all of the other corners of the home. In a separate tweet he recalled that after Peshawar’s Qissa Khwani Bazaar closed, a story teller would sit in the centre of the square and narrate stories.

The provincial government in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa recently decided to purchase the ancestral houses of Raj Kapoor and Kumar to conserve the historic buildings which are in dilapidated condition and facing demolition threat. Kumar’s ancestral home was declared a national heritage in 2014 by the then Nawaz Sharif Government. The Department of Archaeology in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province has decided to allocate sufficient funds for purchasing the two buildings that lie in the heart of Peshawar city, an official said. Dr Abdus Samad Khan, the head of the department of archaeology added that an official letter has been sent to the Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar to determine the cost of the historic building. (With inputs from Press Trust of India)