HYDERABAD, Pakistan: On her 99th birthday in May 2017, Dharam Mukhi sat thousands of miles away in the United States when her family unveiled an extraordinary gift: a video chronicling three centuries of the Mukhi family’s legacy and the painstaking restoration of her childhood home in Sindh, Pakistan.
The video brought back the carved wooden galleries, the Italian cupola and the marble staircase of the mansion she had left behind when her family left Hyderabad during the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 and the violence and upheaval that followed.
“I feel like I am back home,” she told her son, Dr. Suresh Bhavnani. Twenty days later, she passed away.
The picture taken on August 20, 2025, shows Mukhi House in Hyderabad, Pakistan. (AN photo)
Built in 1921 by her uncle Jethanand Mukhi, a Hindu politician and philanthropist, the three-story Mukhi House was more than a residence. With its Corinthian columns, mosaic floors, stained glass, and frescoed walls, it stood as a palace at the heart of Hyderabad. Its halls hosted luminaries of the era — Indian National Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru and Sindh’s pre-Partition chief minister, Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah, among others.
