A thought for the past

BN Goswamy

Whether through neglect or wilful destruction, the disappearance of the physical traces of the past deprives us of more than memories. Spaces that embody historic realities remind us of the lessons of earlier eras. …Heritage is today in jeopardy. What, then, of the deeper values that we risk abandoning under the dust of our own indifference or that might be crushed to rubble by our own destructive force?

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There are pragmatic reasons (direct employment to workers and skilled craftsmen; attraction for tourists; more opportunities for residents) for revitalising a nation’s cultural assets. But, equally, and perhaps more importantly, these activities restore and preserve historic identity. …Heritage is for the world to cherish. — Aga Khan

How, it can be asked, does one go about conserving and, where possible, restoring, all of the great architectural heritage that we have in this vast land of ours? The sheer scale is daunting: thousands of old structures have crumbled under the weight of time and neglect; memories of the past have not only faded but got buried; just rubble, one can see, lies around on the ground as a reminder. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) — that time-honoured institution founded as long ago as 1861 — has risen gamely to the task at places, and done admirable work: but not everywhere, for one sees every now and then monuments where the intensity and the vision needed for conservation work went wanting, and professionalism took a back seat.

It is in this context that one holds the work of a private body, like the Aga Khan Foundation, in great regard. In my mind what one of the wings of the Foundation that concerns itself with Culture did over the years on Humayun’s Tomb and its neighbourhood in Delhi,simply stands out. The tomb that the great Mughal, Akbar, got built for his father in the mid-1560s, had always commanded respect for its monumental scale and design and the use of materials, and had attracted the attention of Unesco which had put it on its World Heritage list in 1993. But one could see that there was desperate need to work on it. The sprawling, originally meticulously laid out, garden around the tomb — in itself seen by Mughal eyes as a replica of the gardens of Paradise — was in a decrepit state; the structure bore a time-worn look; there were signs of old but insensitive repairs that decidedly marred the appearance of the building. No one was paying serious attention. That is when the Foundation I talk of, especially interested as it is in the heritage of the Mughal world, decided to take the monument in hand, naturally with the permission and the consent of the ASI and the government. Elaborate consultations were held; experts from all over confabulated with one another; and finally a craft-based approach to conservation was worked out. As Ratish Nanda, conservation architect, who was involved in the great but difficult enterprise, writes: “Stone-carvers, masons, glazed-tile makers, carpenters and plasterers … worked alongside multi-disciplinary teams of conservation and landscape architects, civil and hydraulic engineers, archaeologists, architects, historians and designers …” At the end, it was decided not only to conserve Humayun’s tomb but to take on a whole urban renewal project which focussed on the neighbourhood which is ‘home to structures built over a period of seven centuries, including the three centuries of Mughal rule’. As the vision for the project expanded – the area included the tomb of Nizamuddin Auliya, Isa Khan’s garden-tomb, the Nila Gumbad, the Sunder-wala Mahal, the Abdul Rahim Khan-i-khanan’s tomb, the Chaunsath Khamba, and the whole basti of Nizamuddin, among others — so did the sources of aid. A host of institutions came forward to pitch in with substantial contributions: the Dorab Tata Trust, the World Monuments Fund, the US and the German Embassies, our own Ministry of Culture, the Delhi Development Authority, to name some.

At the preparatory level, extensive research about the monuments involved was conducted at the same time in the chronicles preserved in the ASI archives in Delhi and Agra, the National Archives, the British Library, the Canadian Centre of Architecture, the Rampur Raza Library in Patna and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Truly significant information emerged from the research which had a bearing on, and informed, the work ahead especially on the garden and the monument called Humayun’s Tomb. A virtually continuous record of photographs from 1849 onwards was put together to help track whatever changes or repairs of the monument — good, bad, or indifferent —  had been carried out over the decades. A ‘high-definition survey using 3D laser-scanning technology was used as the basis on which a stone by stone assessment of the entire façade was completed’ before conservation work began. An inventory of nearly 15,000 tiles used in the original monument and now found missing was tabulated. The complexity and the technicalities involved were enormous. Never before in India had anything resembling the scale of the conservation effort made at ‘Humayun’s Tomb World Heritage Site’ been undertaken. 

If all this begins to sound like an unabashed paean of praise for the work carried out by the Foundation, one should only go and see the monument as it stands today. It may not be, as the Taj has been described, ‘a tear-drop upon the cheek of Time’, but it certainly seems to float in the air with all its elegance and its purity, defying the gravity of its massive scale.

An afterword: There was so much else done and achieved in the form of work on the other monuments/gardens that formed part of the urban renewal project in the area, as also work undertaken to conserve other monuments elsewhere in the country, but there is not enough space here to speak of them. What was done, however, in the congested, piled-up, Nizamuddin basti simply compels attention. Especially how the step-well like 14th-century baoli was resurrected and reclaimed for the residents. The repair of the baoli involved cleaning the well of ‘seven hundred years of accumulated deposits that had reached a depth of 10 meters, requiring 8,000 man-days of work’. But it was done.

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