1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney
Conservation of Architectural Heritage: Different Agendas
Dr Narayani Gupta
Reader, Department of History and Culture, Jamia Millia Islamia University, India
"India is a 'multiverse' where the artist lives simultaneously in several times and cultures ... and it would be impoverishing, artificial and unreal for him to give up any of the times and histories in which he lives" - Ghulam Mohammed Skeikh.
Most Indians live in several times and cultures. They see architecture not just as object but as something with a function which it is easy to relate to, even many centuries after its construction. This paper examines how two successive generations of Indians, after the country became independent in 1947, have looked at their historic architecture. Three questions have repeatedly figured in discussions: history, interpretation and the mode of conservation. These would have echoes and resonances for other cultures as well.
1. The Past in the Present
Unlike other art forms, architecture cannot be locked away in a museum to be viewed on demand. It impinges on our lives and work. We use buildings and see them all the time, even if we do not look at them. How does one distinguish between "heritage" architecture and other buildings? Architecture is noticed, and regarded as "heritage" when it acquires the patina of age, or when it is distanced from us by other styles becoming dominant. In Europe, and in countries initially colonised by European settlers, many pasts have come to be identified over the last five hundred years. World War IIin Europe and Japan, and urban renewal in the countries of North America, destroyed many buildings beyond recall. It is in this context that we have to see the Venice Charter of 1964, a landmark in the history of the conservation movement. "Europa Nostra" seeks to generate a sense of common purpose so that architecture does not become the victim of political rivalries. The institutionalising of periodic meetings between individuals sensitive to and/or professionally involved in conservation has checked the thoughtless tearing down of buildings.
At these meetings of associations like ICOMOS (International Commission on Monuments and Sites) or HII (Heritage Interpretation International) the majority of delegates are from Europe and from countries of predominantly European settlement. It is worth wondering whether this imbalance is symptomatic of different perceptions of architectural heritage and conservation on the part of people in developing countries.
"Heritage" translates in Indian languages into words which mean personal inheritance or a donation. A more commonly used word is parampara, which translates as "tradition which is being constantly added to". Our country is singularly rich in a vast range of historic architecture, surviving through five millennia of building activity. Indian subcontinental styles and forms have influenced and been influenced by those of the Hellenistic Empire, West Asia, Central Asia, South-East Asia and later, of West Europe and the USA. Much has collapsed or been demolished, some have been rebuilt or added to. What survives from the eighteenth century and earlier are massive forts, some palaces, cenotaphs and shrines, which reverence or superstition saved from being despoiled. For the past two centuries there is a wealth of secular architecture (Bombay alone has the biggest collection of Victorian buildings outside London). Much of this is in use, and some of it unnoticed, and some, like the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, seen as monuments.
2.The Archaeological Survey
In India, "conservation" is generally understood to mean the task of keeping listed buildings in a state of good repair. This task was entrusted, from 1861, to an administrative department, the Archaeological Survey of India. This was a crisis-management strategy after many alarming incidents of accidental and deliberate vandalism, clearances for military reasons, for road-building and for recycling into other buildings. The story that Bentinck (Viceroy of British India, 1828-35) planned to auction the Taj Mahal for its marble is apocryphal, but like all such stories it had its foundation in a pattern of official thinking. One individual more than any other left his mark on the functioning of the Archaeological Survey. This was Lord Curzon (Viceroy of British India from 1899 to 1905) who had the ideal mix of informed interest and administrative drive which gave the survey effective power and generated a secular religion, a sense of reverence for these works of art, each a museum in its own right. Survey officials refer to the zamana (age) of Curzon in the way one refers to a golden age. Buildings over one hundred years old were listed and catalogued. The survey's properties are still essentially those which were demarcated in the 1920s.
3. The Tourist
Today, fifty years after Independence, some of these architectural landmarks are in danger not from neglect but from too much attention or too much use. Rose Macaulay spoke for many travellers when she wrote her very evocative Pleasure of Ruins in 1954. The slow and often uncomfortable journeys to the ruins, their wild "unspoilt" appearance, were essential ingredients in the pleasure to be had from viewing them. But all this changed as tourism became an industry, and the occasional tourist-party gave way to large groups arriving in busloads at these sites demanding quick returns for their money. The paintings of the Ajanta caves are fading because of the pressure of visitors and the use of bright lights, and the delicate terracotta carvings in the temples of Bishnupur are smudged to the height of the hand's reach.
Package tours are not new to India. For over a thousand years groups have crisscrossed the country, on foot or by river, on pilgrimage not just to one sacred site but to as many as possible. The shrines included not only places of worship and the sanctuaries of saints but also major geographical features like the source of a river (Gangotri for the Ganga and Amarkantak for the Narmada) or confluences (the many prayags in the Himalayas and in the plains). The pilgrims demand very little by way of creature comforts and on-site facilities. Very businesslike, they "do" the shrines with a sense of getting through a task. In recent years, secular tourism has overlapped with pilgrimage. Tourist packages and incentives from the government (which pays for employees' families to go on an extended holiday every four years), the "Bharat Darshan" ("See India") scheme has increased the numbers of domestic tourists enormously. They are not like Rose Macaulay. Ruins do not appeal to them, and they would appreciate something new and sparkling more than a building which is old and crumbling. Excellence in architectural skills does not hold them in awe; it is taken for granted. For in our country skilled craftsmanship and an innate sense of design is not denied to the poor, and even the wayside vegetable stall or basket of fruit is arranged like a work of art. The various elements in great works of architecture are part of a living tradition.
But there is now an increasing number of deracinated urban dwellers, cut off from their culture-region and from the sense of history imbibed from grandparents. Those who are comfortably literate are vulnerable to "hidden persuaders" and many look at the built heritage with romantic or sectarian preoccupations. Some of it may appeal to some of them more strongly because they see it as part of a tradition with which they identify themselves. In other cases, some sites may appeal to them more if they became in effect amusement parks, tricked out with cultural "festivals" and son-et-lumiere shows. All this means that historic architecture can be used to project ideologies or as a backdrop for activities not always relevant to the site.
4. The Government
When British India and princely India merged and dissolved in 1947, maps of India and Pakistan were overlaid on a subcontinent, cutting across cultural regions which were centuries old. This was followed by the inevitable nationalism-building exercises through school curricula, seminars and "festivals" (not the festivals which were to do with the seasons, but more correctly exhibitions). An implicit competitiveness developed between these countries in respect of their common heritage. Was the Taj Mahal an Indian or an Islamic monument? Are the Buddhist shrines Indian or do they belong to a larger Asian Buddhist community? Is the oldest mosque in the subcontinent one in Pakistan or another in India? (In the 18th century there was no India or Pakistan, though there was, as there is, Kerala and Sind.) The anxiety to define identities has often made architecture its victim, by compartmentalising it according to religious communities or dynasties. In India, this can feed separatist ideologies. Worse, it will marginalise the innumerable syncretist cults and shared traditions which are one of the greatest strengths of our country. Linked with this kind of concern is the issue of priorities in conservation programs.
The Indian establishment made its stand clear when it decreed that its citizens should "value and preserve... the monuments of the country's composite culture" as part of the Fundamental Duties included in the constitution in 1976 at the same time as the word "secular" with its particularly Indian meaning was also written into the constitution ("secular" in India means "non-sectarian"). This is not just a legal injunction; it is rationalisation of a tradition which has been an unselfconscious and age-old one. Architecture has to be seen as an enriching experience in its own right, i.e. it is irrelevant whether the craftsman and patrons were driven by religious fervour, a sense of power, skill in design or simply lavish funds. The end-product of the blend of materials, imagination and generous patronage has to be interpreted in non-sectarian terms, as an element in citizenship.
5. The Architect
A group to whom historic buildings should look for sympathy is architects. Without expecting them to necessarily build in older styles, one would expect from them a strong sense of informed pride in their heritage. But this is less than strong because, while craftsmen still put together much of the domestic architecture, the public and the monumental building has, since the mid-19th century, been constructed by the Public Works Department, increasingly supplemented by private architects. The first generation of independent India's own architects came under the spell of the International Movement, in particular the ideology of Corbusier, to whom many of them were enthusiastic apprentices on the Chandigarh project. This, together with the fact that south Asia did not suffer the horrifying destruction of a World War, meant that the Charter of Venice aroused little interest even among those architects and planners who had heard of it. Starting from the 1950s, massive town-planning exercises have been carried out. Impressive office blocks and extensive housing have been achieved, but areas of heritage buildings were seldom indicated in terms of boundaries and never in terms of elevations. As a result many buildings which had been striking for their scale and balance became enclaved in and dwarfed by highrise structures. These new landscapes were symbolic of the contradictions in a man like Jawaharlal Nehru, who could speak movingly about the grandeur of old buildings, but for whom what was really exciting was Chandigarh, the city of the future.
For the first post-independence generation, then, heritage architecture was something from a past age, and their conservation seen in the manner in which old masters would be conserved: cleaned, framed, hived off. By contrast, dramatic success was achieved in the revival of traditional skills in "soft" or "micro" areas: handicrafts and textiles. This was thanks to the initiative taken by a handful of people, chiefly women, led by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya. An impressive body of research followed, which highlighted the richness of cultural diversities in India, where designs, materials and skills crossed so many cultural boundaries and knit together so many communities in working relationships. In the "hard" area of building technology the iron and concrete lobbies were very powerful, and traditional methods did not seem capable of yielding quick results. The age-old bond between the five smiths, the blacksmith, the stoneworker, the carpenter, bricklayer and coppersmith, who had made up the builders' guilds was snapped. In an age of increasing specialisation, where engineers are distinct from architects, builders from interior decorators, sculptors from carpenters, some sense of the holistic manner in which people built has to be created anew. An architect like Laurie Baker, who for nearly half a century has been building with techniques learned from local smiths, was regarded as an amiable maverick. Schools of architecture taught courses of the "history of architecture" but this had a quality of irrelevance and in any case was heavily weighted on the side of European architecture, with Meso-America, China and India treated cursorily.
6. Urban Development Agencies
Two areas of the built heritage got neglected, trapped in time and morphology between the survey's "monuments" and the architects' modern buildings. One was the vast amount of secular buildings, railway stations, town halls, universities, constructed under British rule. The other was those sections of older towns which were still inhabited and had a distinct morphology, earlier dismissed as "disorderly" but now recognised as being wonderfully adapted to the climate and social needs.
From the 1980s there have been significant changes in the perceptions of our historic architecture for a variety of reasons. Most obviously, thirty years of living in towns designed according to prescriptions relevant to colder climates and countries with much smaller populations has generated a sense of unease and dissatisfaction. The reverse side of this is nostalgia. By a happy coincidence, the 1960s also coincided with the tercentenaries of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. This has generated a strong local pride, expressed in a vast range of publications, ranging from glossy coffee-table books to cheap paperbacks. The Calcutta Tercentenary Trust, a collaborative effort between the British and Indian governments, is launched on a massive program for the conservation of the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta. Another shared task has been that of the German Max Mueller Bhavan and a group of committed architects in Bombay who have worked out a conservation plan for the fort area in Bombay, so that the skyscrapers of the city should not obscure its "period" quality. In Delhi in 1989, prompt action by the Conservation Society of Delhi thwarted the plan of the local administration to demolish an elegant canopy designed by Edwin Lutyens. Even the post-Independence exuberance in changing names of streets and institutions has died down. The colonial period is now accepted as yet another piece in the mosaic of India's history.
In the 1980s, and not wholly by coincidence, the term "vernacular architecture" began to generate a new interest among architects. The Habitat Award to Laurie Baker has ensured that pre-colonial domestic building will never again be dismissed out of hand, and will be regarded as having much to teach a world increasingly conscious of the need to conserve energy. Urban development agencies, which had in the 1950s labelled these areas as "slums" on account of the density of population, now proposed that these be designated as "conservation areas" and be helped to retain their integrity by imposing building and traffic controls. In terms of people's perceptions, these areas are still seen as places where the poor and the immigrant can always find a berth. That they fostered a sense of community which is absent in the impersonal modern neighbourhoods is also making them appear increasingly attractive to the present generation, which is aware of the transformation of East London and of the Marais in Paris.
7. The People
The second generation of independent India, therefore, has become aware of the historical and regional contexts of its multilayered architecture. But even today "conservation" tends to be equated with "freezing'' a site or a building,making a museum of it. The Archaeological Survey is justifiably apprehensive that uncontrolled tourism access can ruin their properties, which include seventeen World Heritage sites (the largest number within any country). Tourism agencies do not make any substantial contribution to the welfare of these sites. Urban development agencies are impatient of building controls and tend to flout them. What then is to be done to make these areas viable parts of the urban landscape without being camouflaged or vandalised, to make them an intrinsic part of our educational system, since they have lessons for students of history and sociology, of art and the sciences? If what Ghulam Sheikh calls a "multiverse" is to be recognised, the Archaeological Survey, development agencies and promoters of tourism are not enough. Their codes and activities have to be underpinned by a network of voluntary and non-governmental agencies. Here again there has been a positive development. In the 1980s a number of amenity groups came into existence in different towns. Walking tours of the city were initiated by the Conservation Society of Delhi, followed by Bombay and Calcutta. Local chapters of the Indian National Trust (set up in 1984) have done much to generate public awareness. There is a great deal to be done in terms of area and numbers of people (Delhi alone is a city of 12 million people, and still growing!). But the beginnings have been made.
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