It’s close to lunchtime and the sun is beating down on us, but noted conservation architect Ratish Nanda is in his element, guiding me through Sunder Nursery, the meticulously curated heritage park.
The park was opened to the public last month after a nearly decade-long restoration and redevelopment project. It sits next to Humayun’s Tomb, which, along with Nizamuddin Basti just across the road, forms the core of the 44-year-old Nanda’s work as chief executive of Aga Khan Trust for Culture in India.
Over the last decade, Nanda and a team of over a 100 people have transformed this corner of the city, originally designed by late landscape architect M. Shaheer, into what they now call Delhi’s ‘Central Park’.
Dressed in a blue kurta, white pyjamas, and sandals, Nanda takes me past pockets of thick greenery that make up ‘the city’s first arboretum’. A pair of peacocks flies overhead. In place of the mounds of rubble and illegal construction that once took up room here, the park is now home to 80 species of birds, 280 species of trees, a garden amphitheatre equipped with a rainwater harvesting system, sunken gardens, waterbodies, nursery beds and six restored monuments over 90 acres.
The central axis — the primary pedestrian spine inspired by traditional Mughal gardens and Persian carpet patterns — is lined with fountains and leads to the restored monument of Sunder Burj. Past the intricate jaali -work, my eyes travel to the ceiling that displays painstakingly redone stone carvings. I can’t help but exclaim.
Nanda looks pleased. “Exactly. I was waiting for that reaction. That’s what conservation is all about.” I think back at the conversation we had earlier about which side of the conservation debate Nanda sits on and why.
Parks as refuge
When we had met an hour ago in his office on the fringes of the Sunder Nursery grounds, Nanda was contemplative even as he played the gracious host. He offered me a coffee, which he proceeded to make himself. With the French Press left to do its work on a wooden rack lined with jars filled with a variety of coffee blends and tea leaves, he settled into a chair to give me a sense of the work he does and why.
“When I was in charge of Bagh-e Babur (in Kabul)” — he points to a framed photograph of the heritage park hanging on the wall to my left — “... a lot of people would say, why the hell are you building a park, we are a war-torn society, we want schools and healthcare. Today, 35,000 people go to the park every week. So these parks are really a refuge. We hope Sunder Nursery too will improve the quality of life here. It is built as a city park to rival the Mughal Gardens in Rashtrapati Bhavan,” he says. But Nanda doesn’t view any one heritage initiative in isolation because “conservation cannot be limited to monuments.
It needs to be holistic and take into account health, education, road improvement, museums, ecology, everything.”
Often, Nanda ends up working seven days a week. How does he sustain the energy to work on projects with timelines of 10 to 20 years? A certain kind of pacing and understanding of the work at hand is what it takes, he says.
“What we are trying to do here is not change the world. We are trying to provide a model that other people can follow. These things take time. The time to design, negotiate, get approvals, implement, and put in place a management system. These are not little interventions, these are major, mega projects that usually NGOs don’t undertake.” It requires layers of work, and working in partnership with the government.
So, do regime changes affect his work? “We have no political agenda. We are here to restore heritage that we see as an economic asset. Already, we have demonstrated it by a 1,000% increase in ticket sales at Humayun’s Tomb.”
It’s a team
As he tells me about his effort to work with the same material and the same tools as the original builders did to bring back the essence of the structure, Nanda attends to our coffee. Is it too strong? Too cold?
Nanda isn’t comfortable basking in glory, even though his is a recognisable face on the culture circuit.“This office has at least 30 different disciplines working together, which is needed in a historic urban context. You can’t have the spotlight on me because it is not my work. It is the work of a hundred people,” he insists. I quiz him on a piece in The Herald (Scotland) from 20 years ago that quoted him saying, “Conservation has changed my life. For me it is sacred. You are dealing with someone else’s work. You have to put your own ego to one side. There’s a strange satisfaction which keeps propelling you.” Does he still feel this way? Nanda chuckles. He was “young and immature” back then, he says.
What drew him to heritage conservation? “I studied architecture and I was repulsed by what we are doing to our cities and quite taken in by how buildings used to be built just 50 years ago.” It is not a straightforward career, quite like photography, “where you have to look for the light, look for the right frame, and you have to bully me into posing,” he half jokes. “You need a passion towards heritage but also commitment towards your nation. It’s not just another career.”
A plan for Delhi
One of the main objectives has been to demonstrate what is possible, and how conservation should be done in an Indian context. “The conservation movement is more concerned with criticising what is not happening or what is going wrong. I think there has been very little private or non-governmental engagement with conservation. That’s changing rapidly. Now there are various government schemes, and the Ministry of Tourism and Ministry of Urban Development are involving non-state players,” he says.
Nanda turns thoughtful when I ask him how he views Delhi today. “Delhi is still very fortunate to have enclaves and a lot of heritage. But we need to figure out what we want the city to be. We should plan future development while being respectful of the past.”
What frustrates him is lost heritage, like a monument ruined beyond recognition, beyond repair. “When the evidence of what it was once is lost, all you can do is preserve. Preservation is not a virtue. It is majboori (compulsion), for the lack of a better word. When you cannot bring back the vision of the original builder, then you cannot ensure the structural stability of the building.”
This brings us to the question of what for him is the true spirit of conservation — which remains a hotly-debated subject that swings between restoration and mere preservation. His pride at watching visitors stare open-mouthed at the restored craftsmanship of the monuments he took charge of makes the answer plain. But he isn’t close-minded, inviting independent peer reviews. “Conservation is not mathematics; it is determined by the significance of the monument. There are a hundred ways to fix a building.”
The freelance writer is a lover of cakes, chai, bookshops and good yarns.
