By Maneesh Pandey
April 27–29, 2007 Edition
Weekend Today
A city that forgets its past cannot cope with the present. When most of his contemporaries from the TVB School of Habitat Studies, New Delhi, were scouting for profitable careers, Ratish Nanda became obsessed with the idea of bringing monuments back to life. From Kabul, where he’s now in the middle of restoring gardens at Babar’s 16th century tomb, to Kashmere Gate, where he breathed life into St. James Church, the country’s foremost conservation architect has been a constant presence.
His early years in his chosen path were touch. “I started working in this field in 1991, when we still had to make a case for heritage preservation, especially in Delhi, where monuments and heritage buildings were being routinely demolished to provide land for housing and office. India was a country desperately looking to modernize in the early ’90s. It was not the place where you could think of a career in conservation, but today, it looks like a viable option for many.”
Success came after a long spell of obscurity for this Modern School, Vasant Vihar alumnus, who got involved with the Conservation Society of Delhi while studying architecture, and went on to become a full-time conservationist after he went to the University of York, UK, for his master’s degree. After completing his post-graduate studies, Nanda worked as conservation architect with Historic Scotland and co-authored a book on historic Scottish graveyards. But back home, the going wasn’t easy. Nanda started out with heritage walks on Sundays and heritage awareness programs in schools and colleges, and then got involved in an ambitious project unattempted since 1913. Nanda, who was then with the conservation NGO INTACH, completed a list of 1,208 buildings that constituted the city’s “built heritage.”
Around that same time, he was involved in the conservation of 30 monuments in the Jamali Kamali area of Mehrauli and in the restoration of a Lado Sarai gumti, completed in the Lodi times. Nanda’s biggest projects have been the restoration of Humayun’s Tom and the development of Mehrauli Archaeological Park. He also was successful in getting the Lutyens’s Bungalow Zone chosen for the World Monument Fund’s list of 100 most endangered sites in 2003.
“Conservation has defined my life by giving me a purpose,” says Nanda. Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.