The diversity of India is more staggering than most continents: 29 states, seven union territories, 6,400 castes, eight major religions, six ethnic groups celebrating 29 major festivals and life itself, despite so many daily hardships. Added to this is the sheer size of the land mass and the length of India’s history, with archaeological remains that go back over 5,000 years. More recent ruins, too, are spread across a sub-continent the size of Europe. India is perhaps the only nation-state today that can boast of a continuous civilisation active since ancient times. However, Japan may offer something similar on a much smaller scale. This creates its own problems of overconfidence and even complacency! Before the early 20th Century, when the Governor-General Lord Curzon formed the Archaeological Survey of India, ruins were allowed to fall, disintegrate, or be vandalised for other construction. Every ruler built in his name for that was considered one’s private piece of posterity. Restoring what one’s ancestors had built obviously gave less satisfaction or merit to a civilisation keen to build and exhibit its civilisational creativity and might. Because India lives so much in the present and is more concerned about the important daily chores and travails for sustenance, the past is left far behind. The many invaders who came – Greeks, Scythians, Kushans, Huns, Parthians, Afghans, Turks, Mongols – never entirely achieved their plans. Their proselytising was met with an unequal dose of military and humanitarian resistance, meaning that the invaders’ zeal ended with their being assimilated. India swallowed all, and though the ravages of war led to a lot of wilful destruction of its built and intangible heritage, India also became richer with wide-ranging influences from Persian, Greek, and Turkish to Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, French, and British.
All these need attention in different ways. What is of national importance comes under the Archaeological Survey of India. That which is of State importance comes under the State Archaeological Departments—but a lot more ruins remain in every corner of India, which we all, as responsible citizens, have a duty to save for the future.
Discover how Neemrana, through its extensive private sector heritage restoration for tourism, has set a unique example for others to follow.
Some forty years have passed, racing about full throttle in my adult present. And of these, some thirty-five I spent willfully sifting through the sands of Rajasthan in private discovery. Even today, it seems that my days flow over with the bounty of a clockwork which ticks two to a second. And so two lives have been lived in one – or even three or four.
As a historian, I’ve come to believe that history is not repeating itself. Instead, it’s hurtling forward, burying the past faster than ever. A decade’s worth of events now unfolds in a year, and a year’s worth of global achievements in a week. This rapid pace underscores the urgent need for heritage preservation.
All those amazing people who made this overlapping journey through my lifetime will slowly be layered over as certainly as will I. This nostalgia of my travels can, at best, be a partial un-layering. I’ve raced ahead continuously, occupying my present with many preoccupations, chiefly reawakening or telling of others’ pasts. But a lot depends on who tells each story and how. This time, it’s me telling my own tale.
How the Informal Building Began
In 1984, quite by chance, I met a student I had taught briefly at the Doon School. He wanted to sell me land, but I was looking for a large tree to make a tree house! Even as a child, I had wanted to set up homes in every abandoned caravanserai on the road or in the forlorn structure whenever we picnicked off the road. This search in the outskirts of Delhi in 1984 took me to a fantastic site at the foot of the Aravalli Hills. Some ruins stood there – picturesque and poetic enough for me to lose my heart to them. I first bought one and began to make it liveable with the most straightforward necessary changes or interventions. There was a lot of learning to do for a painter-poet-historian and graphic designer. However, being a non-architect helped me find original solutions. When I needed to buy wood for the rafters where roofs had fallen, the locals told me of white Neem, Azadirachta indica, a wood safe from termites, so I hunted for and got that. While cement was mainly used in urban and rural construction, this ruined haveli (a house built around a courtyard) was built in lime mortar. This was available nearby, though there was a dwindling demand. I also found an abandoned millstone to grind it. Now, only a camel was needed, which seemed no problem. So before one knew it, everything was in place as old masons who could work in lime mortar appeared with the same ease as young labour.
In India, the unskilled learn skills very quickly. Now, after 38 years of undertaking projects in the north, west, centre and south, it is reassuring to say that master masons and craftspeople in wood, stone, and metal and for construction in brick or stonemasonry work in stone or brick, were available all over. This is what made our work possible. The fact that the new generation, even when semi-literate, learned fast in their apprenticeship – brings hope for the future. The sons of the masons and crafts persons are the ones who will now carry forward the skills and techniques. This is considered upward mobility. So, the future of heritage restoration is in good hands, and the quality will continue to improve.
While it is so much easier to work in India, where there is a lack of awareness and regulations and ready availability of masons, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians who still learn by the old system of apprenticeship under a master (as well as in technical institutes), there can be an incredible mess if anyone insensitive to the past buys an old building and touches it indiscriminately. It needs to be clarified that Neemrana did not restore any «listed» buildings, but only those considered unimportant. This underscores the need for sensitivity and respect in all heritage restoration efforts.
As mentioned before, the central and state governments still look after the important ones. If the buildings Neemrana put life into from their different graveyards were levelled to the ground, it would have been a significant loss but not a breach of Indian law!
In the 30-plus projects that Neemrana completed across India, the one thing we found in common was the curiosity of people to ask, «Why are you wasting money on this ruin?» Where no plans or drawings exist, the sixth sense guides all those who work in India with their hands! This skill for ingenious improvisation is called jugad. Suppose you add an excellent Western liberal education with a keen sense of observation. In that case, which amounts to constant learning – plus an aptitude for geometry, art, and 3-D structures, you get the Neemrana brand of restoration and revitalisation. We changed the end use of the existing structures and made sensitive additions in the same genre or idiom. For example, the organic growth of Neemrana Fort-Palace, a building constantly added to since 1464, seems to spring out of a self-propelled design language of a long, continuous civilisation. I now turn to a few specific projects from the two dozen we have carried out.
Project One: The Khohar Haveli, 18th Century
How little ruin is valued in India can be ascertained from the price of the first haveli, which I bought for Rs. 30,000,- in 1984, the equivalent of €5,000- in 2019! Although it cost many times that amount to introduce concealed plumbing and electricity, the restoration cost was still much less expensive than building afresh. The volume of materials used in the sheer thickness of the stone walls built in lime mortar would scare away a modern builder.
Since this courtyard home or haveli was built in the wilderness, it was much like a little fortress with no windows on the outside and a single door at the entrance (Fig. 2). Some of the arched niches in the rooms and courtyards (Fig. 3) were ideal for being pierced and made into windows.
These openings were measured, and old windows were sourced from homes in Shekhavati, where a reverse process had begun: people were breaking up old homes to build modern ones that brought them both more comfort and new social prestige. Francis Wacziarg and I had tried as hard as we could to stop this process, getting Shekhavati declared as a historic zone, helping form Intach and involving the Marwaris who owned the havelis as well as the thakurs who had abandoned tier forts.
Water was a great challenge in the Khohar Haveli, as the sources in the village had only salty, brackish samples. Six wells had been dug in the past with no success. So the women would go with pitchers and fill them from a water well some 500 metres away. I got a water diviner (in whom I must confess I had no faith) to come and guess where I could drill for fresh water. The first attempt failed, and I laughed at myself for accepting primitive beliefs. Still, I dared to try again because I had bought the haveli and needed to put it to some use. At the second attempt, fresh water appeared to be my good fortune, and the village took this as a good omen to welcome me to be one among them. Then, a cobra appeared from a pitcher in a wall of my ruin. But rather than scare anyone away, it was taken as an auspicious sign of prosperity, as snakes are supposed to guard treasures!
All the furniture – the charpoys to sleep in, the low chairs used by the ladies to churn butter from milk, the benches, stone bowls, etc. – were sourced from junk shops and antique dealers in Rajasthan and Gujarat. Placed back in the kind of house from where they had been originally sold, the furniture and artefacts recreated the lost past effortlessly. I didn’t take the modern option of using today’s interventions in contemporary materials and designs. But this aesthetic return to a past lifestyle caught everyone’s fancy. The Khohar Haveli appeared in all the Indian design and architecture magazines and the Architectural Digest. This first haveli now belongs to my closest childhood friend Yogi Vaid, and I have helped his son Ambar Vaid re-restore it to be more liveable for today
On one of our early discovery drives in Shekhavati, Francis Wacziarg and I met the moustachioed Praduman Singh in Mandawa and mistaken him for a farmer till his Mayo College English amazed and befriended us. At his asking, we called on his historian father Kanwar Devi Singh and his family In Jaipur. We showed them slides of the frescoes from their village, and they all seemed surprised – even his painter son Randhir Vikram Singh had never taken the frescoes seriously in the land of his ancestors. Kesri Singh was still pushing files in a bank while the least ‘Rajput’ of the four brothers, Bhanu Pratap, was setting up a garment unit. Like all the nobility of the area, except Dundlod, they hadn’t considered the possibility of putting their past to commercial use. Over the next many years, we were to give them new eyes to see their strengths as we helped to build on them so that their traditions would survive the onslaught and levelling of modernism.
We called on the octogenarian Jhabarmal Sharma, who had written in Hindi the histories of two of Jaipur’s biggest thikanas – Khetri (in 1922) and Sikar (in 1927). He was living history himself, and we benefitted greatly from our conversations with him.
Inspired by his writings, we made a roadless pilgrimage to the cenotaph of Rao Shekha-ji, who died in 1488 at Ralawata from wounds inflicted while fighting the caurs, who had insulted a woman of his clan. Wedged between two earth walls, our tyses skid on the sands. It was warm, and we left some flowers on a marble plaque with some money for whoever the caretaker of this wilderness may have been. We felt the pride of being wandering Shekhawats!
Back in Delhi, we met Raja Sardar Singh of Khetri, aged around 90, who seemed to be the last survivor from a period he had clearly lived in and also seen draw to an end. He lived with a certain Lady Manning, having finally made peace with his British colonisers only in bed. At 9 pm sharp, we met him at his grand Sardar Patel Marg residence, up an impressive spiral stairway. That, we were told, was his first working appointment, as he slept all day and worked only by night. He arranged for us to stay our first comfortable night in Shekhavati at the Sukh Mahal of Khetri, and he told us to write to him about our plans for his palaces, which we discussed. These had partly been donated to the Ramakrishna Mission for Swami Vivekananda had used them to stay there. We drafted a letter for a proposed museum of Shekhavati and then got involved with the creation of Intach. We formed its first chapter and organised a seminar in Mandawa with Sir Bernard Fielden of ICROM where Lady Wade Gery, the wife of the British High Commissioner, played an important role. Since Raja Sardar Singh was an Anglophile, we wanted to involve the British Government and their expertise in creating this Shekhavati museum. But before this could materialise, he passed away, and his home came to be administered by a trust.
Seven years had passed in this Shekhavati adventure. The restoration of the havelis and the revival of fresco painting was never as we had imagined – mainly because of the problem of uniting the widespread, divided Marwari families, but it became an international destination. Today, it is heartening to know that the new generation like Angad Mandawa, as well as others like Shruti Poddar from the Marwari community in Ramgarh, have joined this movement, and one can only wish them to continue success.
The latest Project: Tijara Fort-Palace, 19th Century
The Tijara Fort Palace was a splendid ruin that I first saw when a Jain friend suggested I visit Tijara village for its grand havelis built at a moment of trading prosperity. These had been abandoned when the original inhabitants migrated in the 19th Century as the British began regulating trade. But on that visit to Tijara, I couldn’t but notice that a more incredible wonder sat on the hill (fig. 7). Later I was to discover that this was an unfinished fort-palace with Rajput-Afghan and British-colonial borrowings in its design. This, too, was to be my tryst with destiny.
Though thirteen years of construction had left enough clues of the plan for us to follow, no drawings existed. There were three palace structures. The Hawa Mahal, or Palace of Winds, had a Rajput-Afghan domed interior with jharokhas and colonial pillars with voluted capitals like ornamented snails, which lined the verandahs on all four sides. The half-built Rani Mahal, or palace of the queens, was designed inwards towards a large courtyard with no windows looking out. This was both for security and for the privacy of the queens. Then there was the grand Mardana Mahal, or the palace of the Maharaja and his male courtiers and retinue. This was the last completed, as only the court offices below were built when Maharaja Balwant Singh died suddenly. His personal quarters on the first floor were yet to be built. The vast rooftop terrace only had copper pipes for a fountain in the middle of a char-bagh style roof garden. Without any plans, the first phase was to secure the palaces. A fortified wall had to be built, not against cannons firing but to keep out intruding animals and humans. On three sides, at least half of the fortifications were missing. These were built first – with three large gateways. Two gateways at the lower level were designed to enter and exit cars, leading to a newly created reception stairway and ramp to the Hawa Mahal, where grey granite elephants were placed to evoke the splendour of a royal welcome. A third gateway, higher than the other two, was built to access the gardens and residential places.
As Rajasthan is very hot in summer – where temperatures soar up to 50° C- we used some traditional techniques to cool the roofs of the rooms. Hundreds of earthen pitchers, turned by hand on the potters’ wheels, were purchased and put face down in five to six layers to create elongated domes. The air gaps within the pitchers can bring down the temperature substantially. At the same time, wide parapets protect the walls from the warmest light from noon and after. Vaulted roofs were built at lower levels to retain the heritage feel.
The rocky central court of the queen’s palace was a bottomless pit with no walkway around it. It was created with old wrought iron railings imported from Glasgow in the British colonial days. The geometry of the exterior architecture and the semblance of a palace inside began to show when doors, windows, and furniture were put in their places.
It would not be easy to imagine what the original builder and his artisans had planned for the sudden gradient of the hill. Would it have been filled up to create a ground for soldiers to parade and drill in? Would it have been terraced? But without the ease of pumping water with electricity, it would not have been easy to envisage gardens in the early 19th Century. However, we were lucky that the 20th Century changed this for us. Just before India gained independence in 1947, the British had set out on an elaborate water conservation project for many parts of Rajasthan. A long dam had been built to retain all the water that flowed from the neighbouring hills. As a result of this foresight, the water level at Tijara was only about 20 metres below the soil.
In contrast, it is from 75 to 150 metres in other parts of semi-arid Rajasthan. This gave me the luxury to dream up and cut seven-tiered hanging gardens on the rocky hill of Tijara. It took us three years just to cut the rocks, build the retaining walls and steps, fill good earth and grow what seems like hundreds of metres of grass. When one sees pictures of where we began, it is hard to imagine standing on that unfriendly, barren hill where we had to blast holes to grow the trees that make shaded boulevards and the “maharaja’s gardens” today.
The effort made and learning gained from working in different Indian States. Sites have been advantageous for the Neemrana team, who knew nothing was impossible if our discipline and Indian skills were always up to the task. It is no longer possible to work informally like this in Europe and America because they have ironed out their time warps. They cannot build as quickly in past techniques because they are ‘dead’ civilisations which have made a break with their past. But for those in India who are as crazy as us and feel the creative need to build, the country and countryside lie wide open. The many people who write to us or those I meet at our properties tell me Neemrana symbolises that optimism. I sincerely hope that this will raise many ruins that will be made sustainable for the future.
Courtesy The Sublime India Issue by Vissionaire
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