by REVATI LAUL
Ratish Nanda PHOTO/Ishan Tankha
In 1997, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture stepped into a part of Delhi that was sandwiched between a busy railway station and a large urban slum, Nizamuddin. As a microcosm of the city, the area presented a slew of challenges. Seven hundred years of continuous habitation had by now included a Muslim ghetto with no sanitation or water, a ghetto that spilled over into the most visited pilgrim site in the city — the dargah of the 14th century Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya. It’s also the place where qawwali was invented and where its creator, poet-philosopher Amir Khusrau lived and died. Very close to the dargah was the tomb of the second Mughal emperor Humayun. Parts of its fine red sandstone were chipping and even with a lofty status of the World Heritage Site, the tomb looked like a bedecked bride jilted by time. The Aga Khan Trust decided that if this part of Delhi’s heritage was to be brought back to life, it could not be piecemeal. It had to be all or nothing. In case of the former, the area to be restored would include Humayun’s Tomb, Nizamuddin Dargah, the old botanical gardens, 50 other monuments and, most of all, the culture of the people of Nizamuddin.
Restoration, in the eyes of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, has meant urban renewal. In the past six years, this massive project has been steered by a conservation architect who has an iron will with an appetite for complexity. Having done restoration work in Scotland, Turkey, Nepal and Iran, Ratish Nanda spent four years in volatile Afghanistan, restoring the Bagh-e-Babur or the gardens that served as the resting place of the first Mughal Emperor, Babur. It’s only fitting that his next project was second Mughal emperor Humayun’s tomb. Nanda, 39, tells Revati Laul how the job has been a heady mix of old and new traditions — from reviving old Mughal craft traditions to building a gymnasium for women in Nizamuddin basti.
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What is the Aga Khan Trust for Culture’s idea of conservation?And how has Nizamuddin in Delhi defined it?
I think the underlying belief is that heritage, whether as an economic or a cultural site, is often the only asset in the hands of communities living in historic cities. The approach of the Aga Khan Trust is to integrate conservation with development. The Nizamuddin area where we work in Delhi, for instance, is the densest ensemble of medieval Islamic buildings but also has 700 years of living culture. So for us, the music is as important as the built heritage. Qawwali was invented in Nizamuddin. So we can’t be working there without working on Amir Khusrau and his legacy. Therefore, we have the Jashn-e-Khusrau festival of Sufi music once a year. But we also can’t be working in Nizamuddin without benefiting the 30,000 people who live there. To see these people struggle with problems of malnutrition, economic deprivation, lack of education, health and sanitation is troublesome. So the large urban renewal project aims to improve the quality of life of local inhabitants while improving the visitor experience for the millions of pilgrims and tourists that visit. Through the project that we started in 1997, we have done all sorts of things. Our partnership is with the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the Central Public Works Department.
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So what have you built for the community in Nizamuddin as part of urban renewal?
Twenty-two percent of this population did not have toilets. And this is an area that is visited by pilgrims as well. So we built public toilets. We also connected private toilets to the sewage system. We have almost rebuilt the municipal corporation school. There were 150 kids attending school when we started, now there are 600. Each kid goes through three hours of art education. The school works almost like a community centre. There is an NIIT centre for computer education that we facilitated. There are after-school tuitions free of cost and English-speaking classes. Then we adopted the polyclinic that the municipal corporation had set up. Thirty-four thousand patients visited the pathology lab we set up there last year. We have vocational training courses. Over a 1,000 members of the community have been trained. There are over 15 different training programmes on offer — from building construction to home-based crafts like bag-making, embroidery, sanjhi (the art form based on paper cutouts), computers, carpentry, electrical training and many others.
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