In his Independence Day addresses delivered from the Red Fort, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been exhorting fellow citizens to preserve the memory of those who overthrew colonial rule. Even as his reminders have been timely, his tactics — enumerating a few freedom fighters’ names and including some of their words in his speeches — are as well-worn as the Archaeological Survey of India’s (ASI) approach to conserving the nation’s built heritage. With a few exceptions, the ASI has largely been content with selecting monuments, isolating them, repairing them and occasionally polishing them. Given the enormity and complexity of India’s past and the risk of large sections of it fading from our collective consciousness, it is time to articulate a more thoughtful and holistic approach to the conservation of ASI monuments.
Acknowledging that the current frameworks informing conservation are the result of certain historical circumstances is important. Driven by a conviction that edifices, if properly analysed, can unlock histories of communities and thus allow for governing them more effectively, colonial officers located and catalogued pillars, rock-cut caves, stupas, temples, mosques, citadels, water reservoirs, and other edifices, promulgated historical preservation laws, and prescribed procedures for maintaining their structural integrity. John Marshall’s Conservation Manual (1923) advocated extensive repair of ancient monuments and reshaping their immediate surroundings into gardens.
Marshall’s handbook continues to inflect the preservation of about 3,600 ASI sites, along with new laws, amendments, and provisions of international agreements. Notwithstanding these efforts, field surveys, audit reports, and court rulings establish that many protected monuments are falling apart. Recommendations of a conservation policy enunciated in 2014 are being irregularly followed. Not surprisingly, the government has begun to invite corporations to adopt monuments.
A road map for conserving monuments
Studying the writings of modern India builders is one way to begin articulating a new approach to conserving monuments. Consider lessons provided by Sarvodaya, Mahatma Gandhi’s transcreation of a collection of essays by John Ruskin, a Victorian art critic. His rendering accentuated the art critic’s advocacy of improving the social condition of all individuals irrespective of their backgrounds, discussed the importance of all vocations, and endorsed his admiration of craftspersons and their labour, even as it critiqued Ruskin’s valorisation of Britain’s imperial ambitions. Might the lessons that Gandhi learned and promoted inspire the ASI’s new conservation manual to propose the following: when an edifice is conserved not only is its structural fabric to be tended, but the lives of all those who live around it and visit it are to be improved; and interpretive materials at an edifice should enable visitors to appreciate its builders’ sophistication, inventiveness, and resilience.
Conservation is a shared concern of contemporary practitioners of diverse disciplines including translators, health-care professionals, wildlife biologists, mycologists, and economists. By convening dialogues among and between these experts at various venues, listening to how they comprehend terms such as repair, preservation, and restoration and observing how audiences respond to them, the ASI can identify more principles of their new conservation manual.
Translators today are attentive to the style and mood that the authors of source texts have sought to nurture and are grasping how sentences are formed and meanings generated in unalike languages. They are recognising that connotations change over time. Thus, their outputs are intricate works in dialogical relationships with assorted pasts, and not obsequious reproductions of texts initially written in other languages. Can such viewpoints inspire the ASI conservation manual to recommend that archaeologists acknowledge their distance between the deep past and contemporary moment and make their physical interventions of a monument’s fabric clearer for visitors to discern? Contemporary translators sophisticated thinking of a particular language aptness to render anew a certain text may also be used to inform a clause in the new manual: that periodic reviews be undertaken of the aptness of preservation materials to ensure that they do not harm historical fabrics.
Varied perspectives are important
Humans preserve themselves by saving memories. Listening to divergent perspectives allows memories to be exercised and sustains their propagation. Such insights should inspire the ASI to study how visitors are using protected monuments today and craft conservation principles thereafter. One way to do so would be to offer visitors opportunities to participate in open-ended conversations about their experiences.
Wildlife biologists are also thinking about protection. They reason that supporting a range of interactions occurring among and between sundry biotic and abiotic elements in an ecosystem and exchanges between networks are more efficacious strategies for restoring waning populations than safeguarding individual animals. Following this line of reasoning, might the ASI conservation manual recommend that archaeologists pay more attention to linkages between monuments and water bodies, fields, deserts, forests and settlements around them and deliberate whether certain boundary walls may be dismantled.
Mycologists have found that fungi are far from unsettling sights. Fungi are powerful agents that break down organic matter, form mutually beneficial relationships with plants including helping them access nutrients, cause diseases in humans but also provide medicines, and help produce food. Such discernments can stimulate the ASI’s manual to encourage the conservation of thousands of small, half-forgotten ancient monuments strewn across the country. Old city walls, cisterns, cenotaphs and dovecotes can have multiple benefits for communities living around them including securing neighbourhoods, recharging ground water aquifers, bringing visitors who might boost local economies, providing habitats and creating public spaces.
Finally, contemporary economists’ findings may also be generative. They have shown that value is produced by how things work and not just by their appearance. Following this dictum, the conservation manual may propose that it is more important for archaeologists to restore a haveli’s natural ventilation systems than to regularly repaint its façade. Emphasising a particular resource’s scarcity is another way in which value is created. Thus, further research should be undertaken to advance our knowledge of what makes ASI monuments sites of national significance. The new knowledge be used to justify larger budgets for their protection. The economic concept of creative destruction as an impetus for growth may also be utilised. For example, it can guide the transformation of old temples submerged in the reservoirs of large dams into laboratories for developing and testing technologies to document underwater sites and forge innovative alliances between historians, geologists and marine biologists.
The citizen’s role
In a country as diverse as ours, conservation’s meaning and value are always going to be positional and contested. Thus, all of us as ordinary citizens can help shape a new conservation manual by becoming more aware of our own locations and actions. We can also assist by further educating ourselves. Learning to read the language of the stones that monuments are built of, will allow us to listen to stories they tell and amplify largely silenced voices. We will also be able to glean builders’ biases and use monuments as mirrors to confront our prejudices. Ultimately acquiring such literacy will empower us to discover India as a monument without walls and preserve ourselves as we shape a new future.
Nachiket Chanchani is an Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, U.S.
Published – August 18, 2025 12:16 am IST