Word: mughals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...bright, bustling 52-year-old known for her uncompromising sense of purpose, Thakur found her calling as a conservationist when she moved from Madras?"not a beautiful city"?to New Delhi in the 1970s to study architecture. Awed by the 2,000 Mughal, Hindu and British buildings in the capital, she considered becoming a tour guide until her professor persuaded her to write a thesis on Nizamuddin, the city's Muslim quarter. She soon realized she was the first to systematically chronicle the area and was effectively "rediscovering a city." After stumbling upon a whole palace complex in the Mehrauli...
...historic buildings where they live can be properly preserved. And, she adds, preservation is often complicated by politics. The most socially divisive issue of the past two decades, for example, was a dispute over Ayodhya in northern India, where in 1992 Hindu mobs tore down a 16th century Mughal mosque they believed to be built over Lord Ram's legendary temple; the furor over the site sparked riots that killed 2,000 people. The ASI found itself entangled in the controversy in 2003 when, under orders from the then Hindu nationalist government, it produced a grandiose, artist's impression...
...Amazingly, Thakur has retained this same sense of urgency and outrage even in the face of decades of disappointment. Taking her latest class of students on a tour of Mehrauli recently, she showed them the mosques, bath houses and orchards of the last Mughal Emperor and a tomb that British resident Sir Thomas Metcalf converted into a summer house and terraced garden. "Oh, God, oh, God," she repeats softly at the sight of one poorly executed renovation after another. "We've lost so much already," she laments. And yet, as always, Thakur determines to keep fighting. "It's a fantastic...
...density of historic remains; yet in New Delhi, familiarity has bred not pride but contempt. Every year, more ruins vanish, victims of unscrupulous property developers or unthinking bureaucrats. Sometimes no other great city seems less loved or cared for. Occasionally there is an outcry as the tomb of the Mughal poet Zauq is discovered to have disappeared under a municipal urinal or the haveli courtyard house of his great rival Ghalib is revealed to have been turned into a coal store; but most of the losses go unrecorded. I find it heartbreaking: every time I revisit one of my favorite...
...Part of the problem is that there is little effective legislation protecting ancient monuments, and while archaeological sites are granted nominal guardianship by the ASI, there is no system of architectural listing, and India's rich heritage of late Mughal and colonial domestic architecture is mostly unprotected by law. In the competition between development and heritage, the latter inevitably gives...