Word: thakur
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar is not even on the list of protected monuments. Traffic swarms around its walls, staining and rotting them with acrid fumes, while a Sikh group from England has covered many of the original murals with what conservationist Gurmeet Rai, a former student of Thakur, describes as "avocado-green bathroom tiles and plastic stickers" and has regilded the famous dome using cement, which she says is trapping moisture in the walls...
...into shrines to their own gods. A day's drive away, Nalanda University, the wellspring from which ideas of Nirvana and reincarnation washed across the world from the 5th to 12th centuries, is nowadays a forgotten pile of bricks and weeds. Faced with this overwhelming array of neglected treasures, Thakur concedes: "Sometimes it's all so depressing, I don't even want to think about...
...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...
...Walking through Nizamuddin's back alleys, past tombs that have been converted into shops or houses, Thakur acknowledges that conservation is inevitably an afterthought in a developing country. India is "so crowded with people and monuments," she says, that it's hard to justify evicting families so that the 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...
...India's biggest problem, says Thakur, is that it lacks the manpower and financial resources to manage its historic riches. The ASI employs no qualified architects or conservationists, and monument care is split between a confusing cluster of local and national authorities, NGOs, religious orders, businesses and individuals. The Taj and its immediate environs come under six government agencies: the ministries of culture, environment and tourism, two city authorities and one state body. Thakur is careful not to condemn the ASI or the ministries, describing their staff as sincere professionals faced with an almost impossible task. But she also complains...