Saving The Past

Conservation of urban heritage has come a long way, though there is still some to go.

- Shail Desai

When Vikas Dilawari started his practice in 1989, architectural conservation was a relatively unknown occupation in India. The first project that came to him, a few years later in 1993, was from a Parsi trust that commissioned the restoration of the Byramjee Jejeebhoy Parsi Charitable Institution in the Charni Road area of Mumbai. Besides these private entities, there were few supporting the conservation of heritage structures at the time.

There were no guidelines in place either, besides what Dilawari had grasped while pursuing a masters degree in conservation at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi and then at the University of York. That first project is something that his team maintains even today, even as the field itself has made rapid progress, which in turn has helped such heritage structures survive amid the pressures of urban development.

It wasn’t until 1995 that the Heritage Regulations for Greater Bombay were put in place by the Maharashtra government, which turned out to be the first set of guidelines for architectural conservation in the country. The following year, the Heritage Conservation Society was established by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority to give their recommendations on conservation affairs. Mumbai became a pilot project of sorts and, in the next few years, similar bodies were set up and regulations implemented around the country.

“Until 1995, the only agency that was doing conservation was the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). And they were primarily looking at monuments and sites that were not really in use, such as forts, temples and monuments. There was no other mechanism to protect historic buildings,” says conservation architect Abha Narain Lambah. “What happened that year was a paradigm shift towards conservation. And that was a game changer.”