Couple of years ago, I attended a talk in New Delhi on restoration of the Red Fort. While I do not have any particular interest in the architecture of the Red Fort, and I knew the talk was organised and delivered mostly by architects, I was drawn to because the evening was to include a reading by William Dalrymple. I sped to the venue after work and got the best seat in the house.
I didn't have any expectations about how it would go. I thought they would make a case for restoration by relying on romantic metaphors and poetic versions of the history around el Fuerte Rojo. So it's fair to say I was surprised when the architects presented information about the Red Fort using slides with scientific diagrams and such. Blueprints, formulae, and so on. Physics, something I deliberately minimised contact with for majority of my school years, was the last thing I had expected to encounter.
I couldn't at all relate to what they were saying, even though I am wholly in favour of protecting monuments. That's because every ounce of the Red Fort's charm for me lies not in the red bricks or the dimensions of its arches and corridors, but rather in the life associated with it.
By the time they finished, I was craving to hear Dalrymple. He read from The Last Mughal. He read with passion and spiritedness, passages about how Ghalib felt about mangoes and how evenings in Chandni Chowk were steeped the fragrance of ittar, smoke from hookahs, and the intoxication of wine, as Ghalib and Zauq, under a canopy formed by the appreciation of listeners, contested for the position of 'poet of note'. His readings were evocative and powerful enough to ship me off on the sea of imagination to a time when the Red Fort was still alive. Not once did he resort to trigonometry, geometry or other mathematical devices to illustrate the significance of the structure in question.
I was surprised at their having chosen Dalrymple to aid them in their task, since he was alluding to something they hadn't even managed to get a whiff of. They were suggesting the Red Fort should be cared for because of the building's architectural genius. Whereas for Dalrymple, the Red Fort was of importance because it served as a backdrop for the lives that were lived both within and around it.
I find restoration itself to be a ticklish subject. Two questions seem pertinent- restoration for whom, and to what extent? If one wishes future generations to also be able to take pleasure from fragments of the past, it is a noble enough idea. Preservation is aimed at accomplishing just that. Restoration goes many steps further. While I disapprove of defacing monuments and approve of efforts to preserve them as they are, I am uncomfortable with the use of cement and paint to patch up cracks in buildings that have been around for centuries. I was mortified, for example, when I walked into Lodhi Gardens one evening to find that they had done up one of the structures in some ugly pink paint that they had hoped would resemble sandstone. I think cracks add character to old buildings. Every chunk that chips off due to the natural passage of time, adds greater depth to the history of the structure. Efforts aimed at restoration smack of an attempt to deny the passage of time. "Back to the way it was before" is an impossible position. Even if one managed to restore the Red Fort to its exact state at the time of the Mughal empire, the essence of that time would still remain lost. You may recreate a structure exactly as it was, and you may stand back with pride, only to realise that the thing out there is nothing like the thing within.
Loss itself is not a negative. Indeed it is one of the certainties of human existence. I personally regard it as a friend, a constant companion. But rather than resign ourselves to the void it leaves behind, might we look at the value it adds to our lives?
We nostalgically reflect only on that which has been lost. And the very thing being reflected on is changed by the act of reflection, for what is viewed through the lens of memory is not the thing in itself, but a representation of the thing. The picture that Dalrymple presents for example, of people chatting on the steps of the Jama Masjid at dusk, is made richer first by his own imagination of it, and then by the imagination of each reader who reads it. None of these people were actually there, yet each has a unique image of what it must have been like. Should we not just let these multiple imaginations prevail? Should we not let time go by and allow our memories to alter the impressions of the past?
So lovely is the recreation by memory of a lost beloved that I confess to harbouring a wish that I were the one lost. Just so that I too may be the subject of fond remembrance, for a moment or two.
