Preface
Fig 1.1 Karan Grover at Sadan Shah Gate
The year 1987 saw the first interna-
The five plateaus of Pavagadh were explored and connections were established between them cutting across centuries, religious beliefs and architectural and archeological typologies.
tional intervention in heritage conservation at Champaner-Pavagadh. Encouraged by Sir Bernard Fieldon, a noted world authority on conservation, an extensive workshop took place in collaboration with the ASI (the Archaeological Survey of India), INTACH (the Indian National Trust for Art, and the Heritage Trust). Sixtyseven experts from across the globe and India charted a future direction for the Heritage Trust. Dr. Jokiehto from ICCROM, Rome, concurrently conducted a workshop on Heritage Conservation Education addressing faculty and staff of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. For three days the medieval erstwhile capital of Gujarat came alive with its magnificent monuments hosting 150 delegates of both the conferences in twelve venues for their deliberations. A major outcome of this international meeting was the realization that Champaner-Pavagadh had been protected and would remain fairly protected because of the strong administration of the Forest Act which controlled over eighty percent of the site. The idea of a “Nature Education Sanctuary” status for the site under the existing legislation of the Forest Act would subsequently influence the direction of several activities of the Trust. Twelve years of often frustrating responses by the Government, both Central and State, pushed the Heritage Trust into an activist role. It took the existing quarries, numbering
over a hundred, to the Supreme Court of India, resulting in the abrogation of their permits overnight. ChampanerPavagadh’s selection for the prestigious New York’s World Monuments Watch List for Endangered Sites in the first year of this Millennium further brought world attention to this archeological site. The Archeological Survey of India resisted seeing this site as anything more than a group of 38 monuments that they protect. A great many more significant buildings existed at the site, excavated in the 1960’s by my mentor, Prof. R.N. Mehta, but they lay buried below the ground, unseen and not comprehensible to the visitor. Thus, the Heritage Trust’s thrust to make the site “read” as a city remained a challenge. Extensive efforts were made to produce a city plan with drawings of the individual buildings excavated and then later covered by earth by Prof. Mehta and his team of students of the Department of Archeology, M S University of Baroda. This plan was then superimposed with the plan of the 114 monuments documented by
the Trust above the ground, within the regional context of 91 villages onto a Survey of India map. Prof. Kasturirangan, Chairman of ISRO – the Indian Space and Research Organization -- helped obtain a remote sensing image of the site. Meanwhile the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign was making its presence felt in India with its path breaking work on the sites at Sarnath and the Taj Mahal at Agra. Their perspective on landscape as a tool to read a site, and their research on landscape as an extension of heritage conservation put these two sites in a new context. For the new project at Champaner, the first workshop of a dozen students from Urbana-Champaign and an equal number from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda took place in the year 2000. Led by Professors Gary Kesler and Amita Sinha, and assisted by Sumesh Modi, Ghanshyam Joshi and Karan Grover, the initial concepts were fine tuned by the team back in the United States and a handsome