Humayun’s Tomb: Conservation and Restoration

Abstract

India celebrated the 50th anniversary of her independence in the year 1997. On this occasion, His Highness the Aga Khan, chairman of the Aga Khan Development Network, one of the world’s largest private philanthropic agencies, gifted a garden restoration project at the World Heritage Site of Humayun’s Tomb built in the mid-sixteenth century in Delhi. As documented in this text, the gift was the beginning of a long association between the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the site, which was later to involve a conservation and restoration project for the mausoleum, and several other monuments in its environs. Within this framework, the latest conservation efforts on the site posed a special challenge to the different local and transnational, governmental, and non-governmental parties in charge of the project. They were confronted with the transcultural genesis of the site’s preservation history that testifies on the one hand to centuries of maintenance through Mughal rulership and local builders and on the other to preservation and repair attempts by the Archaeological Survey of India since the late nineteenth century. The present project aims at the revitalization of the architectural spirit and original intentions of the builder. As such, it has provoked some exciting discussion pointing up the need for a critical dialogue with architectural preservation in India as an originally colonial discipline.