ASI - II: The ‘sins’ committed by Archeological survey of India

Most disturbing aspect of Archeological survey of India (ASI), of late, has been their misdirected sense of security.

Security of structures in recent years has translated into building of fences and mounting grills right over the heritage structures. It appears to have come about more in preference of controls of ticket purchasing rather than actually guarding its core assets, the very structure and its accessories.

For example, the guards at monuments are most vigilant in ensuring visitors not going to most parts of the structure they have actually come to visit, or don’t take videos without paying fees, but are most blatantly ignorant to structure’s abuse, theft and vandalism.

Sculptures lying around the monument are hardly cared for, or recorded. Even the filigree gets easily vandalised. The accompanying images (above) show consciously and forcibly defaced sculpture of Brahma, as part of the panel depicting trinity, Brahma Vishnu Mahesh, on the walls of the second layers from top at the second last shaft of the Queen’s stepwell at Patan, inundated with intricately carved sculptures.

Photo taken of the same spot nearly a year ago shows it to be perfectly intact. The nature of defacement clearly indicates that it has been a premeditated human act, for theft or abuse, and not the natural aging process of time.

The same ASI, which did wonders to unearth the queen’s step well buried in sands of time, literally, since millennium, has been losing its core assets in less than few years.

Another blatantly criminal act is committed at Rudabai’s stepwell at Adalaj. As seen in the pictures above, entrance plasters of 510-year-old well have been chiselled and pierced deliberately by the very department to put ugly steel grill gates which protect nothing.

Its open to sky courts and well shafts are covered up with steel grills, sans any design co-ordination. Randomly placed and patterned with steel flats oriented in any direction these grills come across as the complete misfit and aesthetically jarring. 

It mars the very spirit of its architectural experience of transiting from open to enclosed, from higher levels to lower, with perceived change in the sense of enclosure, experience of duality of solid and void, reflection of sky in water, sense of ablution and so on...closed of spiral stair shaft deny reaching up to resting platforms in lower three floors around octagonal shaft.

Spiked hurdles placed along the ledges deny seeing the symbolically placed panels with motifs of nine water urns, associating with nine durga (aspect of fertility) and source of life-water,  in the niches of the intermediate platforms, designed for human occupation for over five centuries.

Step wells were the resting place for the travellers en-route.
While by act there are controls to new developments within the vicinity of hundred metres in order to maintain the sanctity of the monument, the ugly plastic shacks as ticket booths placed right next to the monuments are themselves the eye sores and total anti thesis to aura and aesthetic
sensibilities of the monuments.

On one hand ASI strictly adheres to its archaic, irrelevant and often idiotic law of barring tripod and flash photography in many monuments independent to its type and sensitivity to these gadgets, on the other it readily succumbs to commercial pressures by allowing its official abuse while shooting commercial films by paying money.

The antiquity law also refers to the structures or objects older than hundred for them to be within the ambit of its law. Many structures, even though of great historic value within the century would escape the webs of the law.

Countries such as US and UK have constantly updated their listing of the heritage structures and recognised even 28-year-old buildings as heritage ones to be preserved for posterity to represent the typology or the significance of the given time.

So, while ASI would have saved many structures in the pressures of estate developers and insensitive bureaucrat’s plans of mega development, many structures, if not as many, may have also lost their heart and soul by the very organisation protecting it.