Mughal gardens of the indian subcontinent and the colonial legacy: the treatment of delhi's shalamar Bagh

Abstract

The treatment of historic Mughal gardens in India today largely continues to draw on the practices evolved by the British as their custodians in the ninteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper aims to illustrate how the British approach in the past and its espousal in contemporary practice have prevented Mughal gardens being interpreted and presented in their entirety as cultural assets. The paper examines the case of Delhi's Shalamar Bagh in this context, tracing the garden's reduction from a seventeenth-century Mughal leisure retreat to a fragmented and neglected ensemble of ruined garden structures in the colonial era. The perpetuation of the colonial approach by the garden's current custodians has severed Shalamar Bagh's relevance to contemporary times. A case is made for shunning the monument-centric approach of conservation adopted in the past and taking up the conservation of Delhi's Shalamar Bagh as a spatial entity in its entirety, where both its architectural remains and the enveloping garden can provide an enriching experience to the users, supplanting the garden's current perception as an open space disconnected from its urban environs.