During a very lively discussion this week at the Delhi Art Gallery on the conservation of monuments, pegged on an exhibition of exquisite aquatints of north India by William Hodges, a question by a girl that stumped the panellists and many in the audience concerned a building that the 18th-century British landscape artist had not painted at all. But in the context of the imminent event at Ayodhya on January 22, the relevance of the query was undeniable.

The panellists—conservation architects Abha Narain Lambah, Vikas Dilawari and Manish Chakraborti with historian Swapna Liddle as the moderator—supported local participation in managing at least some monuments instead of blanket state control. They concurred that the Archaeological Survey of India and state counterparts isolated monuments by enclosing them within boundary walls so the people living nearby were not emotionally invested in them.

Though the jury is still out on whether preservation should mean extensive restoration, a girl in the audience asked whether a monument like, say, south Delhi’s Sultan Ghari—not among the many Islamic buildings of northern India painted by Hodges between 1780 and 1783—be left in the hands of locals as some of them believe it had been built atop the debris of a temple? She feared communal polarisation if they got to decide on its conservation.

Dr Liddle’s prompt but inaccurate assertion that there was no proof of a temple at that spot, sidestepped a knotty fact brought up by the girl’s question: that many monuments in India have contested antecedents. However, a ‘history’ of Sultan Ghari—now accepted by both communities—could well be the answer to the problem of contestations elsewhere in India, as people around it appear to have found a “belief” that is equally compatible with their different faiths.

There’s no gainsaying peoples’ beliefs, especially in India as very few........

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