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Organizing History
Unexplored monuments
from Punjab and Haryana are being documented by a group of Indian and
American archaeologists and researchers on a grant from the U.S. State
Department’s Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation.
By RICHA VARMA Photographs courtesy Centre for South Asian Art &
Archaeology
SPAN March/April 2010
Over the past 18 months, a team of Indian and American researchers, art
historians, archaeologists, photographers and surveyors has been
sweating it out in the dusty plains of Punjab and Haryana doing what is
any art or history lover’s dream—exploring and archiving lost treasures
of an old civilization.
Funded by the U.S. State Department’s Ambassadors Fund for Cultural
Preservation, the project covers 136 monuments at 33 sites.
Working on a grant totaling $93,914, the project is being handled by the
Centre for South Asian Art & Archaeology. Based in New Delhi and Gurgaon,
Haryana, the center (http://www.indiastudies.org/) is documenting
unexplored Indo-Islamic monuments in the hinterland of the Grand Trunk
Road in the two states, says project director Vandana Sinha.
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While certain
areas, such as those around New Delhi, are extensively studied, many
others such as this region had barely been explored or even
identified.
Comprising Indo-Islamic monuments from the 12th through the 19th
centuries, the Punjab-Haryana landscape is dotted with an array of
heritage buildings such as the mosque at Panipat, built by the
founder of the Mughal dynasty, Babur, or the caravan resting stops
at Nur Mahal, built by Nur Jahan, wife of Emperor Jehangir. There
are also a number of bridges, distance markers (kos-minars),
pleasure gardens, rest houses, forts and palaces. While there are
more than 200 possible sites in the two states, about 35
representative sites were selected in consultation with the center’s
scholars and art historians who have worked in the area. These
include historians from the Government Brijindra College in Punjab,
the Universities of Minnesota and Texas and the American Institute
of Indian Studies at Gurgaon. Permission was obtained from the
Archaeological Survey of India and Departments of Archaeology of the
two states. |
In the end, high quality and detailed
monument plans, architectural elevations and photographs of these
structures will be accessible to a wider audience, including on the
Internet. Much work has already been completed.
The project “was not limited to photographing the specific monuments but
the emphasis was on documenting the surroundings also in order to see
the settings of these structures in the context of their current
environment,” says Sinha. “Such an approach was adopted to be able to
collect critical information about such monuments that would aid
understanding of the layers of the ‘landscape.’ ”
The Ambassadors Fund was created by the U.S. Congress in 2001. Since
then, it has provided direct grants for more than 550 projects in 100
countries representing a contribution of more than $20 million toward
the preservation of cultural heritage worldwide.
Courtesy: SPAN Magazine editorspan@state.gov |
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