We built this city
India’s people’s history is far more important than political history, says a conservation architect in her debut book
Conservation architect Gurmeet S Rai’s first memory of Amritsar is from 1995 when she was working on a project to map the heritage of the Grand Trunk Road and the Mughal highway.
“It felt like home. There’s a certain feeling of belonging in Amritsar, especially the Golden Temple,” she says about the focus of her debut coffee table book. The book, titled Amritsar - A City in Remembrance, and published by Om Books International, has pictures her photojournalist husband Raghu Rai.
An ongoing narrative
Gurmeet got to know the city while working on the Ministry of Housing’s Hriday project from 2015 to 2019. “There’s a deep connection between spirituality and culture in Amritsar, be it the langar or the crafts,” she says. She chose to make her writing debut with a coffee table book rather than a novel as she needed to display images of the city.
“Culture needs to be positioned differently and needs to be integral in the way we engage with people,” Gurmeet explains. “Culture and nature are two significant aspects that make cities liveable. We inhabit our cities and hence the cities need to be responsive to us, which is what adds to the quality of life. In this generation, we need to recover our heritage. There’s amnesia when it comes to how to engage with our past and secular heritage.” Raghu has long and deep connection with the city, visiting Amritsar twice a month to take pictures. “Going to the Golden Temple is the most powerful experience ever. Even though I am Hindu, I believe in the calmness and peace the Golden Temple brings. Even when the militants were right outside, that place provided a certain spirituality that would take over,” he reminiscences about the mid 80s, when he even went with a camera hidden in a garland he was wearing and shot pictures of the damage the Akali Dal had done.
A lockdown longing
All the chapters in this lockdown book, for which Gurmeet travelled to Amritsar last March, end with some ideas for the future.
Familiar with the milestones of Amritsar’s history given her previous work there, Gurmeet honed her research on Jalianwalla Bagh and the Baisakhi mela. “We had to show what it means to recover original textiles and the empowering transformation that can bring about,” she says. Raghu has previously worked on a book on Sikhs, besides working with the late Khushwant Singh, but this was the first time he was working with a writer he had grown up together on the subject with for 32 years: his wife, Gurmeet. And so, Raghu’s dug into 50 years of work to cull out which pictures to use, as this is the first time he feels the photographs and the text really marry.
Writing the book was like completing a full circle when it came to Gurmett's relationship with the city and the Golden Temple. “The architectural site of the Golden Temple has aspects related to equality and humane aspects of an inclusive way of living one’s life that is relevant even today,” Gurmeet concludes.
“IN THIS GENERATION, WE NEED TO RECOVER OUR HERITAGE. THERE’S AMNESIA WHEN IT COMES TO HOW TO ENGAGE WITH OUR PAST.” –GURMEET RAI