Urban sprawl leads to grave concern for the future of India’s disappearing monuments
The passion of India’s heritage buffs can sometimes throw up perplexing riddles. Here’s one: will Delhi’s oldest Christian cemetery still be called that when it ceases to exist?
Located in Kishanganj in the northern part of the capital, D’Eremao cemetery, named after a once-influential family in the courts of the Mughal emperors, holds the graves of Armenian Christians believed to have died in the early 1700s.
In the early 20th century, a British historian listed 24 graves in the cemetery. In 2005, Indian-American scholar Omar Khalidi documented 15, and in 2012, according to an Armenian traveller, that number had fallen to six.
As the neighbourhood around it creeps on to its land, the cemetery has almost vanished. The chapel is dilapidated.
Mahesh Sharma, India’s culture minister, said the cemetery was one of several historically important Indian monuments threatened by the unchecked growth of cities around them.
“Twenty-four monuments have disappeared altogether, swallowed by encroaching structures,” he told parliament.
“These include a set of Buddhist ruins in Varanasi, a Mughal-era tomb in Delhi, the remains of a copper temple in Arunachal Pradesh, and temples in Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh.”
Of those monuments, 11 were in Uttar Pradesh, the ministry said.
The Archaeological Survey of India, a state-run body charged with protecting buildings that are considered vital to heritage, has spent 7.7 billion rupees (Dh439.3 million) to look after monuments under its care, Mr Sharma said.
Although the agency has the authority to remove structures that have intruded, legal procedures can drag on endlessly in India’s slow-moving courts.
The body has, over the years, also blamed severe understaffing for preventing it from being as efficient as possible.
But even accounting for the 3,686 sites under its protection, hundreds of other monuments suffer neglect and fall into disuse and dilapidation.
If they are in towns or cities their land is annexed and put to private use.
“People begin to live in these lesser known monuments, or they build their house against one of the old walls,” said Dr Swapna Liddle, a historian who leads the Delhi chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage.
“Some of this has been going on slowly for decades, but the process has accelerated over the past few years.”
In a 2015 survey of 150 lesser-known monuments in Delhi, the trust found that 90 per cent of them had been encroached upon. In several cases, the intruder was the state.