QUIET OF THE LOST GARDEN
New Delhi is set for a new sanctuary, centred on history and music, writes Dean Nelson
A LOST 16th-century Mughal garden in the heart of New Delhi is to be transformed into one of the world’s largest city-centre parks in a multi-million-pound project backed by the Aga Khan and India’s government.
The park will be based around Emperor Humayun’s Tomb, the world heritage site believed to have been the inspiration for the Taj Mahal, and will include the Purana Qila, the medieval fort of India’s Mughal and Afghan rulers, a 16th-century caravanserai, smart restaurants and a museum to tell their stories.
The Aga Khan’s local director, Ratish Nanda, says the project will not only provide jobs for the area’s poor, largely Muslim community, but also offer a sanctuary from the cacophony that comes from the capital’s 16-million people.
His vision is of an oasis where visitors can read a book in the shade of its rare trees, appreciate the city’s rich Mughal history and enjoy Qawwali concerts in its amphitheatre to celebrate its role as the birthplace 700 years ago of Sufi music. It will recreate the city’s Ridge forest and propagate some of its threatened trees and bushes to sell in its nursery.
Mr Nanda, who revived Kabul’s Bagh-e Babur park for the Aga Khan Trust, said he believed the Sunder Nursery, which will expand from 68ha to a 485ha site, one-anda-half times the size of New York’s Central Park, will become the cultural and environmental heart of the city.
“We want to restore the wow factor,” he said. “What other place in the world has a 14th-century Sufi landscape in 100 acres of greenery? This is the largest collection of Islamic buildings in India.
“Humayun’s Tomb is a world heritage site, and we’re hoping as a result of our work, this [park] will be included in that. 300 000 children visit Humayun’s Tomb every year and we could triple that.”
The first stage has already been transformed from a jungle of scrub and dump site for building rubble.
Its Mughal era tombs, sited as close as possible to the shrine of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin, had been raided for architectural salvage and were overgrown and vandalised. Its trees — a rare collection of the most exotic from throughout the British Empire — had been overrun by wild creepers.
A small army of gardeners, labourers, landscape and conservation architects are now on course to open the 68ha section in 2015. They have removed more than 1 000 trucks of rubble, cleared hectares of jungle and laid modern versions of classical Persian gardens with hand-carved marble and sandstone fountains and water channels. The Lakkarwala Burj tomb has been restored and set in a new rose garden, while craftsmen have recreated entire sections of white Quranic verses on the red sandstone interior walls of the Sunderwala Burj tomb. The project will employ hundreds of craftsmen, gardeners, managers, musicians and teachers, and become self-financing through entry charges. The park’s unique musical culture will be celebrated with Qawwali concerts, the devotional singing and clapping which can transform followers into whirling dervishes.