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Qutb Shahi Heritage Park, Hyderabad, India. Photo courtesy Ratish Nanda, Aga Khan Trust for Culture.
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Landscape photograph of park in foreground and urban space in background
Qutb Shahi Heritage Park, Hyderabad, India. Photo courtesy Ratish Nanda, Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

Heritage Conservation in Asia: Insights from India

Wednesday, October 25, 2023
12:00 pm

Penn Museum 345, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 

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Presented By
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Heritage Conservation in Asia Roundtable Series

Speakers

Fong headshot Kecia Fong Lecturer, Historic Preservation; Editor, Change Over Time Bio Divay headshot Divay Gupta Fullbright Scholar, Historic Preservation Bio Rohit headshot Rohit Jigyasu Project Manager, ICCROM Meskell headshot Lynn Meskell PIK Professor in Historic Preservation and Anthropology, Curator of Middle East and Asia, Penn Museum Bio Nanda Headshot Ratish Nanda CEO, Aga Khan Trust for Culture Krupa headshot Krupa Rajangam Fullbright Scholar, Historic Preservation Bio Rachel headshot Rachel Varghese Fullbright Scholar, South Asia Center and the Department of Anthropology Bio

About

Please join us for a conversation with leading experts on Indian and global heritage. Together we will discuss the major challenges and developments facing conservation and contemporary society. Home to over 4,000 nationally registered sites, thousands more yet to be inscribed, and over 1.4 billion people, Indian conservation professionals face a daunting task. With such challenges come ethical and practical imperatives to address a multitude of competing needs from community livelihoods, health, and resource access to climate change and development pressures; all against a backdrop of rising regional ethno-religious nationalism. The impetus to forge everyday life-enriching solutions is great. Come hear how our invited guests, through their respective disciplinary practices and positions, are rethinking the work of heritage conservation and community sustainability. 

Moderators: Kecia Fong and Lynn Meskell

Guest speakers: Divay Gupta, Rohit Jigyasu, Ratish Nanda, Krupa Rajangam, and Rachel Varghese

The Heritage Conservation in Asia Roundtable Series is an initiative of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, Department of Historic Preservation. The purpose of the HCA Roundtables is to draw attention to how heritage and conservation in Asia are central to a raft of broader cultural, governance, urbanistic, and environmental concerns. Issues of national identity, rapid urbanization, sustainable development, international relations, political and religious conflict, civil society, public good, design, public art, and climate change all intersect built heritage and the built environment. As one of the most dynamic regions of the world today, what happens in Asia impacts the globe. The thematically oriented HCA Roundtables are designed to amplify existing Asian heritage-related work at Penn, generate insightful multi-disciplinary discussion, and identify key research questions addressing contemporary contexts, pressing needs, and current heritage conservation practices. Each roundtable features leading experts from Penn and the larger professional and scholarly community whose work in Asia or with Asian diasporic communities offers valuable perspectives and methodological approaches for evolving a global perspective on heritage and a more relevant conservation practice. Come expand your minds and your networks.

Kecia Fong (moderator) is a conservation professional of the built environment. She has worked internationally as a conservation practitioner and educator for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, US National Park Service (NPS), and the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) among others. Her work in the field has addressed multiple scales and contexts from the revitalization of the historic Islamic core of Cairo; conservation of earthen plasters at ancient Puebloan sites in the American southwest; emergency conservation and stabilization of the ancient city of Zeugma, Turkey; to the conservation and adaptive use of 20th century architecture in North American cities. As a conservation educator Kecia brings a global perspective to her teaching. She is committed to understanding the impacts of applying universalisms to the place specificity of culture. To that end, she is particularly interested in engaging with diverse cultural perspectives of heritage and its conservation. 

Divay Gupta is a conservation architect and headed the Architectural Heritage Division of INTACH, New Delhi until March 2023. An alum of ICCROM, University of Birmingham & School of Planning & Architecture, he has been striving to help better manage and conserve the cultural resources in his country for more than 25 years. He has had the privilege and opportunity to be part of a number of prestigious projects in the UK, USA, India, Afghanistan, Nepal and Cambodia and has participated in joint UNESCO & ICOMOS missions to World Heritage sites as a conservation expert. His restoration projects in Ladakh have won the South Asia UNESCO awards of Merit & Excellence. He is an Ad Hoc expert on the International Conservation Committee (ICC) for the world heritage site of Preah Vihear in Cambodia. He was a member of National Culture Fund and serves on advisory committee to Government of India on World Heritage Matters. He is also a visiting faculty and a member on the board of studies of Department of Architecture Conservation at School of Planning and Architecture (SPA) New Delhi. He is presently pursuing his private practice and PhD at Department of Conservation, SPA, New Delhi.

Rohit Jigyasu is a conservation architect and risk management professional from India, currently working at ICCROM as Project Manager on Urban Heritage, Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management. He is also the Vice President of ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Risk Preparedness (ICORP). Rohit served as UNESCO Chair holder professor at the Institute for Disaster Mitigation of Urban Cultural Heritage at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan, where he was instrumental in developing and teaching International Training Course on Disaster Risk Management of Cultural Heritage. He was the elected President of ICOMOS-India from 2014-2018 and president of ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Risk Preparedness (ICORP) from 2010-2019. Rohit served as the Elected Member of the Executive Committee of ICOMOS since 2011 and was its Vice President from 2017-2020.  Before joining ICCROM, Rohit has been working with several national and international organizations such as UNESCO, UNISDR, Getty Conservation Institute and World Bank for consultancy, research and training on Disaster Risk Management of Cultural Heritage.

Lynn Meskell (moderator) is a Richard D. Green University Professor in Historic Preservation and City and Regional Planning, professor of anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences, and curator in the Middle East and Asia sections at the Penn Museum. She is currently A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University (2019–2025). She holds Honorary Professorships at Oxford University and Liverpool University in the UK, Shiv Nadar University, India and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Previously, Meskell was the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Over the past twenty years she has been awarded grants and fellowships including those from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Australian Research Council, the American Academy in Rome, the School of American Research, Oxford University and Cambridge University. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology. Meskell has broad theoretical interests including socio-politics, archaeological ethics, global heritage, materiality, as well as feminist and postcolonial theory. Her earlier research examined natural and cultural heritage in South Africa, the archaeology of figurines and burial in Neolithic Turkey and social life in New Kingdom Egypt.

Ratish Nanda, conservation architect, is India CEO for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. He heads the multi-disciplinary AKTC teams presently undertaking the two major award winning urban conservation projects in India: the Nizamuddin Urban Renewal Initiative, Delhi and the Qutb Shahi Heritage Park Conservation at Golconda, Hyderabad. For AKTC, he was earlier responsible for the Bagh-e Babur restoration (2002-07), in Kabul, Afghanistan and the garden restoration of Humayun’s Tomb (1999-2003). He has earlier worked for Historic Scotland in Edinburgh (1998-99) and been responsible for ICOMOS missions to Turkey, Iran and Nepal. He has lectured in over 20 countries and has a host of publications to his credit including the INTACH Publication, Delhi, The Built Heritage.  

Krupa Rajangam is a humanities-based scholar and heritage management expert. In her research she draws on anthropology and social geography to interpret nature-culture conservation practice; particularly the construction of socio-cultural place identities, urban-rural geographies, and tourism imaginaries. She approaches her work through an interdisciplinary and community-engaged lens. Her overlapping professional, research, and teaching interest is in critical theory-driven, experiential field-based education adopting interdisciplinary methods. She runs an immersive field school (in a historical cultural landscape) that offers a hands-on understanding of this approach. She teaches courses ranging from digital heritage and place making, community and oral histories to masters dissertation, urban heritage management, and research methodology, including ethnographic approaches and ethics.

Rachel A. Varghese is a Fulbright- Nehru Post-Doctoral Fellow affiliated with the South Asia Center and the Department of Anthropology. Professor Lynn Meskell, PIK Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Historic Preservation, Weitzman School of Design, is her faculty host. Rachel A. Varghese has been with the Kerala Council for Historical Research (KCHR), Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India as Research Officer since 2018. She completed her PhD in 2018 under the supervision of Dr. Supriya Varma, at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her thesis was titled Archaeology, the Public, Nation and Region: Case Studies from South Asia. She obtained her BA degree (Psychology) from Union Christian College, Kerala in 2004 and her Master’s and MPhil degrees from the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU in 2006 and 2009 respectively. She is the recipient of the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship from 2009-2011 for pursuing the Erasmus Mundus Masters in Quaternary and Prehistory. Dr. Varghese has training in field archaeology through her participation in several field archaeology projects in India, Egypt and parts of Europe from 2006 onwards. Her research interests include Public Archaeology, Politics of Archaeology, Heritage Studies and the history and archaeology of Indian Ocean trade. She has published articles in these areas in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes and online academic forums.

 

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.

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