RCB Confers ‘Citizen of Mumbai’ Award to Abha N Lambah

On behalf of the Rotary Club of Bombay we are proud to present ‘Citizen of Mumbai Award’ to Abha Narain Lambah for her consistent and dedicated efforts to conserve the history and heritage structures of Mumbai”, announced President Rtn. Dr. Sonya Mehta, as she conferred the award to the Conservation Architect and Historic Building Consultant. Abha went on to address the Club, regaling all about the need and importance of conserving Bombay’s historic architectural heritage. The principal of a conservation architectural consultancy firm based in Mumbai, Abha Narain Lambah’s practice has won 8 UNESCO Award citations for conservation and she has been recipient of the Sanskriti Award, Eisenhower Fellowship and Charles Wallace Fellowship. Abha and her team have left an imprint on a number of heritage buildings in India.

She started her bold and witty address thus, “Conservation has been a very recent phenomenon in this country. Considering that we have some of the greatest treasures of historic buildings, it’s unfortunate the way our government’s policies and systems have been geared over the last hundred and fifty years because their outlook is mainly Abha Narain Lambah has been consultant to World Monuments Fund, Global Heritage Fund, Deccan Foundation and ICCROM and has served on the Heritage Conservation Committees of both Delhi and Mumbai. Speaking on the disinterest and lack of the much needed Government intervention for proper planning, conserving and maintaining Bombay’s historic architectural heritage, she continued, “Take for example the Taj Mahal itself!

That’s turned into a national monument, but the rest of Agra can go down the shoot! We seem to have lost connect with the larger setting! We can have terrible problems with encroachment and everything as long as the gleaming white marble of the Taj Mahal stays gleaming white! And this would have been a reality had it not been for a public interest litigation, because in our lack of planning as a nation, we just forgot to put a buffer zone around the Taj Mahal on the other side of the river! (Cont’d from Page 1) This story repeats itself all over India – through all its towns and cities! Just outside a one meter fencing that protects another national monument – a medieval tomb in Jaunpur – is a transformer, a truck station, a bus stand and a public urinal!

We have historic city centers like Hyderabad for instance where terrible architecture has replaced the marvelous Lal Bazaar with its beautiful historic streetscapes just a century ago. Along entire sections of cities do we see waste piling up, this takes away from the splendor. Our planners seem to sit in armchairs and design city plans… It’s the same even in Benares, which is currently the political hot-bed, where there is the historic Aurangzeb’s Mosque and right in front of it is a multi-storeyed, pink concrete structure! There are no urban by-laws, that we can as a nation, rely on. Therefore when we look around us at all the cities, Bombay is the boiling point as far as urbanism is concerned – very high real estate values, extremely high population, the historic city center is also the center of the commercial district as well as the financial district!

We have issues of rent control and under funding. We have historic heritage which is not even recognized by the Central Government as being of any value! So all of CST or Fort does not have a single nationally protected monument! We were a city headed for disaster, as far as our heritage was concerned because there was no national protection for any of our historic sites, purely because they didn’t even match the criteria of being a hundred years old! And yet, it is primarily because of the citizens of Bombay that we have saved so much of our heritage, and not because of National Protection Regulation or The Archeological Survey of India. April 12 to April 18, 2016 The Bulletin of the Rotary Club of Bombay Page 5 Rotarians Are A Happy Bunch, Especially Post Lunch! Getting Queries answered during the Q&A Session In 1998, I began working with a group of citizens and we felt we should do something about Horniman Circle (Fort).

There was no funding as these were privately owned buildings and through the Horniman Circle Residents Association we raised an amount of Rs. 6 lakhs, with the help of six banks donating a lakh each. We took up working on one block and repaired the decaying walls, shaped up the trees, cleaned up the façade, but most importantly we removed all the hoardings that were all across. Fifteen years later today, we have all sorts of gentrification that has taken a life of its own. Such citizenintervention paves the way for the rest of the citizens to take up this cause.” Abha’s work ranges from World Heritage Sites of Ajanta Caves and Bodh Gaya to award winning conservation of 15th Century temples in Hampi and Ladakh.

Her architectural practice includes historic palaces and museums across India, to temples, forts, caravan serais and mosques in Hampi, Rajasthan, Hyderabad and Punjab. She has advised on conservation of colonial buildings such as the Raj Bhavan and Indian Museum Kolkata, and Gole Market in New Delhi. She has been involved with the conservation of many of Mumbai’s 19th century colonial structures such as the historic Crawford Market, University Convocation Hall, Asiatic Library, High Court, Royal Opera House, Tata Palace, Mani Bhavan, Prince of Wales Museum and the Municipal Head Offices and has authored conservation master plans for Viceregal Lodge Shimla and Government House Kolkata and Nainital. Abha has authored and edited a range of books including ‘Kala Ghoda: Celebrating Mumbai’s Art District’, ‘Architecture of the Indian Sultanates’, ‘Custodians of India’s Heritage: 150 years of the Archaeological Survey of India’ and ‘Shekhawati: Land of the Merchant Princes’ for MARG Publications. She has authored ‘Through the Looking Glass: The Grade I Heritage of Mumbai’ and co-authored ‘A City’s Legacy: The Indian Navy’s Heritage in Mumbai’ and ‘Conservation After Legislation: Issues for Mumbai’.

She continued, “I was appointed by the MMRDA in 1998 to prepare a set of urban by-laws, which was the first urban street-scaping project of India. After comprehensive research we came up with recommendations of signage control. Though this was appreciated, no action was taken. That’s when I decided that if we were to improve anything in the city, we could not use the top-down approach. The reverse did, along with the active participation from citizens with great success. Something like this can only happen in Bombay because Kolkata as a city was built by the British, and New Delhi is the capital. Bombay has always been built by its citizens and that is why a group like RCB is so important because even to simply maintain these buildings, it has got to be citizen-driven, because otherwise it just doesn’t happen in this city!”