Aman Nath, Chairman, Neemrana Hotels on uphill task of restoring heritage in India

OutlookIndia

Aman Nath, Chairman, Neemrana Hotels, talked about the uphill task of restoring heritage in India. And about a hundred other things besides, including his love affair with Outlook. Always a pleasure to listen to him.  About OUTLOOK TRAVELLER: India's best travel magazine, travel guides, and the only narrative travel writing website.

Transcript

00:00 I'm actually not a speaker, I'm more a writer and a doer, but I have an extraordinary relationship

00:07 with Outlook and I can be bullied into doing anything for them.

00:15 I thought I should make at least one statement, which is, I think there's no heroism in talking

00:22 about sustainability, whether it's about the environment, built heritage or the intangible

00:27 heritage, but I think it's about the one which vanishes even more silently. It's pure common

00:34 sense to not cut the branch from which you are hanging.

00:41 For those who don't know the work of Nimrana, I'll take three minutes on that and then talk

00:48 about sustainability. This is the 15th century ruin, but I believe that all of us can be

00:55 sustainable. I believe that we turn absolute waste into assets using what we could call

01:02 'jugad' in India, but in a more sensible way, let's say. Inventing a fort is actually designed

01:09 to keep people out and what we did was to redesign it to welcome people in. So it actually

01:19 stands the whole prospect on its head, but once you're inside it and you have hanging

01:26 gardens and so on, it becomes spectacular. It's very hard to imagine that this property

01:31 was selling for 40 years on the market for one lakh rupees. Still alive with that sense

01:38 of nature. In the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, which were the maritime centuries

01:46 of colonisation, of development, of industrialisation, we lost all that. So this was a flat piece

01:52 of land on which I imagined I would dig a well and I would dig all this earth out and

01:57 throw it away, then build these floors and put the earth on top of it so that the whole

02:03 building would be underground and I've been doing this for 20 years. This is what it looks

02:10 like today. So there's a mound, on the top of it is an octagonal opening and when you

02:17 go underground, two floors, this is the amount of light you have because there are all those

02:22 light wells. Now people go here and say, but how did you know it was there? How did you

02:27 excavate it? So the World Monument Fund people who I met in Sri Lanka over a lecture came

02:32 to see it and they kept saying, but you can't have built this. But I said, but you're from

02:37 India, you don't understand these things. We can build the Taj Mahal again if you want

02:41 to because we have the Piyatra Jhula, we have all the skills we can build in life and so

02:46 on. So I'll just show you, that's the well that you see being dug. And I was at that

02:52 point writing a book on the Tata's and I was doing half of it on the phone, so when a lot

02:57 of it was built I realised. So this is the different layers in which it was built.

03:03 There is no B, no C, this is limestone, this is stone. So we spent all our time just debating

03:11 about the nonsense of rules that we made rather than saying, here is magic. Imagine if you

03:16 had this. So now when you get into this building, if I hadn't shown you all those pictures and

03:22 you visited it, you would certainly believe that you were in some 14th century building.

03:26 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Category

Transcript

Recommended