Architect Abha Narain Lambah explains the political power of her vocation

Narain also discusses the need for a vision and the usefulness of chai

How difficult is it to sell heritage conservation to a people obsessed with their past? “Incredibly hard,” says Abha Narain Lambah, conservation architect who won the Hudco Design Award for 2017 for restoring the Royal Bombay Opera House. It took her close to 10 years and “blood, sweat and tears” to restore the 100-year-old structure. The project had her scouring old books, international journals and Bollywood movies to better understand what might lie beneath the layers of gaudy paint and false ceilings.

Lambah has been ferreting out the hidden histories of heritage structures and the settlements around them for as long as she can remember. It began during her years at the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), New Delhi, when she convinced a sceptical professor to let her study a chaotic jumble of homes, shops and narrow bylanes around Delhi’s 14th C Khirki mosque. It continued when she sat across steel tables and musty files explaining to querulous bureaucrats the job of a “conversation architect”, as they called her.

In those days (1995), conservation was an unknown concept. Lambah had just moved to Mumbai after a brief stay in New York where she says she was so homesick that her husband finally agreed to relocate. After architecture school in Delhi which featured a lot of armchair conservation talk, she found Mumbai full of promise. Lambah thought she would find work here as a freshly minted Master of Architectural Conservation.

Her first project came from a grant application to the MMRDA (Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority) for creating urban street signage around the Victoria Terminus station (now the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus). Her eyes were trained on the busy Dadabhai Naoroji (DN) Road, bursting at the seams with traffic and flanked by heritage structures and a tangle of commercial establishments, where the past and present seemed set on a permanent collision course.  

The government funded a set of guidelines for street signs in the heritage precinct but not for the final project. “I had this vision of a report just sitting on a shelf inside a government office and nothing getting done, so I approached the shopkeepers on DN Road,” she says. Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings she spent talking to them, nudging them to spend on signs and street furniture. The shopkeepers finally paid for the entire project.

Ever since, Lambah’s work has always been closely aligned with citizen’s groups. She is one of the founder members of the Kala Ghoda Association, which has worked towards creating an art precinct in South Mumbai. Her present work in Jaipur also involves interacting with shopkeepers, the municipal bodies as well as residents. The latter always come around — all it takes is sincerity, several cups of sugary chai and some samosas.

It is the politicians and planners who have refused to see the value of architectural heritage, says Lambah, adding that they have abandoned all architectural vision. This attitude has led to a sense of rootlessness in new structures and a lack of understanding of what we were endowed with. There is nothing distinctive about the glass-and-chrome buildings or coffin-like government offices strewn across all our urban landscapes.

The failure of the political class to see the power of architecture baffles Lambah. “Architecture is the most political of all statements,” she says. 

Why did the Mughals build the way they did? Red sandstone was used only for royal structures — which is why the “pink city” of Jaipur features pink stucco despite its proximity to the red sandstone quarries. Red was the colour of kings and officialdom, a way of establishing their authority.

Why, too, did the British first bring in neo-classical architecture? To imprint a sense of European superiority over their subjects. And why is it that after the Mutiny, they brought in Indo-Saracenic architecture? To send out the subliminal message that they were the next big power after the Mughals. 

Post-independence, Lambah sees only two politicians who truly understood the power of architecture. One was Jawaharlal Nehru, who made a clean break from the past — from the British and from Gandhian principles — when he commissioned Le Corbusier to design Chandigarh. The city was a political statement as much as it was an architectural project. After Nehru, says Lambah, Mayawati is the only politician who has tried to make a statement with buildings, albeit with a very different design ethic.

“Political patronage for architecture is critical. We have just made do with what we have,” says Lambah. The make-do culture is so rampant that it has led to us losing even what we have inherited. Large concrete blocks thumped on to finely crafted façades, the haphazard addition of electrical boxes and wires, nails and planks of plywood drilled on to carved columns — government agencies have meted out the third degree to heritage buildings with impunity.

Lambah never thought she would end up as a conservation architect although her love for physics and history in school ought to have been interpreted as early signs. “All these years later, I am still dealing with history and physics — with the stresses and compressions in historic buildings.”

Architecture was not an obvious choice but a carefully negotiated one. Lambah’s bureaucrat father, who wanted her to join the Indian Administrative Services, told her that she should apply only to the best institutions and that if she got in, he would not stand in her way. “So we had a deal that if I got into SPA I would do what I wanted, otherwise I would go by what he wanted.”

SPA bailed her out of a degree in economics and from being a career bureaucrat. It has also been one of the biggest influences on her life. It hooked her because “what it taught you at 17 was that you make your decisions, we don’t judge you, we will question you but we respect your decision.” 

SPA also led her to the office of the legendary Joseph Allen Stein. “I admired him so much that right through college I joked that I would do anything, even wash dishes and sweep floors, at his office.” American architect Stein came to India in 1952, became principal of the Bengal Engineering College and then stayed on for half a century in his adopted country. Among Stein’s best-known creations are the India International Centre and the India Habitat Centre, both in New Delhi. When Lambah met him, he was in his eighties but still sparkling and sprightly. “You seem more interested in sociology than in being an architect,” he told her. Lambah says she begged him to let her join and for the first few weeks just folded blueprints. Gradually she graduated to giving design inputs and then worked closely with Stein and the India Habitat Centre team.

Stein believed that architecture can never be divorced from context. Good architecture lasts because it adapts to the local aesthetic and functional sensibilities. This is still Lambah’s biggest struggle: convincing the authorities not only to preserve the past but also ensure a legacy worth leaving behind for future generations.