Rich in cultural assets, Amritsar’s built heritage, crafts, spiritual practices and traditional city design have, over time, suffered from lack of maintenance and economic investment, compounded by unmitigated pressures of urban growth, population shifts, unsustainable tourism and limited technical capacities of management agencies, compromising the character and imageability of the city. A microcosm of this complexity, the Rambagh Gate heritage precinct, is reflective of a deeply composite historical fabric and character, traversing a tapestry of interlaced historic layers of material, memory and association, juxtaposed against urban challenges, hence, presenting a fertile ground for creative experimentation for a demonstration.
The only surviving city gate of the Sikh period, Rambagh Gate is of immense historic significance to the city of Amritsar. Built during the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780–1839), unifier of the empire of Punjab, the Gate served as a passage to Sri Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) from his summer palace, Rambagh Garden. The Gate demonstrates an architectural vocabulary local to the region, with additions made during the British occupation, giving it a distinctive visual form. Also, it is a reminder of one of the starkest impacts of British rule on the landscape of Amritsar—the demolition of walls and gates of the walled city built by Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
The Rambagh gate with the ancillary buildings on the ramparts, over time had severely deteriorated. Many of its character defining features such as the monumental archway had been obliterated with infill masonry on account of housing new use. Uses such as Municipal toilet for men and drinking water facility had been built on the façade of the building. Misdirected repair with materials incompatible with the historic fabric had further induced stressed into the building for instance the interior had been provided with elements such as masonry walls to house the police station and reinforced cement concrete had been provided over the building as the roof slab. The Government school housed in a few of the rooms built over the ramparts was in a very poor condition. The arches had been provided with infill walls to stabilise them. The rear court and the terraces were overgrown with vegetation. The rampart had been provided with toilets which were in a poor condition and there was extensive seepage into the built fabric. The building of the printing press was in a poor condition with modern materials, such as cement based plasters and flooring which too were in poor condition. The local community was completely disconnected from the historic narrative and significance of the Rambagh gate on account of the use as the police station and a legacy of the police station having been used as an interrogation centre during the time of political unrest in the state in 1980s -90s and secondly since they traced their roots to Pakistan , having migrated across the border to find a new home on the Indian side of Punjab. The Gate also houses a British-era municipal printing press replete with machinery and equipment dating back to more than a hundred years, and a government school established in 1953, that provides free education to children from underprivileged families.
Workshop with the children of the government primary school
The practice of heritage conservation in India often overlooks an important pillar of what makes a place—the people and their connections and interactions with their environment. The continuity of inter-generational knowledge, networks, associations, co-productions and practices makes for a sense of collective identity and vibrant community, that is nurtured when people are placed at the centre of policy, planning and management. It is in the act of recognizing the co-existence of diverse narratives and voices, co-working and co-creating with local constituencies, that enabled the conservation and revitalisation of Rambagh gate and the ramparts lead the power to shift conversations around the heritage precinct to—What is understood by heritage? Whose heritage is it? What is to be remembered? Who has the right to decide?, changing the way cultural experiences are generated and consumed.
Activating Dialogue and Reimagining Livability
The disenfranchisement of local constituencies from their own heritage, typically exhibited in urban planning projects, instills a sense of apathy and disconnection towards their own sense of histories, identities and memories. At the very outset identifying local constituencies and activating dialogue as part of this heritage project proved to be a discreet but enabling tool that planted the seed of disruption in the usual top-down approach in planning. Extending avenues to enable enriching dialogues with the host community at Rambagh Gate—shopkeepers, residents, municipal press staff, government school students and teachers, employees at the police post, and other potential co-actors—craftsmen, artists, heritage start-ups, civil society—expanded the scope of the kinds of apparatus that were required to make heritage both visible and accessible. What began with scepticism and some resistance at the start of the project, eventually blossomed into building meaningful local connections and goodwill towards the creative experimentation.
Cultural mapping was used as a tool to understand the socio-economic and cultural patterns, critically nuanced future trajectory of interventions. Considering the loss of historic fabric and memory of Rambagh Gate, it was imperative that recovery of memory, and building a keen sense of identity and association of the host community with their immediate heritage, had to be central to the framework of the conservation work. Consequently, as a first tangible step, conservation of the gate and its ramparts with the ancillary structures responded to the physical recovery of the historic precinct. After acquiring the necessary historical knowledge to undertake conservation work, processes and techniques were applied to respond to the historical values in the material and skill of the built fabric, a case in point being the skill of traditional brick masonry of Punjab, an intangible heritage which is fast disappearing.
Preservation of built heritage for the end-use of creative repurposing was seen as part of an integrated strategy aligned with the principles of right to quality of life that encompasses the oft-neglected social infrastructure within the immediate environment of the host community—addressing health and safety standards around the precinct, while retaining and aiding continuity of contemporary use of the physical presence of the traditional market, government school, municipal press and police post, alongside enabling dignity of working and learning environments for the host community. It demonstrated how marginalized groups, rather than being displaced, can be integrated within the developmental plans. Consequently, it created a traction within the host community, enabling conditions for a larger interpretive intervention using arts, media and creativity to reimagine an invigorated sense of livability.
Interfacing History, Memory and Art to Engage a New Community
Enhancement of physical and social infrastructure readied the precinct for creative experimentation to engage a community who previously never had access to conversations on heritage, promote interactions with diverse co-actors and inject new creative products in public spaces. Rallying the cause of disruption of the top-down power equation in planning interventions, the project framework extended to marginalized groups to engage with heritage aligned with the values of the times of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the principles of governance during his times.
Extending creative learning opportunities to underprivileged students of government school at Rambagh Gate, children of mostly migrant labourers, naturally disadvantaged by their social and economic backgrounds, coupled with limited learning resources, was an important step. Hence, drawing the students away from typical textbook-focused learning methodology, a two-day creative workshop was organized for 40 students at the newly renovated historic Gate, engaging them through digital and art-based storytelling. To give local constituencies the tools to engage with urban heritage. The co-created engagement thus, brought forth a repertoire of creative content on Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who is central to the narrative of Amritsar, and on the historic Gate. Encouraged to select their character of choice, having immersed in digital storytelling on the Maharaja, the students expressed their own recollections of the storytelling exercise by creating finger-puppets and visualize on canvas their imaginations. Representations of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the historic Gate, caparisoned elephants, horses and armoury, all came together to create a giant canvas of artistic vocabulary. Generating great enthusiasm among the children and teachers alike, this workshop allowed them to exercise creative choices of expressing how they understand and see heritage, an opportunity they did not have the privilege of experiencing before.
Inaugural night event of folk dance of Punjab
Alongside, another distinct experiment to recover memory took an unusual route—that of art-based façade beautification at the heritage precinct, introducing a visual vocabulary inspired by Sikh School of Art, once again from the period of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and identified as also the Lahore School of Art. Typographic practice of street painters through contemporary adaptation was also used, a style used in early 20th century Punjab. Rambagh Gate and 150 shops around the precinct donned the colour palette and motifs inspired by the Sikh School of art, where local resources were meticulously identified for partnering and demonstrating this unique model. In collaboration with grassroots hand paint type artists, led by St+Art India Foundation, a vocabulary for shop front signage was designed and executed in handcrafted metal canvases, showcasing an alternative to uninspiring digital prints and flexes.
Creativity even spilled onto the government school nestled on the ramparts of Rambagh Gate, where heritage, art and gaming fused to extend interactive learning for underprivileged students. Mokshapat (path to salvation), a 13th-century traditional Indian game, popularly known today as Snakes and Ladders, has incorporated through design elements in the play area, reinforcing human values as pillars to society in the form of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ habits. Improving the overall learning environment of the students has, in fact, resulted in attracting new enrolments, and improved attendance at the government school. Following the above, several educational murals and games have been provided on the walls and floors of the school precinct.
These experimental creative explorations helped generate new channels of dialogue through on-site street discussions, providing the host community a platform for exchange on aesthetics, art and history, while injecting a new design thinking inspired by historic and local artistic vocabularies, into public spaces, thus spanning the past into the present and possible future.
The precinct, now bedecked, handed over the baton to its crowning glory, Rambagh Gate, that donned its new identity as Lok Virsa—People’s Museum. Through the lens of its inaugural exhibition, the attempt was to mirror the sacred values of the city of Amritsar, a testament to an inclusive space that embraced all, evoking people-centred stories through a rich ensemble of grassroots community-generated artworks, and local voices. Co-created by local culture bearers and a small team of exhibition specialists, it transcended boundaries between the historic and contemporary, interweaving community, art and co-creation to generate new ways of communicating the values that inhabit the city. The transformation drew immense attention from the public and government, garnering tremendous media footage, eliciting deeply emotive responses and propositioning a new cultural product that constructs different meaning for different people in order to interact and engage with heritage.
The imposing entrance archway of Rambagh Gate now draws the visitor into the museum to offer a navigation of the city through the lens of the uniquely conceptualised 5R’s—Reverence, Revelation, Resonance, Remembrance, Reconciliation. While opening transformative ways of presentation and discourse on the city’s sacred bearings that informed its palpable diversity, Lok Virsa juxtaposes its sombre landscape of pain and loss to weave the complex tapestry that is Amritsar.