When the largest hand-painted scroll of Benode Behari Mukherjee titled Scenes from Santiniketan was displayed in a city gallery recently, many viewers opined that it was perhaps one of the few remaining documentations of the original landscape of Santiniketan.
Artist Jogen Chowdhury told Metro: “Santiniketan ek-kale eirokom chilo (Santiniketan was like this once upon a time).”
After years of unregulated “development,” Unesco’s World Heritage Site tag on Tagore’s abode has renewed hope that there could still be something to be salvaged of what the world body calls the “Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) of Santiniketan.
The Unesco-approved management plan for its newly inscribed World Heritage Site suggests how the “core area” of the site that comprises the Ashrama, Uttarayan and the Sangeet and Kala Bhavana comprising 36 hectares and the 537-hectare buffer zone needs to be protected.
The nominated property is a smaller subset of the overall jurisdiction of Visva-Bharati and the buffer zone is the entire university campus itself.
Physicist Partha Ghosh, an expert consultant to the team who worked on the dossier that is part of the management plan and who was part of author-activist Mahasweta Devi’s prolonged fight to save Santiniketan, said: “Our fight for Santiniketan started in 2003. Today, we see this inscription as a culmination. But to really protect Santiniketan, earnest work needs to be done by Visva-Bharati. The university is too bogged down by its day-to-day affairs to really work on this. After the inscription, I hope the central and state governments together with Visva-Bharati earnestly conserve Santiniketan and protect its universal value.”
The dossier acknowledges “development pressures within the nominated property, buffer, and around the periphery of the buffer”.
“A study of the proposed Land Use and Development Control Plan for 2005-25 for Santiniketan-Sriniketan, reveals the creation of large housing projects, in the immediate periphery of this buffer zone, which are noted to be threatening the overall landscape character of Santiniketan,” says the Unesco-approved plan.
About having a living university as a World Heritage Site, art historian R. Siva Kumar, the head of Kala Bhavana, said: “It is a unique challenge to conserve the core area and the buffer, which forms the campus area of a working university.... In the past 30 years, the university has grown five times because of government policies. There is an acute shortage of space, historical buildings cannot be used. We need to have a serious concerted thought process if we are really to do justice to this inscription.”
Unesco, on its part, will ask for reports on the preservation and maintenance of the site from time to time, said Manish Chakravarti, who co-created the dossier.
“It can delist if the conservation and protection of the site does not match the standards set for World Heritage Sites. Such instances have happened with the Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City, UK, the Dresden Elbe Valley in Germany and the Arabian Orynx Sanctuary in Oman,” said the architect.
In October 2010, a heritage committee was instituted for a period of three years “to monitor all actions related to spatial and entity level conservation...” of the nominated property.
The committee is not active at present.
The biggest threat to the heritage property comes from the Bolpur-Santiniketan Road that bisects the property.
“Buses ply through this PWD Road since the early 80s,” said Ghosh.
The plan, too, notes: “The ideological and functional character of the landscape is altered drastically and adversely by the traffic arteries that bisect the property.”
Visva-Bharati has proposed the creation of ring roads so that the buffer zone can be made pedestrian only.
Apart from stalling any further construction and intervention, the management plan lays stress on restoring the old open landscape where Rabindranath envisioned learning to happen.
The plan emphasises keeping the Rarh landscape of red laterite soil free. It asks to remove all built structures like the concrete stage at Amrakunja or the stage constructed at Gour Prangan.
Among the tangible heritage are also the various outdoor sculptures by great masters like Ramkinkar.
The plan notes the need to repair and conserve Baij’s Gandhi statue, which is in disrepair. His Call of the Mill survives better only because it has an incongruous roof cover.
Siva Kumar has done an inventory of the murals for the dossier. According to the catalogue containing a list of 86 locations of murals, the murals in 14 have been lost.
“The murals are conserved when the buildings are maintained and conserved properly. Seepage is the biggest threat here.”