Gujarat received its first World Heritage Site nomination this year when UNESCO declared Champaner one of India’s best preserved examples of an authentic medieval city, an example of a Sultanate capital of regional India and a precursor of later Mughal city architecture.

To get World Heritage Site status a country has to work hard to prove to the international selection committee that it has done the necessary homework, documentation and research to show that it will preserve the site and never let it fall to ruin again.

Champaner is 40 km from Vadodara in Gujarat. The story starts over 30 years ago. In 1969, the University of Baroda conducted excavations and found stone tools of Stone Age communities around the hills of this region. Champaner is built on a natural outcrop of igneous rock that rises some 800 feet above the flat land. The Kalimata temple is situated at the very peak of this sacred mountain of Pavagarh, and even today 100,000 pilgrims climb up, every month especially during the Navratras.

NGOs working in the area realized the significance of this site and began an agitation to stop the quarrying of stone in the vicinity of Champaner. A PIL was filed in the Gujarat high court and quarrying was stopped and the sacred mountain was preserved.

Then came the detailed study of each building and architectural drawings to understand the unique architecture of this medieval township. The grand mosques, temples and fortress walls all had to be recorded on a map to understand the conservation needs of each structure and what action is needed to consolidate and strengthen the structures so that they continue to exist for another 1000 years.

Then a management plan has to be developed for the whole site. UNESCO demands that when a country places a historic site up for nomination it must have a detailed plan of how the site will be looked after every day, every month and what yearly conservation actions will be taken to ensure that the site does not fall into ruin again. This part of the work is the most strenuous and often defeats even the most enthusiastic supporters of heritage conservation.

Most endangered

The management plan has to address visitors’ needs, site management, roads, drainage, security, land-use, protection of forests, etc. This means that the plan has to bring together local and state-level government bodies and departments, that may never have even spoken with one another, to work out an integrated plan for the common good of one place. In India, government departments tend to work at their own pace and within their own area without consulting any other related department. The electricity department may not have talked to the archaeological department to find out which would be the best place to lay the electricity lines, and so we have electricity lines and poles marring the face of a historic building. A simple road for visitors can damage a historic site if the road works department does not consult the archaeologist to ensure that a new road does not destroy historical evidence and ruin the original plan of the medieval city. If anything, the preparation of the World Heritage sites nomination papers bring departments together and get them to do their job well.

In 2000, Champaner was put on the New York-based World Monuments Fund’s list of 100 Most Endangered Heritage Sites of the World. In 2004, 22 years later, when the homework was done after non-stop research and documentation and continued action at Champaner, UNESCO inscribed Champaner a World Heritage Site, declaring it of universal value.

When will the Indian government wake up to the fact that much of our cultural heritage is of outstanding universal value and its time we cared for it before it is lost forever?