This book review of ‘Heritage and Environment: An Indian Diary’ (2007) is contributed by Barry Joyce MBE, Vice-Chair ICOMOS-UK World Heritage Committee. It reviews the recent autobiographical work of Indian conservationist Shayam Chainani.

Heritage and Environment: An Indian Diary by Shyam Chainani

This is a personal account of a lifetime’s campaigning for the protection of India’s architectural and wider environmental heritage by a remarkable man.

Shyam Chainani’s father was, in the time of the Raj, one of the few Indians to become an ICS officer (one of the ‘heaven born’) and after Independence was appointed a High Court Judge. His son initially followed a conventional career as a business executive with the great Tata Group, following education in India, Magdalene College Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As a young man Shyam Chainani’s instinctive appreciation of the contribution historic buildings make to the urban environment led him to start questioning the destruction which he saw around him in the Bombay of the 1960s and 70s. When his beloved Royal Bombay Yacht Club’s nearby predecessor building of 1898 was proposed for demolition, he was galvanised into what became an obsessive lifetime’s devotion to environmental action.

It is a remarkable tribute to Tata and, by extension, the new young democratic country of India, that Chainani’s employer continued, for over 20 years, to pay a salary to allow him to carry out full time campaigning work, even when sometimes those campaigns were in direct opposition to the interests of the company. Is there a comparable example in UK business history?

The 500 plus pages of this illustrated book recount numerous instances of moral bravery by the committed few who gathered under the banner of the Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG) and were prepared to stick their necks out over matters of principle, sometimes in the face of seriously intimidating threats.

The name of the Group came to be rather misleading once its campaigning activities extended to many of the other great cities of India and even to hill stations and sites of ecological importance.

One of its bitterest and most challenging campaigns was fought in the 1980s against the might of the Navy, in defence of Bombay’s historic Naval Dockyard and its other historic buildings. The dockyard has been in continuous use since the early part of the 18th century and is where numerous ships for the East India Company and later the Royal Navy were built. Chainani describes how, after protracted and sometimes vicious exchanges at ministerial and chief of staff level the Government’s Director of Archaeology was finally won over by BEAG and the Government was persuaded to declare the historic structures listed buildings. This together with the winning over of some admirals frustrated the Navy’s intention to demolish the 18th and 19th century frontage buildings.

Government ‘heritage’ officials were not always so cooperative. Protection for India’s archaeological sites was put in place before Independence but the resultant great bureaucracy ‘The Archaeological Survey of India’ (ASI) considers the protection of the overwhelming bulk of India’s built heritage outside its remit and the book recounts how it has fallen to the heroic discriminating few to campaign for legislative protection for this vitally important part of the country’s cultural heritage.

Anyone interested in India’s extraordinary post independence history will find this an intriguing read, providing as it does an insight into the complex workings of that liberal democracy. Those who have fallen under the spell of India and love its historic towns and villages should purchase a copy to demonstrate their solidarity with the brave few whose heroic battles are catalogued here.

Barry Joyce
March 2008

Book details

HERITAGE AND ENVIRONMENT: AN INDIAN DIARY
By
Shyam Chainani

Published by The Urban Design Research Institute. November 2007.

Rs.995, $25, £13

ISBN 81-9019740-4-4