Aniket Bhagwat’s voice rings clear over the telephone from Ahmedabad. But his heart lies further North — in Nishat Bagh, Srinagar, a Mughal garden built during the reign of Emperor Jehangir. In the copious shade of its chinar trees and the waterfalls that cascade down its terraces, India’s past and present seem to echo. The famed garden framed against the Zabarwan mountains and bordered by the Dal lake is Bhagwat’s favourite. “I have travelled the world looking at historical gardens,” says the third-generation landscape architect and graduate of two august institutions — Centre for Environmental Planning Technology, Ahmedabad; and School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. “Nishat Bagh is poetic. It stays as a residual part of your heart for years. It is emblematic of the geography it finds itself in—a land desiccated with water that mirrors many moods... reflective, joyous, still. It tells you the story of Kashmir.”
For Bhagwat, gardens are cultural artefacts. While geology defines their fundamental character, their landscape is a marker of time and territory; it is this procession of fretwork squares, ordered hedges and flowers in wild profusion through the ages that interests Bhagwat. “LEAF {Landscape Environment and Advancement Foundation}, the research arm of Prabhakar B Bhagwat, the firm established by my father, looks at creating knowledge. One of the questions that we asked ourselves was ‘What is the idea of the Indian garden?’ We don’t have a very good answer to that. A true telling of the garden histories of the Indian subcontinent will take decades of research. When we did our Million Gardens project a few years ago, we spoke to practitioners and students across India. There are gardens mentioned in the ancient scripts. But, there is only literature to support this; no actual physical construct. Over a period of time, the idea was defined by Mughal, colonial, palace and temple gardens. Modernity brought with it the schism between landscape architects and landscape gardeners. The first became concerned with larger issues of the environment, while the second is the one who plans the soil, the plants and works at the laboratory from where you look at many ideas of the world. Paradise is a garden. The exhibition takes this romantic idea and looks at it through an analytical lens.”
What began as a series of lectures from the material garnered, became an e-book and a travelling exhibition that has taken the story of the Indian garden to many cities across the country. “Vinay, a senior colleague, and I looked at different kinds of gardens such as the Botanical Garden in Kolkata and the War Cemetery in Pune. My father was a voracious reader, and so there was a lot of literature from the 1920s in the office. Most of it is original work, and we archived it over two years,” says Bhagwat.
The exhibition, brought to Chennai as part of Landscape Week hosted by Chennai Architecture Foundation (CAF)—a 10-year-old not-for-profit organisation set up by architects that examines the state of architecture in the city and other contextual concerns—has over 300 feet of panels on display. Although formatted into nine sections it is not a linear narrative. “It is open ended, so you can travel back and forth. There are no fancy embellishments. It’s a simple story that connects with the larger import of life,” adds Bhagwat.
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