Past Lives, Present Spaces: Between Culture and Commodification in India’s Heritage Revival
Featured Image: Courtyard garden in Jaipur’s Amer Fort (Source: Aryav Bothra)
By Aryav Bothra
Everytime I pass the abandoned rajbari, royal house in Bengali, near my grandparents’ home in Calcutta, I’m struck by its decaying state. Its facade is weary but regal—arches slanted like tired eyes, balconies strung with unruly vines. Sunlight seeps through cracked windows, casting fractured shadows across a dusty entrance now fading into overgrowth. Outside, the world doesn’t pause. Fruit vendors shout over the rumble of buses, plastic tarps flutter like restless sails. Time rushes forward, indifferent.
Wandering the regal courtyards of City Palace in Jaipur—my mom’s hometown in a region with deep royal roots—a different awe envelops me. Down a corridor lined with jharokha-style windows and stucco doors glowing in the late afternoon ochre, I find a boutique tucked into the palace’s outer wall. I squeeze past a group of British tourists, following the sweet aroma of rosewater around the aisles of artisan soaps and mirror-work dresses. Reading a placard by the register that credits the store’s opening to the Princess of Jaipur’s love for handicraft, I chuckle. There’s something quietly ironic about watching tourists clamour over souvenirs in a space where royal decrees were once drafted.
India is a country with a complicated architectural history. The topography of urban India is dotted with the remnants—both pristine and decaying—of the many that tried to conquer it: the British, the Mughals, and countless kingdoms before them.
The Mughal Empire, spanning from 1526 to 1857, carved into India a landscape of forts, mosques, and mausoleums featuring geometrical gardens and dramatic archways. The Taj Mahal is the most famous example of this Islamic and Persian aesthetic influence. The century of British rule until the mid-1950s left behind European-style courthouses, railway stations, and government buildings—especially in cities like Kolkata, the empire’s long-standing capital. And in princely states, no influence was stronger than that of the local maharaja, such as the Rajputs who painted Jaipur in its iconic dusky pink hue.
Today, many of these architectural legacies are being reimagined through adaptive reuse: converting historic bungalows and palaces into hotels, boutiques, and bookshops. From Jaipur’s famous Rambagh Palace Hotel to tea stalls tucked in the colonial-era Calcutta Stock Exchange, the bones of past empires are the backdrop for India’s architectural revival. This is supported in part by government schemes: heritage hotel tax rebates, federal funding from the Ministry of Culture, and urban planning initiatives like HRIDAY aimed at integrating heritage-sensitive infrastructure into cities.
But, these projects also pose a new generation of Indians with several complex questions: How do you strike a balance between restoration and modernization? Is transforming a palace into a hotel commodifying India’s culture? Whose history is preserved and whose is a necessary sacrifice to the blueprints of a modern nation?
Dr. Shikha Jain, a leading conservation architect and founder of heritage architecture firm DRONAH, sees adaptive reuse as a necessary compromise.
“Obviously, originality is lost a bit in restoration, but then you also have to look at the commercial viability. Otherwise, these buildings will not be saved. I think that is where the question comes in: how does one balance?” Dr. Jain tells me.
In a country with an estimated half a million heritage structures—many privately owned or abandoned—reuse can be seen as a form of rescue. But the ethics of how these projects are pursued remain deeply contested.
In my recent visit to Jaipur, this tension between preservation and commercialization was apparent. A lunch at Bar Palladio brought me to a turquoise-washed space of Italian imagination in the Narain Niwas Palace. Designed by Dutch artist Marie-Anne Oudejans, her vision of candlelit walkways and an opulent European menu felt at odds with the palace’s markedly Anglo-Indian construction and Rajput grandeur—further complicated by the ethics of whether foreign architects should transform Indian heritage spaces.
“The most rewarding aspect of my work is building a team of artists…Some of these individuals are simple folks with families in villages who never had the opportunity to attend school. Witnessing the moment…their faces light up when their work is applauded around the world is genuinely one of the best aspects of what I do,” Marie-Anne said in an interview with Architectural Digest.
The market for these upscale heritage dining spaces and boutique hotels, especially in Rajasthan, cannot be understated. Properties like Bar Palladio and Rambagh Palace earn international acclaim as living histories, records of the often complex but undeniably beautiful artistic forces that have shaped India.
But to approach these projects from a design perspective, Dr. Jain says that architects need to assess a structure’s historical value: spatial layout, artistic detailing, material integrity. Keeping them as the focal point will anchor the space’s authenticity and ensure it isn’t too modernized in an attempt to cater to new-age consumers.
“In City Palace Udaipur, we mapped 57 historic spaces. Some, like palace rooms with artwork, should not be touched—just preserved. Others, like stables, could be adapted for parking…That is where the challenge is. How much to add? How much to change?” Dr. Jain explains. “As long as you’re honest: this was original, and this is an extension, then it is justified. Otherwise, the danger is people demolish and rebuild entirely.”
For Ifthikar Ahsan, owner of the famed heritage bed-and-breakfast Calcutta Bungalow, reflection is also central to restoration.
“I feel that the process of restoration—rejuvenation—has to be organic. It has to be slow. It cannot be very fast, because the moment you go fast and you break things, you superimpose your ideas onto a space. But spaces usually come with their own history, with their own sort of energy, with their own perspective or representation of the time period they were constructed in,” Iftikhar explains.
When I toured Calcutta Bungalow a few years ago, neatly tucked into one of the city’s older quarters, the team highlighted their mission to combat the local apathy allowing vacant homes to be consumed by modernization. Catching up with Iftikhar, he elaborates how the project was not purely architectural, it was his emotional resistance to the erosion of Calcutta’s past.
“There’s so much humanity on the streets of Calcutta. I felt like this place owns me and I own this place. And it’s this symbiotic connection that has fueled the bungalow…So in that sense, we wanted to give it our best. We wanted to make it as beautiful, as deep rooted, and as philosophically sound as the energy that was always there in that house,” Ifthikar tells me.
Ifthikar’s observations about the dangers of modernization resonate across the country. Sameness and the drive for efficiency—in the form of mass apartment buildings and meticulously planned neighborhoods—are swallowing the individuality of Indian communities.
And for many historical buildings, they will never end in heritage tourism. Forgotten colonial printing presses, abandoned ancestral homes, crumbling village stepwells—what to make of them? Without mass economic or political appeal, their futures appear rather bleak.
“Ancestral architecture has this wonderful inside, outside. They have courtyards. They are interlaced with nature: birds were flying into the house, making nests in one corner. Trees were growing in some parts. You were interacting with the vendors in other parts. They were built for complex human beings. As opposed to modern homes that are built for much simpler creatures. And we are not simple creatures,” Ifthikar urges.
The neglect of privately-owned properties is difficult to address structurally, especially when compounded by family disagreements, missing documentation, or migration to entirely new cities and countries. Still, India’s bureaucracy wields immense power in determining the fate of heritage spaces.
Whether it’s a homeowner petitioning the Kolkata Municipal Corporation for permission to commercialize their bungalow or a larger proposal seeking grants from the Bengal Heritage Commission, it is ultimately an opaque state process that determines whose history is preserved—and what is left to fade. With such authority, any conversation on adaptive reuse must not only reconcile authenticity with appropriation but a deeper question: whose history is deemed worth saving?
Dr. Jain explains that while no explicit biases are present in funding schemes, unconscious factors have prioritized certain histories.
“In historiography, which is actually written by the British, there’s a lot of Mughal records. So, Mughal and British architecture have been very dominant for so long. Definitely the current political regime and even some historians feel that a lot of regional architecture was neglected for so long because of this,” Dr. Jain says.
In cities like Kolkata where adaptive reuse has been slow to grow its roots, bureaucratic inertia remains a significant barrier.
“There’s so much creativity that is inherent and latent and just lying in disuse in this city. We are saddled with very bad politicians. They don’t understand tourism. They don’t understand culture,” Ifthikar confesses. “They want to make Calcutta a cheap copy of London. They want to make Calcutta a cheap copy of Singapore…And the people who are close to the politicians, they end up getting all the jobs.”
This bureaucratic red tape contributes to a kind of architectural amnesia: a structural forgetting of the historical spaces not deemed grand enough to showcase. As a passerby, I can’t help but imagine the fruit market my grandparents frequent set against a rajbari with fresh plaster and polished windows, rather than one dissolving into the anonymity of urban decay.
Perhaps paradoxically, social media is catalyzing a broader cultural consciousness of adaptive reuse. As younger generations grow curious of the histories of the spaces they inhabit, they fuel not only heritage tourism but growing domestic awareness of why architectural preservation matters. The Instagrammafication effect certainly risks reducing conservation to marketability, but perhaps it’s a necessary moral compromise India must accept.
“Social media has been very positive for the heritage sector—for reuse, for awareness. It’s definitely helped. There are so many stories and sites that people now know because of it. That’s how the younger generation is getting more interested in heritage,” Dr. Jain says.
As with many things in India, the question of adaptive reuse is inherently complex. It is a question of the momentum of globalization just as much as it is of the enduring legacy and beauty of Indian history. Across communities, change is perhaps the only constant: some are irreversibly changed by the loss of once-vital spaces now lying vacant, others revitalized by repurposing those spaces.
And so the question of adaptive reuse becomes not why but how—how does a country as historically layered as India preserve its complexity?
For me, it’s a deeply personal question. Each trip back to India challenges me to reflect not only on my family heritage but the interplay of colonialism, royalty, bureaucracy, and memory.
Back in Calcutta, the rajbari I see every morning continues to sag into the earth. No preservation crews. No princess-sponsored intervention. It stands still for now—a quiet reminder that not all heritage can be curated. Some of it simply waits, hoping not to be forgotten.
Aryav Bothra is a junior in Grace Hopper College. He can be reached at aryav.bothra@yale.edu.