KVPT’s Patan Darbar Earthquake Response Campaign - Work to Date - September 2016

on caste membership, he is born a carpenter or mason
(there are no women carpenters or masons), stone carver
or coppersmith, painter, gilder or dyer. This hereditary
background possibly authenticates his creations, always
provided that the financial resources available will enable
him to invest as much time as is necessary in achieving
the highest possible quality.
In his seminal article published in 1989, A.G. Krishna
Menon, the Indian architect and conservation activist,
pointed out that by following the practices of the West,
“we [in India] pay the price by alienating the objectives
of conservation from the genius of the country”. For
Menon, the “genius of the country” not only lies in the
meaning of place and site but in the survival of intangible
values such as craftsmanship: “The present emphasis on
antiquity of objects marginalizes the remarkable survival
of craftspeople, rituals and customs which are equally
important in informing of the nature of our past”. Menon
even goes so far as to claim that “in India, we have
one of the few instances in the world, where genuine
authenticity could still be created in a viable dialogue
between the imperatives of tradition and modernity.” In
his radical engagement with the concept of authenticity,
Menon obviously acknowledges no time limit. Authenticity
is not exclusively bound up with a cultural product
of the past. Authenticity is a quality inherent in the
hands that still create genuine products.
Menon’s observations were shared by professionals of
neighboring countries: a “Bangkok Charter” was discussed
in Thailand in the late 1980s to justify the replacement
of heads on mutilated Buddha statues. In
May 1991 a conference in Kathmandu, convened by the
Department of Archaeology in collaboration with the
Goethe Institute, dared to phrase a few key assumptions
which almost took the shape of a charter. It was said that
“the existence of a living tradition ensures the survival
of aesthetic values with an inherent quality of authenticity”.
New “liberties” should not, Menon concedes, “be practiced
on the exemplary monuments of our civilization,
for they remain the authentic texts of a bygone era.”
But he draws attention to the “thousands of lesser monuments
and historic buildings, which still exist in our
contemporary landscape.” In an effort to sting the professional
functionaries of conservation worldwide into a
response, Menon even propagates the “conjectural restoration
of such buildings, with a view to return them
to productive use.” Similarly, Gamini Wijesuriya, an architect
and conservationist from Sri Lanka, pointed out
at a conference in memory of Alois Riegl in Vienna in
April 2008 that ruling out any “conjecture” necessarily
alienates “the followers for whom that heritage was actually
created”.
In 2008, Menon made himself heard once again in the
framework of a general questioning of the universal validity
of the Venice Charter in the twenty-first century:
“Its advocates […] have proselytized its message as an
article of faith,” Menon maintains, to such an extent,
that it “has displaced living cultural traditions”.
Menon’s perspective is surely highly idealistic. Many
craftsmen in India no longer learn their trades from their
fathers. Many of them have been trained in workshops.
In Nepal, by contrast, carpenters of the Newar sub-caste
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Kathmandu, Svayambhucaitya.
Repair, replacement and gilding
of the tympanum crowning the
eastern niche, housing Akshobhya.
The project was implemented
with funds from the Nyingma
Meditation Center at Berkeley in
2008–2010.
Photograph N. Gutschow, 2009
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