Opinion
Pruscha’s Kathmandu Valley
His inventory prepared during 1970-1975 introduces a visionary plan for the preservation of Nepali architectureI recently came across two volumes of a tome entitled ‘Kathmandu Valley: the preservation of physical environment and cultural heritage: a protective inventory’. The publication information says this inventory initially published by the Nepal government in collaboration with the United Nations and Unesco in 1975 is published for the second time in 2015 by Vajra Books. The coordinator and producer of the tome, a senior Austrian professor Carl Pruscha, a physical planner, tells how he got a job to come here with the UN in the mid-60s and how he became successful in his efforts to start the survey of the Kathmandu Valley from a scratch. The Director-general of Unesco, Irina Bokova describes this book as “most timely” and helpful in “subsequent damage assessment of restoration work.” She repeats the world organisation’s “enduring commitments for reconstruction”.
The beginnings
The sudden appearance of these multiple photographs of the heritage sites and the monuments, with recommendations by the pioneering UN expert, at a time when we are trying to grapple with the problem of the assessment
of damage caused by the Great earthquake, is valuable indeed. He suggests that one should read the novella, ‘The Mountain is Young’ by Han Suyin to understand how Rana palaces were turned into hotels—the ethos of Nepal’s experiment with emergent tourism. He also mentions how BP Koirala was arrested by a king surrounded by unctuous advisers.
Pruscha talks about a town planning office set up before 1965 with the help of a UN expert from Denmark. But reading this important book and the subsequent directories and tomes, I have come to believe that the cities of the Kathmandu Valley never warranted the need for new-fangled planning, which explains why foreign experts never came up with models like Corbusier’s plan for Chandigarh. All the anxieties appear to be about developing plans for the preservation of the abodes of gods and humans and the intangible heritage. The familiar and intimate cities open up in a chronological order in these volumes. We get to read the narrative of architect Pruscha from the year 1965, when he arrives in Nepal and is captivated by the Valley’s beauty, and held by the UN assignments. During this period of initial quest for expertise, he meets “a Nepalese geographer returned from his postgraduate studies in Edinburgh”; apparently he was the eminent geographer and scholar, the late Harka Gurung.
Pragmatic romanticism
In the second phase, Pruscha works as a physical planner who would address the issues like settings, inhabitants, their activities and the scope of their mobility. He published the work—his story—in Calcutta in 1969. His ambition was very high; he wanted to see a “stop to growth for the valley” with the surroundings used as production sites for light industries while retaining the “Newari traditional allocation of land for settlement and farming”. Pruscha’s approach was that of a pragmatist romanticist, something that has occupied the minds of all the architects and the Valley planners of native and foreign origins. But it is moving to see how this very pragmatic romanticism had inspired the pioneers and denizens for centuries to combine aesthetics and worldliness in their towns and house designs.
But Pruscha also turned this pragmatic romanticism into action, and used “bricks, limestone and timber to build a house” for himself, and to make up for the unavailability of the timber “developed a modular system consisting of concrete slabs.” His first “major demonstration project was the CEDA building in Kirtipur financed by the Ford Foundation.” The Taragaon hotel was Pruscha’s next work; he got others to work in the holy site of Kapilvastu, Buddha’s birthplace. Pruscha’s third project was the “compilation of the protective inventory and its publication” accomplished in five years from 1970. His contribution was to engage the Unesco expertise by convincing them of the importance and need of the work. The very name ‘protective inventory’ is important, especially in today’s context of developing preservation plans to balance natural features with constructed sites. Pruscha’s introduction to this Vajra publication recalls his first edition that is about forty years old, as a document prepared from a ‘biographical angle’. His note that “the region is inhabited and at the verge of active development” is the jeremiad of all the Nepali and foreign architects and planners.
Pruscha’s biographical narrative about the Kathmandu Valley and its preservation has a unique combination of linearity and complexity. His phase-wise study shows the linearity and his realisation of the complexity that it holds. Works and discourses of the experts of the Society of Nepali Architect (SONA), especially their post-earthquake plans of rebuilding, and writings of different times like Gautamvajra Vajracharya’s ‘Hanuman Dhoka Rajdarbar’ (1976), Mary Shepherd Slusser’s, ‘Nepal Mandala’ (1982, 1998), Sudarshan Raj Tiwari’s ‘The Ancient Settlements of the Kathmandu Valley’ (2011), Niels Gutschow’s, ‘Newar Architecture’ (2011) in three volumes, Satyamohan Joshi’s writings on the subject, Bharat Sharma’s unpublished doctoral dissertation, Rabindra Puri’s model or namuna works, Shiva Rijal’s ‘Visiting Vikramshil Mahavihara’ (2011), Ajay Dixit’s water course studies and his book ‘Nepal ma Bipad’ (2016), as well as Unesco’s ‘Changing Faces of Nepal, century photographs’ (1997), GTZ’s publication of ‘Images of a Century’ (1995), have always shaped my imagination about the future, and helped me understand the anxieties of planning and preservation. Pruscha’s protective inventory prepared during 1970-1975 introduces a far-reaching visionary plan for the preservation by linking that to natural features like peaks, forests, and traditional open-air meeting grounds, among others.
Wealth of information
Pruscha’s book is a big index to visual sites and monuments of the Kathmandu Valley classified and identified as “32 preservation districts, 34 monument zones, 29 natural preservation districts and 888 individual monuments and monument sites”. Pruscha’s compendium may have uncannily changed, but this visual index can be very useful today, especially to assess and locate the damaging sites following the 2015 April earthquake. His personal story of how he involved an European geographer to photograph the Kathmandu Valley from a plane available then and how he made the best use of his expertise and clout for the purpose is very moving. Pruscha’s story of humanism, love for the space and anxieties about restoring and preserving the existing sites and monuments, and his success in engaging the Nepali and UN stakeholders’ attention to the problem is a valuable reading. I have only alluded to the major features of this hugely important work in this limited space. But experts, layperson and artists in general, as well as theatre people, will find a wealth of information in these two volumes.