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Tuesday March 19, 2024

Delhi’s ‘lost’ Mughal garden reopens as public park

By AFP
February 22, 2018

NEW DELHI: A once-forgotten Mughal garden in the heart of New Delhi will reopen on Wednesday after years of painstaking conservation work, creating a new public park in India’s sprawling and smog-choked capital.

The 90-acre garden will be formally opened by the Aga Khan, whose Trust for Culture has helped recreate the classical garden and restore its crumbling 16th-century monuments. Some of the ancient tombs it contains were close to ruin before conservation efforts began around a decade ago, but have now been given Unesco World Heritage status.

The park is part of the historic complex that surrounds Humayan’s Tomb, the recently restored grave of a Mughal emperor that is widely seen as the inspiration for the Taj Mahal. The Mughal dynasty ruled most of northern India from the early 16th to the mid-18th century and were famed for their architectural splendours.

Known as the Sunder Nursery, it was used in the early 20th century to propagate trees and flowers for the grand new city built when India’s British rulers moved the capital to Delhi from Kolkata. It remained in use as a government nursery, but the gardens themselves had become subsumed by jungle. When the Aga Khan Trust for Culture first opened offices, they had to contend with cobras nesting in the half-ruined buildings, said general manager Luis Monral.