ABSTRACT
Modern India’s immense collection of signicant historic architectural and artistic works represents the collective achievements of many great civilizations. Its broad roster of heritage sites spans thousands of years, numerous reigning empires and several religious beliefs, including two of the world’s most prominent faiths, Buddhism and Hinduism.1 One of the world’s largest and most populous countries,2 India faces the challenging task of conserving its patrimony in a dynamic, vast and rapidly developing environment. Its 3.3 million square kilometers (1.3 million square miles) contains a large variety of topography, climates, and ethnic and artistic traditions. These factors have produced architectural splendors associated with some of Asia’s greatest periods of building, including the Vijayanagara (fourteenth-sixteenth centuries ce) and Mughal empires (sixteenth-nineteenth centuries ce), and represent a vast temporal range, from the cave sites of Bhimbetka (paintings dating to 30,000 years from present) to the twentieth century Indo-Saracenic government buildings of New Delhi. While each geographic region carries its own distinctive local culture and deep historical traditions, each also maintains a connection to India’s contemporary national identity, born out of the country’s independence from Britain in 1947 and subsequent partition from the modern states of Pakistan and Bangladesh.
