Site specific intervention
(Part of Annual Art Exhibition - Bharati Kala Mahavidyalaya, Pune)
Material - Red cloth with written note,   Year 2016

Environmental writer Emma Marris - particularly her idea of the rambunctious garden - changed how I look at nature in cities. Ecologists use the term Novel Ecosystems to describe places where human action has produced new combinations of species and interactions that did not exist historically. These can include vacant lots, backyards left to grow, road verges, or small urban plots where native and non-native plants recombine and create unexpected habitats. Novel ecosystems often self-organize without intensive management and can support surprising biodiversity even in heavily built environments.

Novel Nature was conceived as a small urban intervention on my University campus in Pune - a campus that hundreds of people walk through daily, surrounded by otherwise hard, paved, or built surfaces. The project used that everyday campus as a field for attention: 38 sites within the campus were selected where small printed notes, each paired with a piece of red cloth (the red cloth referencing the warning flags used on Indian trucks), were placed to call attention to overlooked patches of vegetation and marginal ecologies. The red markers acted as intentional interruptions: visual cues that asked passersby to stop and look, to notice the species, textures, and light they usually walk past without registering.

The method was simple and deliberate. Each note asked the viewer to consider the patch beneath their feet as part of a larger, hybrid ecology — an urban fragment where spontaneous plant communities, dust, soil, and human use meet. Rather than attempting to “restore” a patch to some idealised past, the installation invited a different question: what kinds of attentions, seeings, and small actions might change how we value and live with these novel urban ecologies? The visual reference to warning flags aimed to make the act of noticing feel urgent - to reposition these small, often dismissed sites as worthy of care and observation.

The project is less about transforming ecology than about creating an instrument of perception - a way to open a different kind of seeing in a cityscape that tends to erase the slow life of plants and micro-habitats.

Further Reading 

• British Ecological Society  - short explainer on novel ecosystems 

• Emma Marris - Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World

Reading Environments : Evolving ways of Seeing

My work on Novel Nature began with noticing small, overlooked ecologies - the so-called “less natural” patches that persist inside dense urban life. Over the years, this way of looking has expanded outward, shaping how I read historical sites, restored environments, and institutional approaches to conservation. One recurring pattern continues to surface: the replacement of historically rich, layered garden ecologies (baghicha) with flat, standardised lawns.

This shift is far from trivial. It reflects a deeper question about how heritage is interpreted and who decides what form “restoration” should take.

When I visited sites such as the Garh Palace in Bundi, the lawns immediately stood out - not because they were beautiful, but because they felt historically unrooted. The palace’s murals depict orchards, flowering courtyards, terraced gardens, and water channels. Literary and archival sources also describe seasonal plants, fruiting trees, and the sensory ecologies that shaped these spaces. A monoculture lawn has no historical basis in these contexts.

This same pattern appears at many ASI-managed sites, including parts of the Red Fort, Delhi. Lawns serve today as a standardised backdrop, visually clean and bureaucratically simple. They photograph well, require minimal historical research, and help institutions stabilise attention on the architecture rather than the surrounding ecology.

But lawns are not neutral. They are an aesthetic interpretation - a modern template applied across vastly different periods, climates, and cultural landscapes. They belong to a colonial vocabulary of beautification imported from temperate Europe, not from Indian horticultural imagination.

In choosing lawns, institutions like the ASI (and occasionally even UNESCO-supported projects) often prioritise asset management and visual order over ecological or historical authenticity. It is easier and cheaper to maintain a simple lawn than to reintroduce: fruiting orchards, local species, seasonal plant cycles, water-based cooling systems, shaded courtyards, layered garden ecologies.

So the question quietly shifts from “How do we restore history?” to “How do we make this manageable within today’s administrative frameworks?”

This reveals a deeper philosophical tension: Are we preserving structures, or are we preserving experiences?

A palace complex with a lawn may look tidy, but it erases the sensory world that the architecture once lived within. In Mughal and Rajput contexts, gardens were not decoration; they were cosmological, climatic, and cultural systems. When removed, a critical part of the place’s meaning disappears.

Yet we do have counter-examples that demonstrate what thoughtful restoration can achieve. The restoration of the Chahar Bagh at Humayun’s Tomb, Delhi - led by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in collaboration with the ASI - proves that ecological and historical fidelity is possible. This project revived original water channels, geometry, and plant species based on extensive scholarship. It shows that the prevalent use of lawns elsewhere is not due to impossibility, but due to institutional preference and constrained priorities.

Across years of observing these choices, my understanding of “nature” and “restoration” has shifted. Heritage landscapes are not passive backdrops; they are active cultural decisions, shaped by what authorities choose to prioritise and what they choose to simplify. And simplification always comes with a cost.

In the end, reading environments - whether a micro-ecosystem behind a campus wall or a large ASI monument - has taught me that restoration is never just maintenance. It is interpretation, value-setting and often erasure. A future planning philosophy must be willing to move beyond managerial neatness toward historically and ecologically grounded authenticity - preserving not just structures, but the living systems that once made those sites whole.