Sunder Nursery: How Delhi's forgotten ruins blossomed into a global heritage park

Sunder Nursery is a place where people arrive in their Rolls-Royces as well by e-rickshaws,” says Ratish Nanda, conservation architect and CEO of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) in India, as we sit down outside his office, tucked away in a corner of the park in Delhi’s Nizamuddin, on an unexpectedly temperate April morning.

The sky is overcast and the late morning breeze is so soothing that even the drops of rain that threaten to turn into a drizzle cannot persuade us to retreat indoors. There is a polyphony of birdsong all around, occasionally punctuated by the piercing calls of peacocks. Midway through the interview, we are visited by a crested serpent eagle, a rare sighting in the park, where nature’s bounty and beauty coexist alongside distinctly urban pockets built for rest and recreation—kiosks selling refreshments, a cafe, and other spaces that host a variety of cultural events throughout the year.

We are meeting to talk about a new book, Gardens Within a Garden: Sunder Nursery, New Delhi. It tells the story behind the restoration and conservation of the 16th-century garden. Editors Archana Saad Akhtar and Geeta Wahi Dua have done a splendid job of showcasing the transformation of what used to be an area dotted with Mughal-era ruins into a favourite hangout spot for Delhiites. A series of essays by historian Gillian Wright (who writes about the nursery that was created in the colonial era and overseen by Alick Percy Lancaster, the last British horticulturist in India), architect Gautam Bhatia (who situates the park in a global context), and landscape architect Yogesh Kapoor (who focuses on the masterly design concept), among others, bring the past, present and future of the project alive.

However, the book’s biggest absence—and presence—is Mohammad Shaheer, the landscape architect par excellence who passed away in 2015. He was instrumental in envisioning the Sunder Nursery project, along with the restoration of Humayun’s tomb, which lies a stone’s throw away, and spectacular Mughal gardens like Bagh-e-Babur in Kabul. The title of the book is derived from one of his phrases and the pages are speckled with quotations from his writings.

“A public place should really be as diverse as this,” Nanda says, drawing a parallel with Al-Azhar Park, a garden in the Old City of Cairo in Egypt, developed by AKTC. The latter, reports say, is visited by more than 2 million people annually. Since it opened its gates to the public in November 2018, Sunder Nursery has hosted over 6 million visitors, Nanda says. “A majority of them, around 75%, are picnickers coming with their family and friends,” he adds. “But the park has something for everyone. If you don’t like crowds, you can find a tranquil zone. If you have an elderly person with you, you can park and settle down close by. People come for the birds, heritage, culture, you name it.”

This egalitarian character of the garden, Nanda tells me, has been a cause of resentment for some of the resident Rolls-Royce wallahs of Nizamuddin, who dislike hoi polloi barging into their personal backyard and ruining their morning walks. “You must realise that the management of the park is as key for us (at AKTC) as its design,” says Nanda. “In the last eight years, we have organised a range of events to generate revenue and attract people who would otherwise not come to a space like this.”

From recently hosting a festival to celebrate India’s tribal communities to regular programming for children and conversations about books, Sunder Nursery has become not only the city’s green lungs but also one of Delhi’s cultural epicentres. Gardens Within a Garden is a testament to the genius of people like Shaheer and Nanda as well as the labour of hundreds of craftspeople, gardeners and other staff who have made this unique park possible.The effort of the AKTC team—which worked in a public-private partnership with the Archaeological Survey of India, Central Public Works Department and Municipal Corporation of Delhi—becomes evident even from a cursory glance at the before and after images of the site. In the 16th century, the entire area, as Nanda points out, would have been a series of gardens. Since all the property belonging to a noble would revert to the crown upon their death except for their tomb, it was in the interest of the family to own a large plot of land to build a mausoleum. “If you were a Muslim noble in a Mughal court, you wanted to be buried near the saints,” he says. Sunder Nursery’s proximity to the dargah of the 14th-century Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya explains why this neighbourhood had turned into an interconnected necropolis.

In 2010, as work on conserving Humayun’s Tomb was underway, Unesco expanded the World Heritage Site status to the adjoining Batashewala Complex, which increased the scope of the intervention. “We got the expansion, which had never been given before, because we were able to show that Humayun’s Tomb wasn’t built in isolation, but rather it existed as part of an ensemble of 16th-century garden tombs built within a landscape of Sufi tradition as represented by the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya,” Nanda says.

Shaheer’s blueprint for the redesign of the park, both Nanda and Akhtar explain, was inspired by his deep understanding of this essential contiguity of the space. Akhtar points out an image on page 65 of the book which illuminates his design principle elegantly. It shows three intersecting circles, like a Venn diagram, signifying “Forest,” “Heritage,” and the “Nursery.” Shaheer’s masterstroke, Nanda adds, was to create what he called an “Arc of Discovery” in this common zone, where all the three functions of the park intersect seamlessly. “You can get to all the monument clusters if you walk along this arc,” he adds.

Shaheer’s other outstanding contribution was to use the “garden carpet” concept from landscape architecture to redesign the chahaar bagh. The meticulous avenues, handcrafted water jalis, lotus fountains, along with natural and other man-made elements are seamlessly integrated into the landscape, as though woven into an exquisite Persian carpet. “It is a 2,000-year-old tradition, and Shaheer sahib’s 21st-century interpretation of it will one day be recognised for the classic that it is,” Nanda says.

Once you have read Gardens Within a Garden, it is difficult not to want to return to Sunder Nursery to look for the magical design that Shaheer conjured up to create this natural carpet. His intricate vision may bedazzle ordinary mortals but it creates a model, and sets a gold standard, for similar projects all around the world. As Shaheer had put it, “the design needed not to harm anything, but to create a movement pattern, a series of spaces among these beautiful assets, so that the design or what is designed does not really overpower that exists.”

Gardens Within a Garden is published by Mapin Publishing in partnership with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, New Delhi and the Government Sunder Nursery Management Trust, priced at ₹1,950.