Bhruvi Bhatia

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will facilitate research to understand how technologies such as photogrammetry, digital documentation, 3D scanning, and virtual reconstruction used by Indian women conservation architects in India are reshaping conservation practices. Rather than treating these technologies of digital interventions as neutral tools, the project asks how they challenge and/or transform ideas of authenticity, materiality, care, and custodianship within heritage conservation. Through interviews with women conservation architects, visits to selected restoration sites, and a series of research-led exhibitions, the project generates public conversations around this relationship between physical and virtual heritage. In doing so, it contributes to feminist architectural historiography and offers new ways of understanding conservation as a practice that unfolds simultaneously across multiple domains. This project is in collaboration with Women of Vaastuakala Archive (WoVA). Announced as accessible in 2022, the archive is primarily located on the web and hosts oral histories of 21 women practitioners in architecture, design, planning, and allied disciplines, from across India. Supported by the Graham Foundation, Chicago, this archive has emerged from a research project Revisiting India’s Architectural History: Tracing the Women Practitioners of Twentieth Century India. The intent is to record conversations with a wide range of women practitioners in varying positions across the built environment industry, map their journeys, and arrive at an alternate narrative about India’s architectural history post-independence. At present, the archive is now supported and hosted by Curating for Culture, a collective focused on making invisible histories visible. Bhruvi Bhatia is the Coordinator of this project. 

Bhruvi Bhatia is a researcher and writer based out of Delhi NCR. She has completed her graduation in English from Delhi University and has a Master’s degree in English and Cultural Studies from Christ University, Bangalore. Bhruvi has been a remote researcher at the University of Bonn on the project Artistic practices that address German colonial past. From December 2024-2025 she also worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Kent on the project Institutional and artistic responses to the statues toppled during the George Floyd Protests. Furthermore, she has presented at numerous national and international conferences and contributed to research journals. Considering her research experience and interest Bhruvi is best suited to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA. 

While recent scholarship has acknowledged the contribution of women architects in shaping modern India’s built environment, academic and scholarly discussions on their role in conserving historic structures and working within the constraints of public archaeological material and community-led frameworks remain underexplored. This Foundation project in collaboration with WoVA, facilitates an important research and documentation of their professional trajectories, experiences of working on heritage sites and readings of it through a lens of feminist spatial practices. Basing the project out of the few selected oral histories available in the collection of WoVA, the project will further engage with women practitioners through interviews, field visits. Documentation of these processes through recording is crucial, not only as outcomes, but to unpack the nuanced practice of conservation which involve long-term and long-drawn processes of care, maintenance and negotiations. Documenting participation of women practitioners in these processes will possibly reorient architectural history away from monumentality and toward practices of repair, continuity, and custodianship – areas in which women have historically been rendered to the background, if not invisible.  In addition, these narratives being added to the collection of WoVA will significantly contribute towards building pedagogical and professional genealogies for future practitioners. By tracing training pathways and collaborative modes of working, the project would provide an important resource for students of heritage conservation and for feminist architectural historiography in India.

One of the key aspects of this project is to examine the role of digital and virtual restoration practices in contemporary heritage conservation in India. The Project Coordinator will undertake site visits to selected projects led by heritage conservationists. These visits will be complemented by in-depth conversations with practitioners to discuss their methodologies. Keeping in mind the timeline of the project and the budget the Project Coordinator will focus on Bangalore and Delhi NCR as the primary focus area for her research. The interviews, conversations and site-visits will enable the Project Coordinator to situate how adoption of digital tools and intervention at various stages of conservation responds to or raises questions about material authenticity, sensory engagement, and the relationship between physical sites and their virtual counterparts. By situating oral histories alongside digital heritage initiatives, the project will contribute to a more expansive understanding of conservation as a field that now operates simultaneously across physical, archival, and virtual domains. In addition, Bhruvi also plans to organise a series of exhibitions, developed more as research methodology rather than solely an outcome. These exhibitions will bring together photographs, site documentation, interview excerpts, archival materials gathered through the project to create a platform for dialogue between practitioners, researchers, students, and the public. By inviting audiences to engage with and respond to the research material, the exhibitions will generate an additional layer of insight into how questions of authenticity, materiality, digital mediation, and heritage are understood and negotiated. 

The project speaks to the vision of the Archives and Museums programme of IFA and responds to the impulse of the collaboration between IFA and Women of Vaastukala Archive. Women in Vaastukala as an archive, is one of its first kind which uses oral history recordings, visual documentation, and storytelling tools to create an open-access archive. The project proposes to extend the significant work undertaken by WoVA by focusing on and including more women architects, specifically those engaged in heritage conservation and restoration practices in India, virtual and otherwise.  

Bhruvi has divided her project timeline into five phases starting with preliminary research, project design, shortlisting of sites and interviewees. The second phase will be dedicated towards preparation and conducting of the interviews along with site visits. Research findings and materials from the first two phase will lead to the next phase of exhibitions across a few cities. The last two phases will be dedicated towards final analysis of the research, writing and consolidation of the materials and its dissemination in consultation with WoVA.  

The outcomes of this project will be a corpus of oral histories along with a series of exhibitions as part of the research method and a scholarly article/research paper will be published in a reputed journal, contributing to the scholarship on feminist architectural historiography. The Project Coordinator’s final deliverables to IFA, along with the manuscript of scholarly article/research paper will be the oral history interviews and audio-visual materials and research findings from the exhibitions.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is supported by Tata Trusts.