At Namita Jaspal’s lab in New Chandigarh, a township just outside the eponymous State capital of Punjab and Haryana, lies a piece of leopard skin on a table. “It has come for restoration from a private collection,” says Namita, the chief conservator of Heritage Preservation Atelier, a company she started in 2011.
There are old paintings in the lab too, but Namita’s work takes shape outside — in the wall paintings of 16th-century Golden Temple in Amritsar, 18th- and 19th-century temples built by Maharaja Ranjit Singh across Punjab, and a nine-foot flag gifted by the Chinese to the British Indian Army in the 1800s. “In 2013, I conserved the wall paintings at Golden Temple. It took three-four years to complete the project as there is a lot of footfall. We have also done frescos and wall paintings in temples from Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s time. In all of them, there was an amalgamation of faith. In a Krishna temple, there were paintings of all 10 Sikh gurus,” she says.
