A leopard skin lies on a table at Namita Jaspal’s lab, set on the second floor of her three-storeyed house in New Chandigarh, a township just outside the eponymous state capital of Punjab and Haryana. “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 the 16th Century Golden Temple in Amritsar, 18th and 19th Century temples built by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, 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 one of the holiest, most-revered sites in Sikhism — Golden Temple. It took three-four years to complete the project as there was a lot of footfall and we could only work at night. 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.
