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The Nationwide Photo Project Preserving India’s Architecture
In the town of Jaisalmer in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, Patwon Ki Haveli shimmers in the haze of the Thar Desert, not far from its famed golden fort. With intricately carved balconies, courtyards where shadows dance as light filters through latticed windows, and rooms that echo with history, this traditional sandstone house, or haveli, was built by a wealthy local trader in 1805.
“Growing up not far from this haveli, I was in awe of it, and it was one of the reasons I decided to become an architect,” 29-year-old Riya Bissa says.
But over the years, Bissa felt it had “lost its relevance for the people living around it.” To address this, she organized a series of community events as part of World Heritage Day last April — walks, art contests and an exhibition in one of the haveli’s exquisite courtyards. “I felt the old building come to life when it was used and enjoyed by the community,” she says. “It was wonderful.”
A passer-by walks through the gates of the Fort of St Jerome in Daman in western India. Photo courtesy of Amit Pasricha / India Lost and Found
This wasn’t the first time Bissa had dedicated time to helping honor India’s historic buildings. For the last few years, she has volunteered with India Lost and Found (ILF), a crowdsourced photo project that celebrates India’s heritage.
Looking beyond the country’s famous monuments like the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort, the initiative documents the country’s vast reserve of lesser-known but still charismatic old monuments. This is important, its founder Amit Pasricha says, not only to create a digital archive that will inform and drive conservation, but also because the crowdsourcing of this information is “creating a new generation of people passionate about history.”
Pasricha is a professional photographer best known for his panoramic shots of Indian monuments. The idea of ILF came to him while he was working on his book India at Home. Travelling through India’s backroads, he found himself drawn not just to grand palaces and majestic tombs, but to what lay in their shadows: Weathered temples, ancient stepwells, crumbling havelis and more.
“The Archeological Survey of India has more than 2,500 historical monuments on its list, but barely a couple of hundred are visited,” Pasricha says. “They remain unvisited, undocumented, unseen […] and that’s a huge part of our heritage that we’re missing out on.”
Initially, Pasricha set out to photograph them himself. But it soon became clear that no single person could possibly capture them all. That’s when the idea of crowdsourcing emerged: What if citizens could help build a map of India’s forgotten past — and, in creating it, make the past a little more relevant to the present.
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Launched in 2018, ILF began as an archive of photographs that Pasricha had taken to which anyone with a camera phone who came across an interesting old ruin in their neighborhood could also contribute. The renowned photographer travelled to universities and colleges across the country to gain support for the project and recruit volunteers. He mentored students to express themselves through the camera, and provided them a platform to present their work in exhibitions throughout India. Additionally, the project collaborated with colleges to hold heritage walks and photo exhibitions, encouraging young people to explore the architecture around them.
But ILF’s biggest focus has been on social media. Its Instagram account (which has over 86.9k followers) posts photographs almost every day, sometimes more, and regularly hosts quizzes, exhibitions and photo competitions. Bissa is designated a “bird feeder” at ILF because she has been tasked with seeding its social media with posts that people from her generation might respond to. “For instance, I link monuments to popular films that were shot there as it always garners interest,” she says. “We’re constantly brainstorming about how to make [historical buildings] relevant to modern youth.”
The Bara Imambara in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Photo courtesy of India Lost and Found
The impact of ILF’s outreach can be gauged by the fact that, every month, 30 to 35 new volunteers sign up. At present, the project has about 500 people volunteering in different Indian cities and towns. Old Delhi-based lawyer Ishita Jain, the legal head of ILF who began volunteering after she too discovered the project on Instagram, says that volunteerism is crucial to their work and objectives.
“Volunteers write stories about heritage structures, fact-check stories written by others and send them to our ILF experts to be vetted,” she says, adding that researching every new site needs over 10 days of sifting through archival records, historical research and more. Their experts include historians like Swapna Liddle and Rana Safvi, and a host of architects, craft and heritage activists, designers and even a cultural anthropologist. Once checked and edited, the stories and images are then added to ILF’s social handles and to the growing archive in the form of a digital map that Pasricha hopes to launch in 2026.
Documenting ancient structures is not just about nostalgia or art, which is what drew Pasricha’s lens to them in the first place. Globally, visual records have proven crucial in guiding restoration and conservation. In Syria, French start-up Iconem has used drones to take thousands of photographs of historically important sites like Palmyra and Aleppo that have been damaged or destroyed by the war, to create digital reconstructions. In Nepal, the Digital Archeology Foundation, which makes digital 3D models to aid future restoration work, has taken digital photos and videos of old structures that were damaged or destroyed by the 2015 earthquake.
The Serai Nurmahal 17th-century rest house, or inn, in Nurmahal, Punjab. Photo courtesy of India Lost and Found
In India too, such visual archives are finding their way into official use for structural assessments and as templates for restoration.“They are a baseline record,” Pasricha says. “Once a structure is documented, it exists — digitally, visually — but you can’t protect what you don’t know exists.”
Consequently, the objective of ILF’s work is to help people living around historical structures to understand their value and be proud of them, as many are still in use as homes, temples, or community spaces. This is what Bissa was aiming to achieve when she organized the World Heritage Day celebrations inside Patwon Ki Haveli. “It’s not enough for tourists to appreciate a monument,” she says. “I was thinking of how to get the neighbors to enjoy the haveli and feel proud that something like this exists in their vicinity.”
But running a volunteer-driven project that ignites passion for dusty relics in the hearts of the young is challenging, especially as it often feels like a race against time.
Every day, Pasricha says, they hear of centuries-old structures collapsing from age, or because they are standing in the way of development. But ILF tries to train its lens on the monuments that remain, not the ones that have lost the inevitable battle with time. Like Bissa, he believes that if more volunteers work across the country to instill pride in old monuments, their objective has been fulfilled. “When young people really see and appreciate them, they will organically feel the need to preserve them,” he says.
The project, presently self-funded, would have progressed much faster if they had financial support. “The volunteer model has worked beautifully without funding,” Pasricha says. “But I’ve had to invest my own money into developing the app with the digital map.” ILF needs, but has not managed to find, institutional and philanthropic donors who, as Pasricha puts it, “are willing to support the project without wanting some stake in it.”
By this, he is referring to the growing politicization of history across the world, as evidenced in India as well as the United States. In an executive order issued in March 2025, President Trump decreed the reinstatement of public monuments, memorials, statues and other historical structures that — in the words of the order — “have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.” Only time will tell what this presidential order will mean for the architectural heritage of the United States.
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But Pasricha and ILF remain staunchly apolitical, driven purely by passion for built heritage. Jain, a busy lawyer who says she likes to “unwind after work by researching new monuments for ILF,” says that their aim is to make real history — not political or fictional renderings of it — come to life for Gen Z. On ILF’s Instagram page, mosques and temples, palaces and havelis, tombs and pleasure gardens all appear in no particular order, or any specific theme.
Jain says her biggest high comes from discovering an archaic gem hidden in plain sight. “And then I imagine how many such incredible places are waiting to be explored across India.”
The post The Nationwide Photo Project Preserving India’s Architecture appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
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