26/01/2018
Ajmer
The Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishty Dargah
The Sixth Semester Architectural Design Studio is an interrogation of the architecture of Institutions. The institutions to be examined in this semester are those related with religious practices and their relationship with the communities that they serve.
There are rituals associated with every institutional form. They could be the movements of bodies as they navigate the travails of their everyday existences, or could even be the particular pilgrimages that are traced to mark hallowed ground. These rituals mark distinct terrains within space, often demarcated by distinct edges consolidating the difference between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’. These rituals also connect the contemporary pilgrim across time to an imagined past and possible future. It is through the movements prescribed by rituals that bodies are conjoined in imagined communities.The ritual marks a space of the known within the unknown.
The Dargah in Ajmer
The city of Ajmer is centred around the Dargah-E-Sharif. Probably the most important Sufi shrine in India, it attracts millions of pilgrims from around the world. It exerts it’s influence throughout the city affecting it everyday life through its institutions and culture. At the same time, the city of Ajmer has been one of the important urban centres in Rajasthan being a railway junction and a colonial centre of governance with many important schools and colleges. It has also been selected as part of the heritage cities list for the HRIDAY (Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana) scheme of the Government of India.
The Sixth Semester Architectural Design Project aimed to examine the relationship of the Dargah to the city of Ajmer. The study of the Dargah used the ‘biography’ as the method of understanding this relationship. Interviews were conducted with actors in and around the Dargah examined the nature of the relationship of the visitors and inhabitants of the old city with the institutional systems in the city. The study has been compiled into an interactive website that will be released on the 26th January 2018.
