Colours of Conservation: The delicate science of preserving art without erasing its history

On January 1, amid the mechanical merriment of forwarded fireworks and borrowed blessings, one New Year greeting made me stop.

Aashika Jain was home.

The daughter of Shivani and Mohit Jain—one of my oldest friends—had returned from Florence and established a conservation studio in Delhi’s New Friends Colony. Restoration by Aashika Dhoomimal, or RAD, had quietly begun its work.

Some beginnings arrive with bands and banners. Others enter carrying a cotton swab.

I remember Aashika as a young girl who mirrored her mother’s looks and her father’s curiosity. She used few words, but they came with intelligence and a nuanced understanding of life. There was poise, playfulness and the occasional perfectly placed tantrum—the holy trinity of childhood. She attended Modern School, Vasant Vihar, as Mohit and I had before her.

At eight, playing cricket inside the house—because wisdom ripens slowly—she tore one of her father’s favourite paintings, a Satish Gujral inherited from her grandfather. The work was restored, but Mohit felt its surface had returned too glossy, its original character altered. Where he saw an intervention, Aashika discovered an invitation. At fourteen, she interned with a Delhi restorer.

Damage had disclosed a destiny.

Art was already her inheritance. Dhoomimal Art Centre, founded in 1936, is woven into the history of modern Indian art. Her late grandfather, Shri Mahender Jain, represented its second generation; Mohit, her father, the third; Aashika is the fourth. She grew up hearing names such as FN Souza, MF Husain, Nand Lal Bose, BC Sanyal and Jamini Roy spoken not as auction-house ammunition, but as artists and extraordinary human beings.

Yet inheritance without inquiry becomes entitlement. Aashika went to Florence to study conservation at the Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici, training under Dr Roberta Lapucci, the formidable Caravaggio specialist. Her education encompassed chemistry and connoisseurship, microscopy and material history. A conservator, she learnt, must be art historian, scientist and surgeon—knowing when to act and when to leave well enough alone.

There were lunches cooked by Lapucci—gnocchi eaten before a restored Caravaggio—and lessons severe enough to sharpen eye and instinct. Aashika worked on a panel by PlautillaNelli, among the earliest known women painters of the Renaissance: a nun who taught herself to paint when female ambition was treated almost as trespass. Preserving her painting meant protecting evidence that she had existed, endured and created.

That understanding followed Aashika home.

At RAD, she has worked on fragile Satish Gujral rice-paper paintings, each demanding a different diagnosis. She spent nearly nine months restoring a Jain pattachitra made from cotton cloth, tamarind-seed adhesive and traditional pigments. To conserve it was to preserve more than a painted surface: technique, touch, tradition and the knowledge of generations.

India possesses art in astonishing abundance, but conservation remains a widening, worrying vacuum. We build museums, buy masters and celebrate record prices, yet neglect humidity, heat, handling, storage and scientific care. We remember a work’s value while forgetting its vulnerability.

Restoration is not Botox for a battered painting. It is not about scrubbing away age or manufacturing youth. A sensitive conservator does not erase time; she negotiates with it. She respects the crack, studies the stain and listens to what the material remembers. Her task is not to make yesterday look like today, but to help yesterday survive tomorrow.

Aashika’s first principle is beautifully simple: first, do no harm.

What wisdom for art. What wisdom for India. What wisdom, indeed, for being human.

A new year began with fireworks fading across a darkened sky. In a small studio in New Friends Colony, another kind of light remained on—a young woman leaning over an old artwork, preserving not only pigment and paper, but our passage through time.