Until a few months ago, heritage conservationist Mudar Patherya had never heard of Khalsa College. Then one afternoon, somebody sent him a sketch of the building on WhatsApp. A few photographs followed. Turrets, domes rising against Amritsar’s skyline, sweeping arches across red sandstone, an Indo-Saracenic facade stretching across nearly 300 acres – Mudar stared at the images and had the sort of thought that changes the course of months. Why is nobody lighting this place up properly?

Within weeks, teams from Kolkata were camping inside the campus with nearly 2,500 lights becoming the first major step in taking Kolkata’s increasingly visible illumination movement nationally.

For the last few years, Mudar has become one of Kolkata’s most unusual urban revivalists, illuminating some of the city’s most iconic heritage structures and transforming them into glowing nighttime spectacles. But Khalsa College marks a turning point. “This is the start of my pan-India initiative,” he says simply.

Khalsa College, he explains, is also his most technically ambitious project yet. “Normally a project takes 100 or 150 lights. This is going to take me two-and-a-half thousand,” he says. “It’s not one building. It’s an estate. You cannot think of it from a single-building perspective.”

The challenge lies in the geometry. Khalsa College is full of curves, domes, layered arches and long visual sweeps that require careful lighting design. “One has to keep the entire architecture in mind while approaching it,” he says.

The project moved with startling speed. After Mudar approached the management, permission arrived within two days. Within a month, teams from Kolkata were already on site. “This shows we can move with speed,” he says. “We can tie up funds with speed, send teams with speed and execute projects quickly. This is a very different face of Calcutta.”

Funding the project 

The funding comes from Techno Electric and Engineering Company, led by managing director Padam Prakash Gupta, who coincidentally happens to be a Khalsa College alumnus. He told the conservationist, “Don’t just illuminate it. Make it a tourist attraction.”

For Mudar, illumination is not cosmetic beautification. It is civic strategy. He believes architecture can shape tourism, urban pride and even investment. “If you don’t have a liveable city, you don’t have a great State,” he says and adds, “Kolkata’s restoration will lead Bengal’s revival.”

That philosophy has increasingly shaped his work. Alongside illumination, his collaborators are now supporting façade restoration and repainting projects for historic buildings. Mudar believes Indian corporations need to engage more deeply with urban restoration instead of limiting CSR efforts to conventional causes. “Everybody talks about heritage. Everybody builds awareness. But nobody wants to take the first step toward restoration. We are not proactive or reactive. We are inactive,” he says sharply. 

Ironically, the project that convinced him this model could travel nationally was not in Punjab, but Kolkata’s own Victoria Memorial. The illumination of the wind-whirled Angel of Victory atop Victoria Memorial, became proof that heritage lighting could transform how cities look and feel after dark. “If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere in the country,” he says.

For Mudar, illumination is also about creating nightlife without building anything new. “I don’t have to construct a monument,” he says. “I only have to put lights. If that creates evening tourism and transforms the visual appeal of a city, then this becomes one of the easiest things India can do.”

He insists the process remains sensitive to heritage authenticity. The projects use warm yellow lighting rather than aggressive colour-changing LEDs. “We are not changing the architecture,” he says. “We are revealing it.”

And perhaps that is what makes the Khalsa College project feel larger than illumination alone. A man in Kolkata sees a sketch from Punjab and decides, almost impulsively, that the building deserves to glow. Funds arrive. Teams travel. Lights rise against domes and arches hundreds of kilometres away. And just like that between coincidence and obsession, a movement begins.