Aniket Bhagwat has quietly defined some of India’s most celebrated public spaces, believing that a landscape is more than the sum total of gardens, trees and aesthetics. To him, every piece of land carries memory of culture and history, which requires a physical expression.
Bhagwat describes his profession as “the mother of all arts”. It is a deeply personal statement as well, which spans a family legacy of three generations.
Bhagwat’s aesthetic geneology began long before landscape architecture became a term in India. His accountant grandfather worked at the Empress Botanical Garden in Pune, which turned him into a horticultural expert. When the British left, he became the superintendent of the botanical garden.
Bhagwat’s father, Prabhakar B Bhagwat, studied agriculture before travelling to Denmark to study what was then known as Garden Art. He later studied landscape architecture in England, becoming India’s first formally qualified landscape architect. Returning home in the 1950s, Prabhakar not only established professional practice, but also laid the foundations of landscape architecture education in India with teaching tenures at the JJ School of Architecture, IIT-Kharagpur and the National Institute of Design before establishing Prabhakar B Bhagwat Landscape Architects in 1973.
Aniket’s entry into architecture was accidental. He had little interest in pursuing architecture, but appeared for the CEPT entrance examination largely because of his close friendship with Bimal Patel, now one of India’s prominent urban planners and associated with the Central Vista redevelopment. Success in the exam set in motion a design journey that would eventually lead him to landscape architecture and, decades later, to becoming one of India’s most recognised practitioners.
Once in practice, his studio won international honours from the International Federation of Landscape Architects early in its journey, and its work has been featured in prestigious global publications.
Since the mid-1990s, the studio has deliberately distanced itself from award circuits and media attention, choosing instead to focus on meaningful conversations about design. “Every morning we come back to the studio with a blank page,” he says. “The work matters more than the applause.”
That philosophy defines how he approaches projects. Rather than arriving with preconceived ideas, Bhagwat begins by asking a simple question: “What does the land need?” Listening to the landscape before attempting to transform it is, he says, the single most valuable lesson inherited from his father.
This approach is powerfully visible in Ahmedabad, where his work on the City Wall Garden project is redefining how a 600-year-old fortification can be experienced in the 21st century.
The project traces the historic city wall of Ahmedabad built in the 15th century by Sultan Ahmed Shah. Over centuries, as the city expanded beyond its original boundaries, large stretches of the wall were neglected, encroached upon or forgotten.
Bhagwat’s intervention does not treat the wall as a monument to be frozen in time. Instead, it reimagines it as a continuous cultural and ecological corridor a living landscape that reconnects citizens with the city’s layered history. Sections of the wall are carefully revealed, restored and framed through planting, pathways and public spaces that allow people to walk alongside 600 years of history.
For Bhagwat, however, the project is not about beautification. “It is about helping Ahmedabad rediscover its history,” he says.
He argues that landscape architecture begins only after technical questions involving ecology, water, soil, plants and climate have been resolved. Its real responsibility, he believes, is to create cultural meaning. “History is not a fossil,” he says. “History is a conversation.”
He rejects the idea that heritage should be frozen behind fences. Instead, he believes contemporary interventions should respectfully converse with the past, much like Louvre Museum in Paris or the Reichstag in Berlin.
He compares history to a grandfather. “You don’t keep your grandfather at a distance because he is old. You speak with him and learn from him. History deserves the same relationship.”
