India, June 17 -- Tucked away on the second floor of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) at Janpath, a quiet but meticulous effort is underway. In a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled conservation lab, a team of experts is painstakingly restoring over a century of history-one fragile sheet of map at a time.

These are the so-called Wilson Survey maps - delicate records from the colonial era that captured the walled city of Shahjahanabad in remarkable detail. Faded contours and brittle paper, marked with aging ink, reveal not just topography but a map of lost wells, forgotten streets, and the shifting outlines of a city at the cusp of modernity.

Between 1910 and 1912, British surveyor AJ Wilson was commissioned by the...