all things inheritage

i came across a wonderful post by a friend with regard to museums, heritage and the question of repatriation here -
http://theinheritageproject.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/in-favour-of-a-universal-heritage/

those interested should most certainly go through it. its one of the most careful and complex analysis of these issues i've read...

and here's my response to it; it would be on the blog as a comment to the post as well.

hey.. it really is wonderful to see this piece. it's brought together so many complex debates around repatriation, heritage and museumization that are of such contemporary relevance. if you'll permit, i have a few bones of contention to offer.

firstly, let me get this one little itch out of the way - to my mind, the British Museum [unlike many others of similar legacy] is singularly unique and notorious both with regard to international museum laws and acts, and in relation to this, its claims to retain many collections. this is unlike many other nation-states and their museums [national museums or otherwise] which especially in the case of the Elgin marbles have been greatly forthcoming in their support towards its repatriation. while you are right in that the de-contextualized and travelling histories of cultural objects such as the marbles do offer multiple meanings, histories and contexts, i wonder if it is possible at all to attain a 'complete history' of the marbles, regardless of their location. i would think that it is in this desire for 'complete'ness in the context of discourses of museumization and heritage that one often overlooks the fact that these discourses are intrinsically tied to the question of nation, in its constitution of a public. [let us not forget that the Louvre was a private collection thrown open to the public following the French Revolution in its attempt at 'making-bourgeois' of its public].

the discourse of heritage is very much part of the project of modernity, although it often is posited as contradictory. the question of cultural heritage repatriation arises, as you pointed out, in most post-colonial and post-imperial contexts precisely because these 'universal' museums emerged under contexts of imperialism and colonialism. and let us not forget also, that the discourse of modernity is very much nationalist; nationalist of the kind that claims universal validity. in fact, the claim for 'universality' has conventionally been the rubric within which colonialism, imperialism, and discourses such as orientalism functioned.

can one put aside 'particular' claims to heritage in favour of the condition of modern nation states? this then shifts the debate to one of 'better preservation', which, needless to state, is grossly flawed. [i refer here to your example of Egypt]. and it is not a matter of reversing a dark imperial or colonial past and their wrong doings, but of recognizing multiple and particular claims of heritage. [and yes, as much as I'm against 'nationalist' claims, these nation-states, in the context of the 'universal' claims made under imperialism and colonialism do become 'particular']. the travesty of heritage discourses is that the universal rubric of heritage tends to overlook the particular demands of heritage; in short, it claims itself to be the sole bearer of heritage, denying others a similar claim. and when the British Museum today claims universality of cultural heritage, it is doing so from a nation-state perspective, not some imperial or universal one.

if the question of museums and heritage is not seen within the paradigm of nation-states, and in the context of repatriation within postcolonial and postimperial conditions, it would be very easy to make a claim for universal heritage.

anyway, let me wrap up by sharing my experiences of when i visited the British Museum. it shattered me to the very core to see how it obstinately denied its imperial and colonial past under the shroud of universal cultural heritage. i'm no big fan of nationalist demands for repatriation. but i'm equally if not more sickened by the violence of denial of histories of imperialism and colonialism, of which the British Museum stands in glorious testimony to.

this is an issue that cannot be 'resolved' through accommodations or name-changing, or even repatriation; but how long can we deny the legitimacy of particular demands, especially if the 'particularity' of those positions emerged precisely through the setting up of a 'universal'.

the final solution

the Times of India reports that in the last decade alone, the depth of the Hussain Sagar lake in Hyderabad has come down to 40 ft from 60 ft... worse still, in some areas, the depth of the lake is only about 20-30 ft.


this is attributed to the immersion of approximately 30,000 - 40,000 ganesha idols in the lake each year.

in fact, the size of the lake as it exists today is itself supposed to be only 40% of what it used to be...

is this a dilemma any different from what we see happening in rapid proliferation to 'natural resources' in other parts of the nation? i'm willing to think that it is different... but i may not be able to articulate why... as yet.

in most cities, water bodies, small and large, have been filled with sand to reclaim the land for establishing settlements. the city of Bangalore as we know it (of course we no longer know it as Bangalore), for instance, stands on what used to be a minimum of 400 water bodies including ponds and tanks. 

but few cities have water bodies (other than rivers or beaches) that are constitutive of the 'image of the city'. for example, in Chennai, who would want the smelly 'Cooum river' to represent the city??? in fact the history of the Cooum might tell a different tale of the city altogether... 

but no, in Chennai, the long strip of the Marina beach is such a source of attraction - apart from all the elites who drive down to the beach to then walk on the 'jogging track', - even the flights that take off from the Kamaraj airport will do a little jig and take you a few thousand meters through the beach into the Bay of Bengal and return to its normal course... 

just as the flights that take off at Bombay will do the same into the Arabian Sea via the Juhu beach... 

of course the beaches that are the edges of seas which tie up with oceans are mainstay for the fisherman communities in these regions... 

take the Hooghly river... popular visual imagery is so crucial for the ways in which it shapes our 'images' of the places we inhabit and imagine. even before i'd seen the Hooghly river, the utterance of its name would bring to the fore an image of sunset, and silhouetted boats with fishermen.... this is the river that annually sees the immersion of hundreds of thousands of durga idols... this is also the river that is source of livelihood for fishermen...

but then again, these are big rivers and beaches... lets get back to smaller water bodies that exist... a place like Baroda has the Sursagar lake which like the Hussainsagar is a dumping/immersion ground for the ganesha idols... of course no one fishes here...

or take Nainital for instance... tourism and the lake.... tourism which has generated new forms of employment, but is slowly killing the lake...

same shit, different place? perhaps... but something needs to be said for such inanity that goes by the name of 'cultural practice'!

can the existing vocabulary of water bodies as a source of livelihood translate legibly into concerns for ecology?... from where things stand today, no.

so is it for this 'image' of the city that heritage conservationists clamour for the preservation of water bodies?... or is it for the ways in which water bodies are so constitutive of our built environments?... how does ecology itself become the cause/ name by which we attempt its preservation?

added to this dilemma is that the heritage conservationists have to contend with socio-cultural and religious practices of people, which they cannot disregard... so what do they say, then? they say two things - one, turn to more eco-friendly idols that use organic clay instead of plaster of paris and eco-friendly paints... of course they don't know how cheap the PoP and chemical paints are.. and how many people would afford this eco-friendly material? and perhaps some might even say, why the hell should we give a damn about eco-friendliness; its the government's job! following this, the second thing that the heritage people say - government authorities should 'wake up' and clean these water bodies. if they claim that they do clean, then they should clean better.

is this the best we can do? go the 'eco' way or the 'management' way?

surely 'management' is an issue... but clearly the dangers of the 'management' argument are apparent - in its inevitable conclusion, it speaks of the privatization of the lake... who knows ten years down the line we see a TATA/Birla board all around tank bund... perhaps we'll be ticketed to pass by the lake... perhaps there'll be a statue of aforementioned TATA/Birla among the esteemed few that find place in tank bund... 

and forget what to do with the lake.... what can be done with the practice? why have the number of idols been increasing at an alarming rate over the years? should immersion be banned? should there be a limit imposed on number of idols per society/ neighbourhood? but that's all anti-democratic... so how does ecology work with democracy? can ecology work only through capitalism - a la the new eco-friendly and organic exotic - or through state control - which despite its seeming horrors is in fact only a miserable ideal...

and finally... what of 'the people'... is this what 'popular culture' is? this maddening, inane practice that seems to be championed in the name of some 'diversity', 'ephemerality', and 'vibrancy'... or worse still, in the name of 'democracy' and 'secularism'...

what would the city or town or village be without its rivers, creeks, lakes, ponds, tanks? nothing.

perhaps the biggest myth we rely on, apart from the superiority of man over nature, is that of the eternality of water...or air...

why hark over the 'image of the city' when there won't be one any more...

UK riots: in pictures

i came across a bunch of photographs on the Guardian website of the UK riots.. was wondering what to do about the photographs.. or what to think about them... so i thought i'd share them here, and scribble some of my thoughts in the form of captions... this is a first in the series... i hope to do more...

this, along with many other similar images of the destruction just seemed straight out of the apocalyptic genre of movies that as we all know, are usually situated in cities (of course others in endless stretched of deserted farms or villages, but let's not think of that now). but unlike those movies, it didn't take an alien force or an enemy nation to invade (and the normative imaginary cause for such destruction has to be either air-attacks or super slick bombs made by scientist geniuses gone wrong). i keep thinking, what would this look like on large screen.. and my conscience doesn't prick.. hmmm...

such graceful horses.. and such a magnificent fire.. where do humans stand in comparison to either..

like a fairy tale gone wrong.. how do imageries of destruction manage to be so captivating.. enchanting even! how does a journalist stand in front of this scene and take a photograph as arresting as this.. was he 'just doing his job'? or was he 'hoping to capture the immensity of destruction'?.. running after authorial intentions may never get us anywhere.. but as i see this photo again and again, i'm struck by the street lamp on the top-left corner that's still burning.. it doesn't hold a candle to the blazing fire, but it seems to hold its own... it interrupts the otherwise-natural duo-tone silhouette of the photograph... wonder what that says about the life of objects...

this is the Sony Centre warehouse.. massive industry.. massive fire.. massive water.. massive state power.. quite a 'powerful' image, all in all..

explosive, to say the least... we rarely think of buildings containing the possibility to erupt.. they collapse, they burn, they crumble, they decay... but for a building to spew a lava-like fire.. crackling and sizzling.. and to melt.. for all the wrong reasons, it reminds me of Marx's famous "all that is solid melts into air".. it doesn't evaporate, doesn't vanish, doesn't erode... it melts.. and there's nothing quite furious as a monument melting...

the clouds seem to have left their shadows forever imprinted on the building...

the cruelty of heritage

the usual clamour made by 'indians' about 'we indians' is that 'we' do not know how to respect and preserve our heritage, blah blah. look west, look east, its all so well kept, well showcased.. how much more pride in 'our culture and tradition' would 'we' be able to accumulate had 'we' shown even an iota of the same commitment that other, even smaller nations are able to...

(dangerously, some might go so far as to say: look at sri lanka! a nation hit by war, and yet they preserve and showcase their monuments so well. no matter that scores of people were brutally murdered, and scores of lives and forms of livelihood destroyed in a war that was fundamentally racist, and instituted through the agency of the government. oh  no, lets not talk of bygones.. their monuments are so well kept; tourism is flourishing.. such hospitality!)

the problem with india (and india has so many problems) is that, worse still, apparently the gatekeepers of 'our' heritage are steeped in politics.. so, damn the 'corrupt' politicians and the BIG BAD POLITICS! 

some might say: why, we don't even have our kohinoor... its sitting in the tower of london crested into the crown jewels.. what would we say to this? would we be able to say then that, at least its well kept there. the moment it reaches india, it'll be infested in a prism of POLITICS.. 

is heritage anywhere really not inflected through politics? indeed can there be a discourse on heritage that is not necessarily imbricated in a politics of heritage? why, what would the the British Museum be without all its Indian/Egyptian/ Mesopotamian/ Persian collections... oh those were acquired as gifts to the Raj. shall we start talking politics finally? they say gift, some would say loot. loot, you say? why, the erstwhile colonial masters could never 'loot'! (and mind you, some American scholar recently mentioned in the form of an anecdote [and most anecdotes suffer from a pathology of xenophobism i think] that the word loot supposedly originates from the word lootna in hindi - to steal. imagine the levels to which typecasting had reached in colonial times... to attribute a word, which is not just a word, its a state-of-mind, to an entire people.. )

it was the generous Indians who gifted it to the needless-to-state superior Raj. but they're no longer colonial masters. what might've been gift then, can just as well be considered loot now. and in any case, how can one 'gift' anything to a king? any such attempt, under circumstances of servitude (partial it may be) must necessarily be seen as an act of surrender. what do 'we' say?: so what if we cannot keep it safe and locked up in a tower? so what if it gets stolen? at least it gets stolen from here!

what happens next?

we come full circle to chant the usual clamour.. 'we have no respect...." blah..

and where do we go from here?

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there's this song which has become a very popular rhyme..

london bridge is falling down...
falling down, falling down..
london bridge is falling down..
my fair lady..

one can only speculate why and how or whether it fell at all, and who 'my fair lady' that this song is adressed to, might be... also, there are varying versions of the next few stanzas, each with differing meanings and so on.. be it of rebuilding the bridge [build it up with wood and clay], or the repeated failures in being able to do so.. [wood and clay will wash away].. so the 'material' cannot replace or rebuild the structure; what was destroyed was not merely the bridge as material form.. it stood for something else...

in any case, in rhyme form, it is sung with much glee.. singing with joy about watching a building fall seems rather bizarre... a descriptive, narrative, visual account of fall...

and yet, if at all one wishes to historicize it, the rhyme-song seems to suggest a couple of things: the bridge stood as paramount symbol of oppression - signalling the destruction of a bastion of power - it is important to watch it falling... and to sing with joy of its fall... the other way of looking at it would be that, in its fall was engendered a collective will to rebuild, no matter the failures.. and so on..

the rhyme has been leeched of all other connotations, as is the case with most rhymes, but it is immensely popular..

but today, would it be possible to even speak - not sing - about destruction in any manner except with gravity? we are seeing images of london burning in riots over the last week or so.. of buildings being set to fire.. of shops being looted.. immediate thoughts are usually of mindless destruction; mob fury; re-construction and restoration; policing; stock market; and so on.

setting fire to, or pulling down architecture, public statuary and objects of cultural production that epitomize a dominant power structure has historically been a practice of many movements world over.. it especially made sense to destroy a building/ statue/ object precisely because it had been invested with a value of heritage. what sense would it make to destroy any ordinary building? none, if one considers the symbolic value of destruction as well, apart from pragmatic. the power to acquire such heritage was made possible in/through the subordination and oppression of many others.

however, nothing today it seems justifies the destruction of buildings of monumental value, those that are symbolic of a power that is simmering with a potential to unleash its oppressive nature..

and yet, it might still be possible to destroy with perfect ease minor structures.. for these are not structures of power.. they are structures of solidarity, of community..

in that sense, i do believe in marking a difference between major and minor architecture.. they both contain and signify immensely different meanings, contexts, and significances.. laughing over the destruction of a major object of cultural production, and a minor one, are entirely different things...

world over, would it be possible today, to laugh with glee, and jump with joy at the destruction of minor architecture, as it was possible with tremendous ease a decade or two back? and yet, how far is babri masjid demolition away from today? not very. how many statues of ambedkar have been repeatedly destroyed over the last many decades? scores.

maybe for the west it might not be possible to openly laugh and celebrate the defeat of 'enemy' figures/ territories/ lives/ objects.. but as far as india is concerned, i really don't have the courage to imagine that such cruel laughter belongs to a time bygone..