Comment

Renovating the ‘History House’

THE once natural relation between heritage and history now stands severed. The dissimilarity could not be more pronounced than this: history is contested, but heritage is ‘common’. No site of historical contention can be classified a heritage site, as if to become a part of the ever-growing market-driven list of heritage sites it must have an uncontentious past.

Heritage is solemn history, not its agitating youth. Poverty, deprivation, conflicts and how they influence human lives rarely inform our perception of what constitutes heritage. To be a part of heritage is to be like the king of a parliamentary monarchy: free, fair, kind and above all the struggles in one’s own society. Heritage is big, shiny and cold. Nothing that is without shine can become heritage. Eventually, what finds favour are manicured ‘constructions’ of the past, produced uniformly and strictly for only one consumer: the global tourist with little time to spend on the details of a heritage site.

Heritage sites today do not have a ‘History House’. For instance, the frenzied attempt to keep pace with the market has invented the ‘palace hotels’ – a kind of penance for the ex-royals. Commoners now can stay in these palaces as long as they can meet the expenses of a royal lifestyle. It is impossible to ignore this carefully calibrated roar of heritage because it comes without the attendant problems of traumatic history. In the rush to appear before the public as a ‘Heritage Site’, these historical sites appear like history dressed hurriedly for a fleeting public performance, the concept of heritage conservation simplified so as to attract the unwinding souls.

One can visit India’s heritage sites without learning anything about their historical background and problems because the entire unifying campaign of heritage aims to prevent it from becoming a diverse experience. Heritage here refers to the tangible and intangible riches of the world. The big houses, the culinary traditions, the beautiful and grandiose dresses are the world’s recognised heritage. Of course, there are other forms of less-defined heritage like mountains and forests. But given past experience, forests and forest people would at best occupy only a very marginal place in this scheme because of the problems that they pose in being packaged for the world. Such heritage remains locked up as ideas in files and MS Word documents in the cultural agencies worldwide. In the race to declare the best, the biggest, the brightest and the richest as its own, official heritage refuses to look at the less fortunate aspects of human affairs.

A case in point is the discussion on the role that monuments play in the life of people around them. People here appear more as a cause of ruin or neglect of precious architecture and delicate practices. Heritage thus is reduced, or rather elevated, to the royal palaces of Udaipur and Jaipur that have rarely been shared by the people. The problem with foregrounding the faceless non-human aspects of heritage over their human agents is that such efforts unselfconsciously gloss over peoples’ contribution to their culture. As a result, it is the palace, not those whose labour and loyalty have shaped and guarded its contents for generations, which becomes heritage. Human life deemed unworthy of assuming the title of ‘heritage’ is sacrificed at the altar of formalist aesthetics. It is heritage that ultimately suffers; it is truncated.

The reason why conservation of heritage and culture remains so problematic lies in the people’s discovery of the separation between their history and heritage which prompted their ultimate departure from the zone of heritage. As conservation progresses, the conservator argues that heritage is not about bringing it close to the people; it is about ensuring the safety and preservation of endangered skills, crafts and arts. Schemes of conservation thus are meant not for dreamy youth but cautious professionals who know how to make the best of old buildings, ornaments, or animals in a nearby sacred forest. Someone’s inheritance always means someone else’s disinheritance. For example, as Camille Paglia shows, the Book of Genesis in the Holy Bible is a declaration of the beginning of the male era of historiography and an end to the era of the mother cult. Declaring the Book of Genesis a central civilisational text, Paglia argues, does not come without its own share of exclusion.¹

The idea of a picture perfect, well-organised and categorised heritage has its own share of problems. In an obsession to ‘present’ heritage as a friction-free field of tangible and intangible performatives, the traditional conservation experts often treat heritage as a monograph. Schools of heritage continue to speak about diverse heritage through a language of cultural uniformity. They forget that a prerequisite to shouldering that responsibility is to incorporate the discourse of diversity within heritage and recognise its contested nature.

To accept the current crop of ideas on tangible and intangible heritage without recognising the plural interior of their subject’s mitochondrial structure is to once again fall into a trap so cautiously marked out by many, including Edward Said. Such notions of heritage only recreate the cultural discrepancy and inequalities critiqued by Said in his seminal work, Orientalism. The concept of heritage does not possess the empty space to accommodate the history of civilisational trauma. ‘Conservation’ thus actually stands for a mummification of history and prevents it from escaping the aesthetic sensibility of a collective viewership. In short, history exits through the window when heritage enters the precinct.

In a way this particular move basically betrays the post-Cold War millennial conclusion that the world is now fit to be conserved. There are, of course, certain quarters that cannot be conserved, e.g. Auschwitz and the killing fields of Cambodia. These gruesome aspects of history are, therefore, memorialised.

Conservationists would merrily divide the world of senses into the exhibition hall, the museum and the memorial. Their uncritical attitude overlooks the fact that the real world is fast losing its resources to the real and virtual museums. For example, soon after the looting of the Iraqi museum in 2003, the photographs of the looted items appeared on the Internet. Even as we are made to believe that the era of memorials is past, we see all around us a reality that dictates that many more memorials would be required to memorialise the brutalities of our amnesiac age. Such anti-heritage virtual museums and memorials are becoming all pervasive, as television channels telecast images of death and destruction across the world. In their silence over depleting human and non-human resources, conservators explain what many are seeing around themselves: the destroyer is also another name for the curator, who by his selection/destruction decides whose history should be preserved and whose world should be curated. To be curated is actually to be destroyed. It is the curator himself who, under present discourse, is preserved.

The real work of conservation takes shape not in the meeting of art historians, but in sessions of policy-making between the powerful states and their inhuman opponents. Those who are preserved are actually spared decimation; those who are decimated are placed in the museum. In the unsafe 21st century world the collector’s study is actually a safer habitat of lost heritage than the indefensible museum. Though famed for holding the dried mummy of history, museums cannot rid history of its ghost. Plunderers and well-equipped vandals of Baghdad’s National Museum or Pune’s Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) are afraid of the spirit of history. Dispersed among countless ‘private’ connoisseurs, heritage becomes a puzzling piece of fine Japanese silk that fails to make sense to its owner as he can never see its complete shape, even as it similarly deludes the confused private collector who possesses the rest of the silken puzzle.

Disassembled and thereby no longer menacing, history becomes heritage and heritage conservation a tale of exclusion and elimination of all those who lost the race of survival. The point is that the discourse of heritage conservation is still modelled on the nationalist alphabets as produced by the ‘uncontested’ post-colonial elite. This note argues that the established discourse of heritage conservation has failed to acknowledge the changes within the nation. The ‘location of culture’, as Homi Bhabha asks us to understand, has shifted away from nationalist historians to the ‘alternative histories of the excluded.’ The little amendment that is necessary to include the lost voices into the discourse is left unaddressed because the realm of heritage is deeply intertwined with the bureaucratic details of the nationalist elite. As a result, those at the margins cannot be granted any permanent residence in the ‘national museum’. They creep in, courtesy the generosity of a few scholars, perform, and are promptly banished to the ‘folk’ and other bastions of anthropological fieldwork.

The search for ‘global heritage’ is thus an airport-hopping collection spree of national treasures with a smattering of ‘peoples’ culture’. Without reordering the debate on conservation – if not its politicisation – heritage conservationists will invariably forget that villages not otherwise important to the nation-state continue to drown with their ancient temples and even more ancient culture. The conservationists should somehow find a way to craft a more intensive discursive meeting ground with environmentalists, tribal activists, culturally tormented religious and ethnic minorities, and other members of the ‘great unwritten project of exclusion’ of our times. What these people need most is not an ‘endangered’ status so favoured by conservationists, but a real partnership with people and organisations concerned with a more problematised version of heritage and culture.

Such a partnership would do two things: first, make the debate on heritage conservation relevant to a larger constituency and take it outside the ambit of its traditional locale; second, by incorporating the ‘beyond’, heritage might help create necessary political space for a resolution of various conflicts in human society, a process that is otherwise almost impossible to inaugurate. A broadening of cultural consciousness would change the way heritage is theorised and accommodate without conflict its many claimants.

The idea of cultural diversity finds a place in all documents concerning intangible cultural heritage and development. However, documents like the UNDP Human Development Report 2004 and the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage are misplaced since they do not take into consideration that diversity is often the product of deprivation and denial of entitlement rights. What shape would heritage take when the slave woman/ infant murderer, Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Bhikhu Mhatre in Ram Gopal Verma’s Satya – both creatures of an ethical twilight zone created less by their compulsion and more by the antagonistic world – demand from the authorities an explanation about the contents of a heritage that has no space for them. How can a cultural legacy claim to be universal when it is based on systematic elimination of its less privileged voices? Would Sethe in African-America and Bhikhu Mhatre in Dalit India – both outlaws and outcastes – ever regard ‘global heritage’ as their own? Unlikely, if global space continues to be just another committee of ‘national’ cultures.

In his latest work on culture and globalisation, Amartya Sen speculates how cultural diversity can ‘counter’ the threats emanating from globalisation.² But a critique of globalisation should be prefixed by a realisation that the more potent and overlooked threat comes from a cultural subordination of sections at the national margin, an inbuilt feature of the domestic scenario of the postcolonial space. Globalisation’s neo-colonial tendencies find ready partnership in these elements that are fanned by its neo-liberalism. It is this power equation at home that resists claims that ‘national’ culture and heritage defined by geography is actually heterogenous.

The aim here is not to provide a sufficiently ventilated idea of culture to take care of the discourse of conservation. The proposal instead is to create flexibility in the body of the discourse to enable it to align with new partners and claimants without compromising them to new categories. The point is to be cautious in creating new categories for the recent discoveries within the established discourse of national heritage and see whether justice has been done to its less privileged clauses. Otherwise this ‘tyranny of categories’ would only embolden the status quo in the national arena and subsequently replicate it in the field of global heritage.

It is not new categories which will save the less prominent heritage in the periphery of the national and the global systems, but an ending of the monopoly of national heritage by a few claiming to be representive. It is only when the two-tier national-global structure of the ‘Security Council of Culture’ is converted into a multi-tier system of cultural interaction that other non-national, non-global and sub-national culturally invisible characters would find themselves in the role of the preserver of their own cultures and rid themselves of the extremist scientific interference of the catalogue-obsessed curator for whom conservation is the name of a static performative oblivious of the historical relation between heritage and its time-tested owners.

The problem in the idea of ‘global heritage’ is its rather hasty settlement in favour of ‘national’ culture and consequent self-construction by combining various provinces of national heritage. Doing so ensures that despite the talk of participation of communities and NGOs in the heritage sector, these actors do not actually share the credit for the ‘global’ heritage because what goes for global is in reality the international cultural heritage of both tangible and intangible variety. The people of the interstices – their arts, culture and heritage – remain where they were. As a grace of some sort new pedestals are created for them so that even while being acknowledged they maintain the traces of past neglect.

The art of the interstices in postcolonial societies is, however, a rhetorical overreach because given their historical location in the global system, these societies are no better than the interstices that they are supposed to carry within themselves. There is virtually no need to hurriedly add compartments to the existing body of national culture before the results of an adequate challenge to the uniform notion of national culture and heritage are publicised. Such arts, as those of the repository ‘communities’ and ‘peoples’, cannot be conceived without expelling them from the contest of the cultural South.

An appropriate response to the existent project does not lie in adding pouches of ‘tribal’ and ‘ancient’ arts to the body of the South’s cultural consciousness, but in shedding light on those spaces inside the extant structure of the discourse by providing a consistent critique of the motivations of national culture and heritage. Conservation at a national level can succeed only by accommodating those long denied space at home. To imagine too many ‘interstices’ within a resource-starved society may create a kind of culture cramp in the muscles of the South. Perhaps such actions benefit a few in the upper echelons of international power who had ended up thinking, rather prematurely, that it was time to conserve heritage finally since no new developments were possible any more.

The argument in this submission is opposed to that advanced by the end-of-an-era lobby. Because the thrust here is based on the hope for a history of the global South, in what Bhabha calls the ‘emergence of the interstices’.³ Yes, there is heritage of the ‘dispersed’ South, but that project is incomplete because its march towards history is nowhere near a decent closure. Like its volatile past, the future of the South’s ‘cycle of freedom’ remains unborn. Conserving the riches of such a society would become possible in a renaissance programme of representation, empowerment and recognition of its traditionally neglected, less privileged constituencies and not by expelling or exiling them using trendy excuses.

Kallol Bhattacherjee

 

Footnotes:

1. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, Vintage, 1991.

2. Amartya Sen ‘How Does Culture Matter?’ in Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton (eds.), Culture and Public Action, Stanford University Press, 2004.

3. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, New York, 1994.