How India can create an idea of heritage which resonates with democracy
December is the time for cultural events. If Kolkata flaunts its book fairs, and Chennai its panchayats of music, Delhi opens up with an epidemic of seminars. Many of them are forgotten quickly, but some deserve a wider audience because the debates there are critical for the democratic imagination. One such session was the ICOMOS conference on heritage.
Heritage, one realises, is a loaded polysemic word. It cannot be written off passively as a move to preserve a few buildings and monuments. Our ministers, as they inaugurate these sessions, tend to treat heritage as a clerical term, as an auxiliary to the wider debates on sustainability.
When our culture minister gets eloquent and claims sustainability and heritage are human rights, one wonders what he means, as development projects in India create more refugees than all the wars we have fought. What does heritage mean in this context? How do we create a more proactive idea of heritage which resonates with democracy?
History
One has to remember that heritage is not just a clerical term but a life world, encapsulating history, memory, a vision of time, even a sense of the commons. One has to widen the idea of heritage; to do so, it might be relevant to remember some of the great debates about culture during the national movement.
One recollects the geologist and art critic Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy arguing that the national movement must fight a guerrilla war against the idea of the museum. The museum, he said, smelt of death and formaldehyde. Coomaraswamy added, "if God were to return today and ask Western man where the Aztecs and Incas or even the Australian aborigines were, would he take him to a museum?”
What Coomaraswamy suggested was that heritage is not a passive act of preservation, but must seek to sustain the skills, the imagination of these ways of life.
Another creative suggestion came from the Russian painter, Nicholai Roerich, who spent years painting the Himalayas. Roerich, a theosophist, suggested the idea of the Green Cross, an organisation to preserve culture vulnerable at a time of war.
Heritage in both these examples is life giving. It is not only about a sense of loss or nostalgia. It is an idea about the continuity of civilisations. In that sense, the heritage the nation state protects maybe less creative, more an extension of tourism and national pride rather than a way of sustaining the skill sets of a civilisation.
Another danger is to treat heritage as a resource, rather than as a way of life. Then heritage becomes an act of cost-benefit rather than an ethics of the other. For example, the handloom industry has often been called a sunset industry, an economic sector which is doomed. Such a clerical definition blinds us to the fact that handlooms provide livelihood to 13 million people.
One has to protect the concept of heritage from becoming too bureaucratic or economistic. The idea of heritage has to go beyond the notion of built-up culture. Nature has to be seen as part of our heritage. The seed is as critical as any monument in evolving the idea of heritage.
Our efforts in this direction have often been bumbling. Today, we need to make nature part of the Constitution, give it representation and seek to define it as a person, as a complex chain of being. Our High Courts have recognised the Ganges as a person because it is sacred to Hindus. Such definitions are restrictive and bureaucratic.
One needs to see nature in all its forms as heritage where trees, seeds and coral reefs are seen as part of the cultural imagination called heritage.
Language
Even language is part of heritage. Our government’s idea of language as any form of life that has a script doomed almost 2,000 oral languages to extinction. Orality and the power of orality have to be recognised, not as a vestige of a primitive past but as involving the authoritative and the ritualistic today.
Orality has to be seen as something inventive, an act of memory which keeps language sensitive to its everyday variations. In fact, we need a new social contract between the oral, the textual and the digital.
Democracy, instead of lurking in a narrow electoralism, has to be alive to these forms of institutional invention. Heritage has to eventually be a heuristic. A way of reproduction and continuity than an act of mourning, a sense of loss and idiot pride about what we have almost destroyed.
In that sense, an Indian idea of heritage is not just about the dead past but will attempt to fight the incessant obsolescence of cultures. We have to guard against obsolescence, erasure, amnesia of cultures under the impetus of development. Heritage in India is not an act of custodianship for a way of life that is lost but an act of ethical trusteeship for ways of life which are alive and vulnerable.
In America, one meets the tribe in reservation. Here, tribes are part of our democracy and tribal knowledge, lore and their cosmology have to be part of our current knowledge systems.
Imagination
To create and sustain all this, the notion of heritage cannot be left to “time pass” experts but must be a part of a people’s imagination. One crucial example is the way Costa Rica has handed over its biosphere reserves to the tribes. We must empower tribes through the notion of heritage so that the tribal as citizen is a man of knowledge.
Their shamans, their medicine men, their herbalists, their Ojhas need to be honoured as theorists so that we do not merely appropriate and abstract their knowledge as collectors.
To rethink heritage, we have to widen the notion of intellectual property beyond patents, to a sense of a shared commons, of dialogues and traditions kept alive. The idea of heritage in India has to go beyond the Western notions of preservation. Heritage reworked is an ethical commitment to the tribal, nomadic, peasant and craft ways of life.
Heritage is an effort to ensure that development does not become genocidal, accelerating the extinction of cultural forms.
To achieve all this, our schools, our communities have to be responsible for heritage by keeping crafts, languages and skills alive. In that sense, heritage becomes a way of reskilling democracy. It is these new imaginations that India has to bring to intellectual forums and incorporate in its manifestoes of democracy.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)
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