Preservation between empire, nation and nationalisms: the problem of history and heritage in India

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1 bs_bs_banner NATIONS AND NATIONALISM JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM AS EN Nations and Nationalism 24 (1), 2018, DOI: /nana Preservation between empire, nation and nationalisms: the problem of history and heritage in India INDRA SENGUPTA German Historical Institute, London ABSTRACT. This article looks at the problematic questions of heritage and history in a postcolonial nation-state such as India. It looks at the colonial past of the preservation of historical buildings and relates this to the postcolonial history of the use of heritage and history for both nation-building and also to assert the claims and counterclaims of postcolonial identity politics. The article shows how the state and its bureaucracy historically acquired the right to be the custodian of culture, history and heritage, and it also argues that the state nevertheless was and remains circumscribed by subnational and communitarian claims to heritage and the past. KEYWORDS: colonialism, heritage, India, nationalism, preservation As in most parts of the modern world, the preservation of historical buildings in India has been deeply implicated in the process of nation-building and statehood in a nation that till the middle of the twentieth century was a colony of the British Empire. However, in a country that is often referred to as a subcontinent and consists of a multitude of linguistic regions, ethnic and religious groups and deep social and cultural inequities embedded in the caste system, the politics of history and heritage and the preservation of historical buildings have posed problems that are as complex as the history of nationalism and state building in India. Further, understanding heritage and preservation in India today is complicated by its colonial past. When modern ideas of heritage began to make themselves manifest in Western European nation-states in the aftermath of the French Revolution (Swenson 2013), India had already begun to come under the rule of the English East India Company and, by the time Western European states embarked on a course of large-scale, national legislation to protect and preserve historical buildings and other forms of built heritage, India was a crown colony. In fact, the origins of modern historical preservation and heritage management in the sense we understand these practices today can be traced not to the growth of nationalism and national identity in India but to ideas and practices and legislation that the British colonial state in its self-proclaimed role as custodians of India s history and culture introduced. India s status as a colony, consisting of subjects rather than citizens, whose rights could be more easily circumscribed by state action

2 Preservation between empire, nation and nationalisms 111 than was possible in Britain, meant that stricter and more sweeping legislation could be enforced in India long before Britain (Brown 1905: 235). This peculiar colonial history of preservation in India has cast its long shadow over heritage practices in India today. It means that there is a long history of regulation of the preservation of historical buildings by means of state action. In fact, the increasing power of the state following independence from British rule strengthened the ability of the state to exercise greater control over many aspects of civilian life, including the regulation of heritage laws. Thus, while it is easy to label heritage policy and practice in India as a non-european case study, India s colonial history makes it essential to understand these in the context of its historical links with Europe by means of its colonial past and complex postcolonial present. This article will demonstrate significant continuities between the legislation driven, heavily bureaucratised and procedure-oriented practices of preservation introduced in India by the colonial state and those adopted by the state in independent India until very recent times. Notwithstanding the state-driven nature of historical preservation in India, such practices, like many of the top-down policies of the colonial and postcolonial state in India, often reveal the challenges posed to the state by the many conflicting claims of the various ethnic, linguistic and religious groups that comprise the postcolonial Indian nation. Indeed, the postcolonial Indian state since its foundation has been forced to engage with the manifold challenges of a diverse nation and its many fractious components. Ideas of heritage and history have thus come to be defined in terms of identity politics in modern India and have become closely intertwined with the often conflicting claims and counterclaims of various ethnic, religious and regional communities. While in Western European societies' heritage and preservation are often closely related to the emergence and consolidation of nationalism and nation-states, India s colonial past and its uneasy, violent birth as a nation complicate the picture. The history of Indian nationalism (and attendant questions of modernity and culture) was fundamentally different from the emergence of European prototypes of nation-states. The links between national consciousness, the emergence of a national community and a public sphere and the subsequent desire for a state were by and large much less clear in the case of India than Western European nation-states. The experience of colonial rule meant that the public sphere did not emerge as it did in Europe, as the objective of colonial rule was not the creation of a body of citizens but law-abiding, revenue-paying, permanent subjects of the British Empire. Further, right from its organised inception in the late nineteenth century, the scope of Indian nationalism was to stake claim to a common nationhood for a motley of linguistic, religious, local, regional communities and many traditional, precolonial loyalties, which had been brought under the rule of the British Empire. Effectively, the Indian nation was to succeed the British Empire in India. The path to success of what the historian Joya Chatterji describes as this imperialist scope of all-india nationalism (Chatterji 2013: 243) lay in a strong, centralised state and political institutions (including a

3 112 Indra Sengupta strong parliament, bureaucracy and judiciary) that would speak for the whole nation and contain the diverse regional, linguistic, religious and other nationalisms that appeared to threaten the idea of a single nation just as they had tried to thwart imperial rule. The resulting negotiations between the postindependence nation-state and an all-india nationalism on the one hand and the diversity of smaller nationalisms on the other became characteristic of Indian political life in the second half of the twentieth century. Claims and counterclaims to history and heritage by various communities seeking to assert their political identities became increasingly so in the last two decades of the previous century a significant part of these negotiations. Drawing on some examples, chiefly that of the well-known Babri mosque at Ayodhya, this article will attempt to show the often problematic links between heritage, state and nationalism/s in India. The state and the bureaucratisation of preservation Since its foundation by the colonial government of India between 1861 and 1872 to survey and classify India s historical monuments, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has remained the principal manager of the protection and care of India s historical buildings. The ASI is a department of the central government of India (and is replicated at the level of state governments), falls under its Ministry of Culture and has as its director a bureaucrat from the Indian Administrative Service. On its website, the organisation describes itself and its primary functions as the premier organization for the archaeological researches and protection of the cultural heritage of the nation. Maintenance of ancient monuments and archaeological sites and remains of national importance is the prime concern of the ASI ( About us, ASI website). It discharges these functions by mobilising an apparatus of legislation to protect ancient monuments, drawing up lists of monuments deemed worthy of protection, engaging in programmes of beautification of the sites of monuments by creating a suitable landscape for historical buildings, now termed monuments, and systematically undertaking to protect these monuments from close contact with the public (for instance, by erecting fences around such structures and placing notice boards that both point to their value as monuments of national importance as well warn the public of the consequences of trespassing or defacing the structures). The entire process of preservation is directed by legislation for the protection of monuments as well as a handbook of conservation, both of which date back to colonial times. The organisation is divided regionally into 24 circles and, akin to departments of large public-sector organisations, consists of branches such as those for Excavation, Prehistory, Epigraphy, Science, Horticulture, the Building Survey Project, the Temple Survey Projects and the Underwater Archaeology Wing. In other words, the business of protecting India s historical built heritage is conducted in the manner of a department of government: officiously run by

4 Preservation between empire, nation and nationalisms 113 bureaucrats and with an agenda and a method that have remained more or less unchanged since the early years of the previous century. 1 On the one hand, this means that the bureaucrats of the ASI have considerable power over policy and practice; on the other, the problem of dealing with the diverse identitarian claims of the postcolonial nation-state has exposed its essential weakness. Protecting India s heritage: a colonial history To understand how the protection of heritage and preservation became the preserve of government, it is necessary to take a look at the origin and history of modern practices of historical preservation in colonial India. In the early days of the rule of the English East India Company in India ( ), the government of the East India Company look little interest in the preservation of India s architectural heritage and in fact often demolished older structures if they stood in the way of the great road- and railway-building projects of the empire in India. Modern-day practices of historical preservation came to India on the back of strict legislation on the protection of historical buildings. Most notable were the efforts of Viceroy Lord Curzon, Marquess of Kedleston ( ), who ruled India from 1899 to Curzon not only had a deep interest in preserving India s architectural heritage, he saw this as a fundamental duty of the colonial government in its role as custodian of Indian culture and heritage. In a famous and oft-quoted speech that he delivered at the annual meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal on 7 February 1900, he spelt out the obligations of imperial rule and outlined a clear line of heritage policy to be pursued by the colonial state in India. I regarded the conservation of ancient monuments as one of the primary obligations of Government. This obligation, which I assert and accept on behalf of Government, is one of an even more binding character in India than in many European countries. There abundant private wealth is available for the acquisition or the conservation of that which is frequently private property. Here all is different. India is covered with the visible records of vanished dynasties, of forgotten monarchs, of persecuted and sometimes dishonoured creeds. These monuments are, for the most part, in British territory, and on soil belonging to Government. Many of them are in out-of-the-way places, and are liable to the combined ravages of a tropical climate, and exuberant flora, and very often a local and ignorant population, who only see in an ancient building the means of inexpensively raising a modern one for their own convenience. All these circumstances explain the peculiar responsibility that rests upon Government in India (Curzon 1906: 183). This speech marks a foundational moment for the preservation of ancient buildings and monuments in India. In its historical context of imperial rule, the speech is symbolic of the colonial relationship between Britain and India. In the self-fashioning of British rule after 1857, the colonial state in India emphasised the paternalistic character of its rule, its political guardianship of India and, as can be seen in Curzon s speech, its custodial role as India s culture keeper. The colonial state was thus custodian of India s heritage until

5 114 Indra Sengupta Indians reached the level of maturity of Europeans and were able to appreciate their history and heritage (Sengupta 2013). At the same time, Curzon s emphasis on the lack of private wealth and a weakly developed public sphere, which required strong and decisive action on the part of the state, became a foundational principle of the Indian state in immediate aftermath of independence from British rule. The programmatic speech of 1900 was followed by a series of measures on the part of the state to protect India s historical monuments. These included a radical restructuring of the Department of Archaeology and the passing of the Ancient Monument Preservation Act (Act No. VII of 1904, henceforth to be referred to as AMPA 1904) in The Act of 1904 gave the state wide-ranging powers to legislate on India s heritage and enforce preservation measures and thus provided the legal foundation for the responsibility of the state in the field of historical preservation of public buildings; it also vested the state with tremendous power. Section 3 of the AMPA, for instance, gave the government the authority to declare a structure to be legally protected and within limits to buy, lease or acquire guardianship of it. Like many of the practices of the colonial state, the protection of ancient historical buildings became the subject of elaborate legal arrangements and bureaucratic procedures. The fact that many of the historical buildings that were to be protected were religious structures, such as Hindu temples, did not make the task of the state any easier. On the one hand, the colonial state since the revolt of 1857 was committed to a policy of religious neutrality; on the other, it was committed to organising and regulating the way in which places of worship, such as the temple, were managed. The tension that resulted from these mutually conflicting goals could be seen in the way in which the Archaeological Department of the colonial state managed the preservation of historical buildings and the degree of success it enjoyed in the enforcement of the principles of preservation (Sengupta 2013). The legal apparatus for the preservation of historical buildings put in place by the AMPA of 1904 was backed up by detailed rules of practice for historical preservation, which were to be strictly enforced by the officers of the Archaeological Department. A new code of practice, known simply as the Conservation Manual, was drawn up in 1923 by the influential director general of the Archaeological Department, John Marshall. Essentially, a code of practice for bureaucrat preservationists the Manual became the Bible of heritage conservation in its time and underpinned the work of the ASI long after independence from colonial rule. The principles of monument conservation to be followed in India were more or less as they were prevalent in late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain: ancient buildings were to be treated as sources of Indian history, with the aim of recovering the historical authenticity of built heritage. Historical structures were to be preserved, rather than restored; necessary beautification of such structures was to be undertaken. Historical structures were thus rendered monuments, which were to be visited and seen from a distance, not regarded as part of living tradition or social and ritual practice. The Manual that codified these preservation practices thus laid down a code for the

6 Preservation between empire, nation and nationalisms 115 bureaucratic management of culture that, akin to the task of managing of the empire in a vast and diverse country like India, had to be conducted with strict discipline aimed at uniformity of practice and maintenance of order by the colonial state (Sengupta 2015). Such excessive regulation and discipline, as well as firm state control of heritage policy and practice, were problematic even in colonial India. This was especially true in the case of preserving religious buildings of historical importance, which were in a state of decline and required protection. Measures adopted by the state for their preservation often left the officers of the department of archaeology as well as the colonial state helpless in the face of the agency of local communities (Lahiri 2000; Sengupta 2010, 2013; Sutton 2013; Mukherjee 2013). In a nation-state made of various competing subnational loyalties, state control of heritage practices, especially from the 1980s onwards, became as we shall see increasingly embroiled in the claims and counterclaims of competing groups to competing pasts. Such claims and counterclaims, conflicts and negotiations on historical structures, on their many uses and on history between the state, its Department of Archaeology and various religious communities did not emerge out of the Act of 1904 and its implementation alone. The intellectual and ideological underpinnings of understanding India s historical buildings can be traced back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century when, on the basis of the survey and documentation of India s historical ruins, attempts were made to classify India s historical buildings, to develop a typology for them and to write a history of Indian architecture, which would provide a point of entry into understanding India s history. Colonial scholars or scholar-bureaucrats, such as Alexander Cunningham, who was the first director of the archaeological surveys of the mid-century, archaeologists and art historians such as Henry Hardy Cole and architectural historians such as James Ferguson. While their views were not identical, together these scholars contributed to a narrative of Indian art, architecture and historical ruins that divided India s history into periods that were defined by a religious group (Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim), by conquest where each group successively replaced the other and, having conquered its rivals, destroyed their important buildings as well (Mitter 2013: ). Central to such a narrative was the colonial, essentialist construction of Hindus and Muslims as mutually antagonistic communities and Muslims as the rapacious invaders of India, who desecrated and destroyed Hindu temples and shrines in the wake of their conquest of India. India s architectural history was marked by a decline of architectural style and quality that went hand in hand with the general degeneration and decline of Indian civilisation until British rule emerged as India s saviour. Curzon s speech outlining the role of the imperial state as custodian of India s heritage that I have referred to earlier was pitched much along these lines. In his speech, Curzon referred to the antagonistic beliefs, warring races and rival creeds that comprised India and the dispassionate and impartial nature of British rule that was best suited to both rule it and guard its heritage (Curzon 1906). The postcolonial nation-state of India was heir to both the

7 116 Indra Sengupta central assumptions of this kind of colonial discourse: that of a strong, impartial state that would stand above and unite its communities, as well as a nation that in the aftermath of its partition into two states was scarred by the violent sectarian strife between Hindus and Muslims in the decade leading to independence. Bureaucracy of culture: the postcolonial present of a colonial past Heritage practices and policies that were excessively bureaucratised and state driven have long outlived their colonial past and become an entrenched part of the state guardianship of culture in independent India. Till the middle of the 1980s, making policy on preservation and implementing such policy was virtually the exclusive preserve of the old state institution of colonial origins, the ASI. The principles of the AMPA of 1904 and the rule-book-oriented approach to historical preservation remained part and parcel of the business of culture keeping of the Indian state long after the end of colonial rule and, despite the influence of new actors on preservation practices, this approach continues to exist (Gupta Jafa 2016). This is chiefly due to the fact that the ultimate responsibility for the preservation of historical buildings continues to lie with the ASI and its unwieldy bureaucratic apparatus. Independent India, over the decades after independence from British rule, introduced a series of legislations for the preservation of historical buildings and protection of India s cultural heritage. But the scope, definition and meaning of these acts, as well as the understanding of heritage that they were based on, remained tied to late Victorian ideas that had been brought to India on the back of colonial rule. In 1958, the Indian parliament passed the first piece of legislation on the subject: the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act 1958 provided for the preservation of ancient and historical monuments and archaeological sites and remains of national importance, for the regulation of archaeological excavations and for the protection of sculptures, carvings and other like objects. The Act of 1958 was by and large no fundamental break with the colonial past: like its predecessor of 1904, it provided an elaborate description of the procedure to be followed for the protection of historical monuments, but while it contained more details of procedure, its fundamental assumptions of what constituted a building, site or object worthy of preservation remained unchanged. It also remained wedded to the kind of historicist notions of Victorian heritage thinking that held monuments as objects whose function was to remind the present of its forgotten past and thus remain, as it were, museal relics of the past with little connection with social life in the present. Like the Act of 1904, it continued to vest the central government and, to a lesser extent, the state governments, with absolute powers of protecting monuments. 2 There were, however, a couple of significant points of departure from the colonial past. The first of these was the introduction of the term national to reflect India s changed political status and inscribe the nation into its built

8 Preservation between empire, nation and nationalisms 117 heritage. Hence, monuments deemed fit for protection were now to pass the test of being of national importance. Equally, monuments previously declared important could at any point lose their status as monuments of national importance, should the director general so decide. A second difference was much more significant and, as we shall see later, it would fundamentally alter the relationship between ancient buildings, the state and assertion of identity politics by various divergent and conflicting sectarian interests. The change related to the acknowledgement of the role of religious practice in the preservation of historical buildings. This latter was a significant departure from the policy of religious neutrality that the colonial state tried its best to follow in the aftermath of the revolt of The Act of 1958 thus dissolved the long-held distinction between history and antiquity on the one hand and faith and religion on the other that had been made by colonial archaeologists (Sutton 2013). Notwithstanding this, the structure and apparatus within which the policy and practice of preservation were undertaken continued to be dictated by the state. The care of historical structures remained the duty of government and the task of its bureaucracy. What explains this excessive anachronism and continued bureaucratisation of heritage management in a nation that became free of colonial rule almost seventy years ago? Independent India even in the immediate aftermath of colonial rule had a reasonably well-developed public sphere, though this was largely the preserve of the small, urban middle classes. The fairly obvious answer is the continued domination of the colonial past in many newly independent nations in Asia and Africa, which had previously been under European colonial rule. This influence of colonial mind-sets could be seen chiefly in the continuation of colonial policies and institutions of government, such as education, the police and the bureaucracy (Kaviraj 2010: 222) as well as in the continued influence of a Western-educated political elite, which had acquired prominence and privilege during colonial rule, in public life. India was no exception to this. But this explanation has to be further examined to understand precisely what the relationship between the legacy of colonialism and state power was. In order to do this, one must again take a brief look at the nature of the colonial state in India and assess how independence from colonial rule and nationhood affected the power of the state. Historians of colonialism are deeply divided on the question of the power of the colonial state and its ability to disrupt pre-existing social structures and networks, which rather than the state in precolonial times were the repositories of political power. While a detailed discussion on this subject is not possible here, it may be noted that over time, the colonial state in India succeeded in creating a political system where political power came to rest with the state. Especially after the revolt of 1857 the colonial state engaged in massive projects of infrastructural development in order to bring the country under better control of a centralised state that increasingly began to fashion itself as the guardian of its Indian subjects. At the same time, the state started co-opting specific elite groups of Indian society into government, in order to

9 118 Indra Sengupta create a stable class of political allies of colonial rule. Notwithstanding such measures of the expansion and centralisation of the state, the colonial state in its day-to-day dealings was often circumscribed by conditions in India. Historians like Christopher Bayly have shown the persistent dependence of the intelligence system of the state in the eighteenth century on indigenous networks of social communication (Bayly 1996). This dependence, changing in degree, continued into the nineteenth century. The world wars of the twentieth century substantially eroded the power of the colonial state, as war forced Britain into dependence on India s manpower and other material resources (Kamtekar 2007). Interventions of the colonial state in the care of India s ancient heritage indicate similar inconsistencies and anxieties of self-preservation. While, as we have seen, the state introduced laws giving the government far-reaching rights of intervention in order to protect historical buildings, the state was often hamstrung by its need to be cautious about public feeling. This was particularly true when the building in question was of a religious nature, such as Hindu temples or Muslim mosques. Christophe Jaffrelot and Gilles Tarabout have shown the paradox that emerged between the increasing intervention of the colonial state in the management and indeed working of Hindu temples on the one hand, and a policy of non-interference in religious affairs in general, on the other (Jaffrelot and Tarabout 2012). A similar confusion of the historical importance of a building and its significance to communities as a place of worship or prayer was evident in the case of Muslim structures, especially mosques and shrines, too (Ahmed 2014; Kavuri-Bauer 2011). Preservation policy too had to be careful to adhere to the policy of religious non-intervention that was adopted by the government of the British Raj in India in the aftermath of the revolt of The AMPA of 1904 as well as state interventions to protect historical buildings and sites recognised this. Official preservation law and policy made the distinction between sites and structures of historical importance, which would be preserved by means of state intervention, and religious structures still in use, where the state would play a marginal, advisory role. In practice, this turned out to be a much more complicated task. As I have discussed elsewhere, in reality, the colonial state was forced to engage with the rights of religious communities on the ground, which rendered it difficult to maintain the distinction that had been made in law between secular and sacred space (Sengupta 2010). Hence, even within the structures of colonial domination such as the legal apparatus of preservation, indigenous religious communities had the ability to assert their own agency. In independent India, the claims of these various communities to history and to historical buildings and sites became a central feature of assertions of their identity within the framework of the nation-state, constantly challenging it to redefine itself. The state that India inherited from the retreat of the British Empire from its soil in 1947 was a strong one. Compared to the state of Pakistan, which also emerged from the same empire, India after independence from British rule

10 Preservation between empire, nation and nationalisms 119 continued to strengthen itself by introducing programmes of nation-building, such as mass literacy and an increasingly strong and integrated economy, as well as by its ability to accommodate potentially centrifugal movements of linguistic or ethnic nationalism by means of its federal structure and democratic government (Chatterji 2013; Jaffrelot 2013). In fact, the historian of the Indian state in the 1940s and 1950s, Indivar Kamtekar, has persuasively argued that the Indian state in the immediate aftermath of independence from British rule was far stronger than at least the late colonial state ever was, as the war economy benefited large sections of Indian business groups. The Nehruvian state that emerged from the end of the British Raj in India inherited this strength, and this was the beginning of the subsequent, steady growth of the Indian state in the decades after independence. By claiming to be a nation, Kamtekar argues, the state could legitimately claim for itself the kind of power that at least the late colonial state never could (Kamtekar 2007). This growing strength of the Indian state, the Nehruvian vision of a socialist nation and the concentration of power in the hands of an elite that in social terms remained unchanged from colonial times came together to form a powerful state and a gigantic bureaucratic apparatus. The nation consisting of disparate linguistic and cultural groups had to be cemented, and to do that, the history and heritage of the unified nation had to be showcased. The business of managing India s culture and heritage was seen as an integral part of the postcolonial programme of nation-building and hence could not be left in the hands of private individuals or bodies. Colonial ideas of state custodianship of culture were thus given a long afterlife in a postcolonial setting. Yet, state custodianship of culture was not free from tension in a postcolonial nation-state that was driven by what Sudipta Kaviraj has analysed as the simultaneous logic of bureaucracy and democracy (Kaviraj 2010). Nehru s vision of the nation, which by and large underpinned the ideas of heritage and the preservation of historical buildings in the post-independence years, was essentially inclusive and secular. But he was aware of and repeatedly expressed dismay at the sectarian violence that accompanied India s freedom from colonial rule and the rise of Hindu right-wing ideas both within the Congress Party and in political life in general (Zachariah 2004: ). This was particularly true of the 1940s, as independence approached and along with it, the large-scale sectarian violence that ultimately led to the partition of India into the Islamic state of Pakistan and the secular republic of India. The right-wing trend in Indian politics was to mark the years preceding independence and its aftermath, and it only abated or rather went underground with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in Nehru s idea of the Indian nation, which he essayed in his Discovery of India (1946), was that of a people characterised by a positive nationalism and united in their diversity. Nehru s vision was thus of a strong state but one that rose above the diversity of its citizens, which nurtured diversity while itself remaining neutral. The state would rise above religion and be what the Indian constitution described as secular. Nehru s discomfort with the Hindu rhetoric of nationhood such as

11 120 Indra Sengupta the concept of Bharat Mata or Mother India, which the Hindu Right had mobilised and which Nehru found to have considerable currency among the ordinary people of India was consistent (Nehru 1985). This vision of India infused the public institutions of early post-colonial India, and it was this secular approach that the ASI and academically trained archaeologists tried to adopt in the practice of preservation. However, as we have seen, the tensions within such a secular ideal were also manifest from these very early days: as already mentioned, the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Site and Remains Act of 1958 acknowledged that sacred buildings where religious practice took place also fell within the remit of monuments, thus breaking with the colonial practice of keeping secular historical and sacred buildings separate. Further, notions of a Hindu heritage and the privileging of such a heritage and history exercised substantial influence on the historians of ancient Indian history and archaeology of the late nineteenth century down to the scholar-administrators of the public institutions of archaeological practice, such as the ASI, well into the period after independence from British rule: attempts to claim the Aryans as home grown Indians or, in the decades following the partition of India, claims to the Indus valley civilisation most of whose sites lay in the newly created enemy state of Pakistan as Indian formed a substantial part of the concerns of the academic and administrative establishment of archaeology in postcolonial India (Guha 2015: ). The quest of a young nation for a national identity which was predominantly secular and inclusive but beset with the ever-present threat of Hindu nationalism went hand in hand with a heavily bureaucratic apparatus of preservation practice that found expression in the ASI. Preservation and politics since the 1980s From the 1980s onwards, new and increasingly vocal actors have entered the debate on what to do with India s heritage. The preservation practices pursued by the ASI have increasingly been called into question by who have repeatedly questioned what they regard as the antiquated approach of the ASI. They have pointed out the need to bring preservation practices into line with the demands of modern-day life in India and be responsive to changes in international policy on heritage that have radically critiqued the continued adherence to the purely historicist, nineteenth-century notions of heritage. Central to this kind of critique of the ASI was the birth of Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) in 1984, a non-governmental organisation that has been modelled on the National Trust of Britain. INTACH describes itself as India s largest non-profit membership organisation dedicated to conservation and preservation of India s natural, cultural, living, tangible and intangible heritage (INTACH website). The fundamental challenge INTACH posed to the ASI s practice of heritage was by redefining the concept of heritage itself. The INTACH

12 Preservation between empire, nation and nationalisms 121 Charter, outlining its philosophy, mission and goals, defined heritage as much more than historical monuments: heritage was both tangible and intangible, consisting of not only historical buildings but also the traditional skills that went into the making and care of these buildings, as well as the rites and rituals, social life and lifestyles of the inhabitants; heritage was historical but also living, including changing forms of social life and use of historical spaces. The charter declared its commitment to the protection of smaller, lesser known and non-monumental structures, which had always been neglected by official policy; it drew attention to the problem of reconciling heritage preservation with the demands of urban growth. INTACH made the significant distinction between what it described as the old, colonial policy of preservation of historical buildings and sites and what it called conservation of heritage. The latter term was meant to be more inclusive in its approach to practice: thus, not only were buildings to be preserved for their historical importance, but what also required protection was a whole set of localised practices in time which stood for values of enduring relevance to contemporary Indian society. Hence, the focus was to be as much on protecting the past as well as the ever-evolving responses of localised communities of builders, artisans and other practitioners to the changing contexts in which they lived and practised their craft. In a radical departure from the Victorian and Edwardian philosophies of preservation that colonial officials such as John Marshall had introduced in the early twentieth century, the purpose of protecting heritage according to INTACH was not only to be driven by a purely historicist urge to preserve a building in its original state but also to include all the various changes and shifts that were reflected in those buildings and structures. The idea of historical authenticity that was at the heart of nineteenth-century preservationist movements in Europe was now overlaid by a much more radical, flexible notion of authenticity stemming from indigenous, traditional cultures of conservation, which regarded restoration and replication as a natural part of the continued existence of old structures (INTACH 2004; Menon 2003, 2013). The role of INTACH has succeeded to a great degree in opening up debates on the cultural meaning of preservation in India to ideas beyond the business of building a postcolonial nation-state. Through INTACH, transnational actors were drawn into debates on India s heritage practices: Sir Bernard Feilden was one of these. In its early days, INTACH worked closely with the National Trust in the UK and has traditionally shown great receptivity to changes in the approach of international organisations such as the UNESCO to preservation. It has thus, for example, welcomed the Nara Document on Authenticity of 1994, which has radically redefined one of the central concerns of the historical preservationist movement of nineteenth-century Europe. While emphasising the truthfulness of sources in determining the historical authenticity of monuments, the document makes a significant point about the importance of recognising cultural diversity in heritage practice. This point was particularly important in the context of globalisation, multiculturalism and the threat of

13 122 Indra Sengupta cultures losing out in the face of universalist ideas of preservation of an authentic historical essence: Cultural heritage diversity exists in time and space, and demands respect for other cultures and all aspects of their belief systems (Jokilehto 2009: 298). INTACH has proved to be a useful and necessary corrective to the policies adopted by the ASI and in recent times has if rather uncomfortably and not always harmoniously collaborated with the ASI on projects of building preservation. The results have been mixed. Till the early years of the present century by and large, the ASI continued to follow the old rules and principles that had been in place in colonial times. Legislation passed in the 1990s and in the first decade of this century, for instance, continued with the policy of isolating historical buildings from encroachment by human settlement, thereby maintaining the antiquated distinction between dead monuments and living traditions. 3 Nevertheless, the success of INTACH s efforts is clearly a reflection of the self-assertion of an educated public sphere that does not require the guardianship of the state to understand the history and appreciate the significance of the nation s heritage 80 years after Curzon s declaration of the inability of Indians to look after their architectural heritage. That said, the ideas expressed by INTACH are often not unproblematic: by seeing itself in binary opposition to the ASI and Western ideas of heritage preservation and tending to romanticise the Indian craftsman, the organisation is not free of the kind of orientalist bias that it often accuses both the ASI and colonial officials of. Heritage, history and the challenges of nationhood On a broader level, the politics of the past entered a new phase in the 1980s, as the inclusive Nehruvian nation-state became subject to repeated challenge. Nehru s broad church style of politics was gradually dismantled in the two decades after his death in 1964 as the ruling Congress Party under Nehru s daughter Indira Gandhi pursued a policy of appealing to India s voters on the basis of caste, community and religious allegiances. The Congress also attempted to systematically weaken the power of regional governments. The 1980s saw the emergence of sharpened political conflicts in India, as the dominant claims of a strong central government led almost uninterruptedly since independence by the Indian National Congress increasingly came under attack. I have argued earlier that the anti-colonial nationalist movement in India saw a strong nation-state as the successor to an empire that ruled over a multitude of linguistic, caste, ethnic and religious communities. A federal structure with a strong centre became the means by which potential forces of discontent or rupture could be contained. In the aftermath of the national emergency declared by the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, however, such a model of a strong centre with a virtually single-party rule came to be radically challenged from various quarters. For the first time in history, the

14 Preservation between empire, nation and nationalisms 123 Congress government was defeated in the elections of From the 1980s onwards, regional separatism became a serious threat to the integrity of the Indian nation and, when these were successfully contained, regional parties increasingly came to dominate politics. The report of the Mandal Commission on the social and economic backwardness of vast groups of previously untouchable castes, now known as the Dalits, and proposing educational and job quotas for them came out in This marked the beginning of the organised political assertion of Dalit movements, as well as resistance to their special treatment by upper castes in India. All these movements appeared to pose a fundamental challenge to the nation-state as it existed in the first three decades of independence from colonial rule. Of particular significance was the high profile achieved by a particular kind of sectarian identity politics involving demands of conservative Muslim groups and the Congress Party s policies since the days of Indira Gandhi. From the early 1970s, conservative Muslim groups such as the All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat (AIMMM) were increasingly trying to assert claims of a single, homogenous Muslim community of India by putting increasing pressure on the government of India to safeguard Muslim Personal Law (based on the Shariah). The greatest success of this strategy was perhaps the infamous case of Shah Bano, when a verdict of the Supreme Court awarding alimony to a poor old Muslim divorcee under Indian law was set aside by a change in law effected by the Congress-majority Parliament in 1986, which caved in to pressure from conservative Muslim groups to implement Muslim Personal Law. This policy in the parlance of the Hindu Right in India has come to be known as Muslim appeasement or playing the communal card to gain votes (Jaffrelot 1996: 330 7). Such forms of Muslim identity politics also began to draw upon the idea of a Muslim past for a collective Muslim community and from the early 1980s onwards, even if sporadically, there was a greater focus on historical structures, principally mosques, in order to claim a specifically Muslim heritage and demand control over Indo-Islamic historical sites (Ahmed 2014: 133 9). Local-level Muslim organisations were established to reinstate prayers in the non-functional historic mosques (Ahmed 2015: 133), and demands were made to change the Act of 1958 to specifically allow the use of historical mosques for prayer. One such local organisation was the Babri Masjid Action Committee (BMAC), which was formed in Faizabad in 1984, in part as a response to the growing focus of the right-wing Hindu group, the International Hindu Association or Visha Hindu Parishad (VHP), on the historical mosque of the Mughal Emperor Babar in Ayodhya. The success of conservative Muslim politics in the Shah Bano case and the parallel mobilisation of right-wing political Hinduism would bring the mosque to the attention of the nation and the world as an example of heritage as a site of conflict and negotiation over the nation, its communities, over history and the state. Let us now turn briefly to political Hinduism and heritage. The origins of political Hinduism can be traced to colonial times, particularly in the late nineteenth century, and a kind of Hindu reactionary element was present in many

15 124 Indra Sengupta sections of India s anti-colonial nationalist movement. However, it was in the second half of the twentieth century that the movement, in an attempt to give a political voice to the Hindus, sought to provide them with the one element of other faiths, such as Christianity, which Hinduism lacked: a centralised, quasi-ecclesiastical organisation centred on religious figures or sadhus. The post-independence government under Jawaharlal Nehru s prime ministership tried to organise these religious figures and work with them; similarly, following in the footsteps of the colonial government it took control of the management of Hindu temples. The intransigence of religious figures in the face of state control culminated in 1964 in the foundation of the VHP, which right from the outset was led by India s main Hindu nationalist outfit, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an organisation that had fallen into some disrepute due to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 by a former member. The principal agenda of the VHP, like that of the RSS, was Hindu majoritarianism in national politics, and the movement was principally directed at what these groups regarded as the policy of concession to Muslims that the Indian state after the partition of British India had in the name of secularism embarked on (Katju 2003; Jaffrelot 1996). At the Second International Hindu Conference in 1979, a plan to mobilise Hindu voters and create a Hindu vote bank was launched, and the VHP was entrusted with the task. The 1980s saw several programmes of political grandstanding (including national processions, public programmes of reconversion of Dalit groups who had converted to Islam or Christianity back to Hinduism) on the part of the VHP. The most spectacularly successful of these was the Hindutva-led movement for Ramjanmabhumi of the mid-1980s, which culminated in the demolition of the so-called Babri Masjid in the north Indian town of Ayodhya on 6 December The basis of this momentous act was the claim of the Hindutva movement that Ayodhya indeed the precise spot of the mosque was the original birthplace of the Hindu god Rama (Ramjanmabhumi) and the site of a Hindu temple that had existed on the site for centuries. The temple, Hindutva activists claimed, had been destroyed by Babar, the central Asian conqueror and first Mughal emperor of India, in order to make room for the mosque that he then built on the ruins of the temple. 4 The aim of destroying the Babri mosque was to restore the site to its pre-mughal past and its original meaning as a holy place of the Hindus. Hindus had indeed long laid mythical claims to Ayodhya as the birthplace of Rama. Not much seems to have been recorded of this disputed site between the purported destruction of the temple in the sixteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century when the site began to be mentioned in occasional British accounts, and occasional clashes between Hindus and Muslims appear to have occurred between 1853 and In 1859, the colonial government opted for what was to be a typical solution to such problems of conflicting sectarian claims to historical structures: it erected a fence around the mosque, thus demarcating the area of the mosque from its precincts, with the former being accessible to the Muslims and the latter to local Hindus groups. The situation remained

16 Preservation between empire, nation and nationalisms 125 unchanged till on the night of December 1949 when an idol of Rama seems to have been placed inside the mosque (the Hindu worshippers claimed that the idol arrived there as an act of miracle). The local government took the swift and decisive measure of locking the mosque and barring entry to all, which is how the site remained for another almost 40 years. In the midst of the Ramjanmabhumi movement of the mid-1980s, a judge of a district court in February 1986 ordered the opening of the gates for Hindu worship. The destruction of the mosque in 1992 led to a long, and still unresolved, legal battle of claims and counterclaims of Hindus and Muslims over the site. Much has been written on the incidents surrounding Ayodhya and the significance of these events for the formation and assertion of political identities based on religion (Gopal 1991; Nandy et al. 1995, Guha-Thakurta 2004: ). For the purpose of our discussion on heritage practices, several features of the dispute stand out, which indicate the strange and uncertain ways in which historicist ideas of preservation and the state through its laws, courts and department of archaeology (the ASI) has had to confront the complicated questions of communitarian rights of religious identity groups in modern India. Hindutva claims to the site reveal a complex interweaving of the arguments of history and faith, of what is often described as Western notions of scientific knowledge on the one hand and indigenous communitarian rights on the other (Guha-Thakurta 2004). In their claims to the Ramjanmabhumi, Hindutva activists dismissed the need to provide historical evidence to establish claims to a site of religious belief; to illustrate this, they drew on the examples of sites such as Jerusalem and Mecca, which despite dubious historical evidence are accepted as the holy sites of Christianity and Islam. The only proof that was required to establish their claims to Ayodhya was thus about the existence of a pre-mughal temple to the god Rama on that site. It was to the latter end that they took to the courts to prove their case. In the process, they drew on the testimonies of professional historians and archaeologists, and the ASI, and used essentially historicist arguments, as they attempted to provide archaeological, textual and other forms of scientific evidence to prove the historical existence of the Rama temple and thereby give a mythical past a physical site. They claimed that this temple predated the mosque and was destroyed in order to build the mosque. The ultimate aim was to assert majoritarian cultural and political rights, to correct what was perceived as a historical wrong perpetrated by India s ('foreign') Muslim rulers upon India s original Hindu inhabitants. Notwithstanding the particular resonance of Ayodhya in India s public discourse and collective memory, it must be remembered that, seen in the wider context of postcolonial history, it was in fact a part of a chain of events related to conflicting communitarian claims and counterclaims to historical sites of religious significance that began immediately after India s independence. Ayodhya must thus be understood in the context of this larger narrative of a fractious religious nationalism that owes its origins to colonial theories of an essentially divided and disunited India and has at least since the early days of anti-colonial nationalism contested the narrative of a united, pluralistic nation with the