Abstract
Heritage impacts an area, a nation and a region’s way of life and perhaps even the behaviour, ideas and artefacts which are passed on to the next generation. The above is hardly a statement that needs repeating, perhaps! However, while heritage and its conservation, protection, transmission and so on have supporters, there are those who flatly declare that they do not understand the need to live in, and with, ‘the past’. Heritage awareness at schools, colleges, universities and for the general public is, therefore, a crucial area for analyzing our collective responsibilities towards human inheritance.
The renowned artist Mr Gulam Mohammed Sheikh provided one such thought-provoking overview of India’s artistic and architectural heritage, and what he termed ‘inheritances’, when he spoke at the launch of the first issue of the Journal of Heritage Management in Ahmedabad. Emphasizing the need for comprehensive documentation, innovative museums and a national archive of heritage monuments, he also highlighted the social mindset towards art and the challenges before us. While we cannot take our readers back in time for that scintillating presentation, we are sharing the text in this issue’s Talking Point. It is a theme we hope to revisit in subsequent issues.
Continuing with the theme of what is valued, what is not and why, Parul G. Munjal’s article looks at the ‘notion of heritage’ in six small- and medium-sized towns in the district of Gurgaon. Acknowledging that the definitions and scope of heritage are more than physical, she looks at how local stakeholders maintain and use sites and structures that they value. She also tries to understand the process as a step towards demystifying the construct of heritage by communities and the values they give to remains from the past.
Such an ascription of value to heritage sites and monuments, whether by a community or communities or a nation-state, is uppermost when a nation prepares dossiers for obtaining UNESCO ‘World Heritage Site’ inscription for its sites. In fact, the winter months are somewhat in the nature of a waiting game for countries (referred to as ‘State Parties’) and their quests for World Heritage status for sites, pending decision by the World Heritage Committee. Even as I type this, the city of Ahmedabad has undergone the World Heritage Committee’s rigorous processing towards possible inscription as a World Heritage Site.
However, decisions are based not just on the ‘outstanding universal value’ (OUP) of a cultural or natural or ‘mixed’ nomination site but near equal weightage is also given to prescribed aspects like ‘authenticity’, ‘integrity’, disaster preparedness, availability of interpretation centres at potential World Heritage Sites, community involvement, proposed outreach programmes and, of course, long- and short-term management and their implementation. The decision for any site—when it comes, and whatever it be—sets in motion further processes of implementation and management for sites that get ‘inscribed’. (And, of reworking dossiers where the decision is not a straight acceptance but a ‘referral’ or ‘deferral’.)
Against this backdrop, the third article in this issue is on China’s experience of managing and further understanding the World Heritage Site of the Great Wall of China. As Huang Xiaofan’s article highlights, the process of viewing and reviewing the Great Wall and its numerous component-structures and cultural linkages has led to the accumulation and dissemination of even more information about China and its Great Wall than was available years ago when the Great Wall of China was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The complex issue of ‘authenticity’, so central to debates on heritage, is taken up through two separate articles thereafter. Julie Williams Lawless and Kapila D. Silva analyze World Heritage Site designations in an Asian context, while Neel Kamal Chapagain provides a challenging contextual approach on authenticity as it is applied to heritage management, conservation and tourism. His perception on a ‘kind of situational ethics in negotiating the meaning and implications of authenticity’ is an important and timely one to mull over.
Carrying the discussion to the city of Ahmedabad, with its legacy of urban living patterns and much more, even as we await for June 2017 and the decision on Ahmedabad’s bid as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Rajdeep Routh and Dhruma Bhavsar share their findings on Urban Street address in that city as a way for managing historic urban precincts of India.
We stay with Ahmedabad for our ‘Case Study’ section. In this, the concept of ‘value network’ in heritage walks is examined with particular reference to Ahmedabad city by Abrar Ali Saiyed, Anita Basalingappa and Piyush Kumar Sinha.
We have been receiving suggestions for themes and topics to cover in our forthcoming issues. We welcome these and will try to incorporate those subjects. We also encourage our readers to look at the submission guidelines and send in their own contributions too. This is a collective journey we have embarked upon.