Janakpur

One of the fastest-growing cities of Nepal, Janakpur is the capital of Madhesh Province and a hub for religious and cultural tourism. The city was first documented as a pilgrimage site in 1805, and Maithili is widely-spoken as the lingua franca. Janakpur is a key node in the so-called Ramayana Circuit, a regional pilgrimage heritage trail project, as well as a crucial hub for connecting traditional knowledge systems through the fine and performing arts. Janakpur is an important case study within Heritage as Placemaking for exploring the influence of neocolonial and soft power in framing and interpreting cultural heritage. The city is furthermore a key site in Heritage as Placemaking for analysing and understanding how heritage is implemented to further ideological agendas.

By looking at the heritage performance/performative interface in Janakpur and surrounding villages, Monica Mottin is documenting folk dramas such as the Kartik Naach and Ramlila.

Modernization and urbanization, along with the transformation of the public places that hosted such folk dramas, have led to the disappearance of performances in their traditional form from the city of Janakpur along with traditional performers themselves. However, they survive in the surrounding villages, where epics and dances animate local melas (fairs) during festivals for nights in a row. They are also occasionally produced by local theater and cultural groups in adapted forms that appeal to urban audiences in Janakpur, Kathmandu, and India. No doubt, such performances are part of the much-valued cultural heritage of Madhes that is strategically used by political groups to promote their place-based identity in relation to the central government. Grounded on the theoretical strands of commoning and erasure, Monica Mottin’s project will contribute to understanding how changes in performance practice and processes of cultural placemaking are redefining place across levels in different directions: rural-urban, Janakpur-Nepal, Jankapur-India and how they sustain/question Janakpur as a sacred city.

Sabin Ninglekhu’s research makes a deep inquiry into the political and discursive origins of placemaking projects that have been gaining rapid ascendency in more recent times. At the heart of his research in Janakpur, Ayodhya, and Lumbini is a critical ethnography of these project(s) of ‘heritagization’ and urban planning.

In Janakpur, Sabin Ninglekhu focuses on the 2014 Ramayana Circuit pilgrimage/heritage project, which promises to ‘trace Ram’s footsteps’ by connecting Janakpur, Nepal, with Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, India. He also analyzes the Greater Janakpur Area Development Council, conceived in 1995, and critically evaluates the political and discursive developments in the city that have spearheaded such projects, such as the 2017 elections in Janakpur, which were initiated by the mayor and ultimately re-instated local governments. While urban development and heritage projects, on the one hand, are meant to beautify the city, boost its commercial potential via investment in religious tourism, and (re)claim a heritage-based identity; on the other, they also pose critical threats of erasure of other non-Hindu/non-majoritarian symbols and semiotics of the city that accord identity and agency to the minority citizen communities. Such tendencies can sometimes lead to (un)intended effects, such as physical demolition of commercial and residential buildings, which convert minority local communities into ‘placeless’ non-citizens. Together, his research takes up these three places as emblematic and relationally co-constituted cases to inquire about the contemporaneous place of governance and bureaucracy vis-à-vis heritage, in creating the blueprint utopia, the ‘master plan’, based on which planning decisions are made for cities in the Global South.