Lumbini

​​Lumbini, a pilgrimage site situated in present-day southern Nepal, across the Indian border, is one of the most important places of worship for Buddhists, as it is believed to be the place where the Buddha was born. It is one of the four cardinal places of the Buddhist pilgrim trail. As Sasanka Perera and Pooja Kalita’s work in Lumbini demonstrates, Lumbini is not merely a geographic or demographic location in Nepal, but rather a place that is constantly transformed on the ground, based on the versions of Buddhism practiced by visiting pilgrims as well as the ethnonational interests they represent.

In addition, Lumbini is transformed according to the bureaucratic and governance-related interests of the Nepali state, local government prerogatives, concerns over commerce related to day-to-day living, and more importantly, pilgrimage-related tourism. Understood in this sense, Sasanka Perera’s research is located in the intersections of pilgrimage, placemaking, memory, and bureaucratic interventions of the state and local government structures.

Lumbini is a critical site for Sabin Ninglekhu’s critical ethnography of the project(s) of ‘heritagization’ and urban planning. His research is located in certain keystone historical ‘moments’ of places, moments that may be considered critical nodes, particularly from an urban planning point of view.

One such project is the so-called Lumbini Master Plan, which in 1977 laid the ground for much of the infrastructural work in commemoration of Gautam Buddha in Lumbini. Another key moment is the year of 1986, when the action plan was launched for the ‘Buddhist Circuit’ heritage and pilgrimage trail, which would come to connect Lumbini with other cities such as Varanasi, in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, thereby ‘tracing Buddha’s footsteps’. In Lumbini, the tendencies and implications of ‘heritagization’, vis-à-vis erasure are far less pronounced than in other sites such as Ayodhya or Janakpur. Nevertheless, Ninglekhu’s research takes a similar thematic and methodological approach by locating bureaucracy and erasure (of ‘other’ heritage) in the context of the history of placemaking projects in Lumbini as well as in the ongoing implementation of the Buddhist Circuit.