"What makes heritage alive?" by Sudatta Ghosh

Sudatta Ghosh is a PhD scholar at South Asian University, New Delhi.

A wall art of ‘Rajamati’ in Itum Baha. Photo courtesy of the author.

The six days spent in Kathmandu Valley, participating in the Heritage as Placemaking spring school, was an overwhelming experience for me. It made me open my eyes to the beauty, vibrancy, and complications of a culture similar and yet so different from my own as a Bengali from India. On the very first day, Monica Mottin had pointed out that, as the spring school progresses and we visit different places, listen to various people, and interact with communities native to Nepal, we must constantly ponder over the question, “What makes heritage alive?” Several further questions emerge from this provocation: whose heritage are we talking about (borrowing from Stuart Hall’s ‘Whose Heritage?’ published in 1999), is heritage dead, who has the power to make it alive or revive it, how much of heritage is intertwined with politics specific to a nation and its culture, and so on and so forth. While answering all of these would require a thesis in itself, I decided to think about heritage and placemaking from a single point of view for the purpose of this write-up. The first thing that really struck me when I reached Patan, where we stayed in a quaint little hotel and where most of our sessions took place at the Jyapu Samaj, was the architecture. The beautiful windows, narrow alleys, temples at every corner and intersection, interspersed with cafés, local wine shops, grocery stores, as well as meat shops. But as the days passed, I realised how none of these spaces mean anything without the people moving in and out of them. It means nothing without knowing about the people who once occupied these spaces, the ones that occupy them now as well as the future generation who will most certainly attach new meanings to the space. Past, present and future are beautifully interspersed with one another. People, together with a space, lead to the creation or making of a place.  What is merely space becomes place when things like architecture, people, religion, rituals, language, food, dress, gestures, emotions, and memory; all combine together.

Evening at Kathmandu Valley. Photo courtesy of the author.

While I feel all these things come together to make heritage alive, I would talk about one particular aspect, which is resistance. By resistance, I do not only mean the very overt kind that we see in political rallies on the streets, but also the everyday resistance that people carry out through their mundane activities. Resistance is performed through the everyday. It's when Abhi Subedi sir said that people make places usable through performances and rituals. Resistance is when people are able to take back the heritage they own from the Chauni Museum when they need it. Resistance is when people come together as a community to manage the space. such as the sithi nakha, which is the community cleaning of water bodies. Resistance is the charya tradition where people devote themselves to a certain way of life that preaches peace, friendship and compassion in times when countries are waging wars and so openly inflicting violence upon people. Resistance is also when Manju Ale, Biniti didi, and other women partake in Chharya that seemed to be a male-dominated space. Resistance is also when the Jhijhiya dancers through their performance and rituals engage in placemaking within the larger socio-political context of Nepal. At the Harisiddhi temple performance, we learnt how there are so many versions of the Ramayana and people are keeping it alive through performance. This is also resistance against the one mainstream narrative of the epics that we usually study in our schools. The thematic of resistance, for me, binds countries together where socially excluded or marginalised groups, through their embodied acts and performances, make a space meaningful and preserve heritage in different forms. Its emotions, love and compassion that are felt by people which makes heritage living. All of these drive people to resist and show resilience against exclusionary practices and claim spaces and one’s priced heritage as one’s own. Back in West Bengal in India, I work with a group of women known as Nachnis who continuously resist the appropriation of performance that is carried out by the State and other sections of society. They do this through their gestures and movements during the dance performance but they also do it through their everyday lives. Resistance and resilience of people is what makes heritage alive.  

A man looks at vibrant masks in a shop. Photo courtesy of the author.

Lighting diyas at the Kathmandu Durbar Square. Photo courtesy of the author.

I wish to conclude this brief write up by stating that I have taken back important and practical learnings about the different ways in which one can understand heritage and placemaking. The spring school provided several new experiences, one such being the hands-on training provided by Rajan Shreshtha on audio recording and podcast methodologies. Inspired by his training, the next day I observed Prabita, a fellow participant in the spring school, recording sounds of various objects and humans as we went about our itinerary. I realised what a brilliant project Prabita was undertaking by arguing that heritage is multisensorial. While the visual has always been put on a pedestal, what makes heritage alive is also the soundscapes, tactile sensations experienced, smells, and so on. The sheer brilliance of each and every participant I spent the week with will stay with me and it has been an inspiration for my own work to a great extent.

"What Keeps Heritage Alive?" by Tara Brahme

Tara Brahme is an MA Student at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Universität Heidelberg

It was the day before the annual festival of Holi, and children across the neighbourhoods of the Kathmandu Valley were armed from their terraces with water balloons, in anticipation. We had just attended the Jhijhiya dancers’ performance at the Echoes In The Valley festival and were making our way down the narrow lanes of Kathmandu to speak with them in more detail about their performance and the dance tradition that they practice while trying to dodge every noticeable water balloon-armed terrace. At the discussion venue, we sat in a large circle explaining and trying to understand the worlds and traditions of performance that we all came from and teasing out the similarities in South Asian performance traditions. What stared as a discussion, evolved organically into a sharing where we ended by singing songs to each other from the many different places we came from.

A street in Patan. Image courtesy of Tara Brahme.

I frame these final reflections on the question “what keeps heritage alive?” and the 2024 Spring School around this performance and the interactions with the artists and hope that this choice becomes clearer through the questions that I raise.

When I was thinking about the question, and project while applying to the spring school, the first question that struck me was even more basic than this one, and it was: “can heritage be alive?” And, “what does it mean to phrase something in this manner?”

More often than not, the tendency is to understand heritage as something static and frozen in time rather than dynamic. We see this in how “heritage” is explained as well. When we look at words like “legacy” and “inheritance” as words related to heritage, in whatever form they may take there is an underlying sense of something being passed down in its “authentic” form and the emphasis is often on preserving continuities with the past as an unbroken thread. Then when I think of heritage as living, I find that we must decentre the emphasis on the past and think about heritage as something dynamic and one that is constantly evolving. This presents a contradiction.

The second problem or challenge with a category like heritage and one that deeply concerns me, especially given the current political moment that a neighbouring country like India is in, is related to power, exclusions and who can make claims to heritage within a national or regional community. And consequently, who gets left out of the narrative when certain sites, objects, monuments, festivals and similar aspects of cultural and public life are assigned the role of representing the heritage of national and/or regional communities.

It is in relation to these two aspects – one of contradictions and the other related to power and representation – that I would like to bring in Jhijhiya as an example. Through the interactions we had with the artists two things stood out as broadly relating to my questions, concerns and thoughts.

Learning from the Jhijhiya dancers. Photo courtesy of Monica Mottin.

The first and perhaps the most obvious challenge to heritage as static and singular practice were the variations that emerged during our discussion with the artists, the translator and Dr Mottin when each of them had a slightly different answer to some of the questions we asked them based on their own practice in different locations and Dr Mottin’s research interviews with other Jhijhiya groups as well.

The second emerged when the dance form was placed in the social context of a caste society. And I think it is here that the potential of this form to illustrate what we have been contending with in this workshop lies. From my understanding of the discussion, what came up was that in some instances (not with this group) there is a difference between which caste groups perform in which settings. According to the translator, often it is the oppressed caste communities who perform in the ritual context while in popular context people from diverse caste background may be part of the performance. Thus, the dance form in these two spaces contrasts caste-based practice/ labour in the ritual context versus an access to wider publics which allows groups to perform in the popular context outside the ritual sphere.

What is interesting about this then is that Jhijhiya dance then challenges this vis-à-vis who can and does perform in which setting. The fact that oppressed caste women dance it in the ritual context and women from other castes dance it in the popular context complicates questions of who the dance “belongs” to especially if we were to look at the ritual context as a more “legitimate” sphere endowed with greater value, power and meaning than the popular context. Conversely, one could also argue that it is the performance in the popular cultural presentation context that keeps the form alive by introducing it to audiences who may not be able to access the ritual performance. And then in this instance the work is being done by those who have access to perform in these contexts who then can also make claims to the form. Therefore, I’m inclined to argue that it is perhaps tensions and contestations like these that keeps heritage alive because aspects of it are always being challenged and changed as different people and communities encounter it over generations.

It is also important at this point to go back to the spontaneous sharing session we had at the end of the discussion with the Jhijhiya dancers because of how central the participatory aspect is to keeping heritage alive. In conclusion then, this set of reflections has tried to show how central participation in the form of sharing is to keeping heritage alive and contesting the static quality that the label of “authenticity” ascribes to it and highlighting the inevitable dynamism of cultural heritage as performance.

"Crossroads to change" by Tanya Jones

Tanya Jones is a Doctor of Philosophy Candidate at Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University

On the first day, the building was there. By the last day of my stay in Patan, I realised it was gone.

The temple with materials from a demolished building sitting in front of it. Kathmandu, near Jyapu Academy. Photo courtesy of Tanya Jones.

Along the roads to Jyapu Academy stands a Bhairab temple, its composure unchanging except for the poster notices stuck to its sides, and the LED that lights up the trim of its roofs. Where my attention was drawn, however, was toward the daily-changing surrounds of the temple – a crossroads of life moving on; buildings, cars, and construction material finding a play to stay, and then to go, revolving as a mandala around both the holiness and the regularity of the architecture. As a group, we discussed the flow of heritage in its changes and its continuities across livelihoods in Nepal, finding our ways to where water, flora, and fauna once gave life, too, and to where the tangible and intangible meet to enliven that which is maintained and developed across time.  On my own, I explored the ideas that cause a place to change or to remain the same – what are the conditions for something to stay, or to go?

MacDonald (2018) writes that “[h]eritage… is imagined and produced as enduring unchanged over time” (p. 3), in discussion of terminology surrounding heritage preservation and that which is “allowed” (p. 3) to change. I further draw upon Chitrakar (2020) in their exploration of Kathmandu Valley public spaces as an “integral part of urban life… [and] in providing a common ground for human contact and social interactions” (p. 25). In the understanding that the temples, stupa, and everyday parts of living like water and commerce make up these social interactions, I find myself wondering who and what in Kathmandu Valley determine which social interactions stay, and which go, and where and why such vital elements to public life might stay or go.

The temple standing untouched, now with the ruins of the building removed. Photo courtesy of Tanya Jones.

To begin along the journey to an answer, of some sort, to these ponderings, I think back to the first few days of my stay in Patan. We were told of restoration – both of place and of self and behaviour – where the future creates the past, as selected and curated from repertoire of the past, and that nothing can truly be done for the first time. All relies upon an orientation to the past, built upon by a continuity of acceptance or rejection as each performs their own identities. Similarly, we asked ourselves what heritage might mean for different stakeholders – who curates the past for the future’s care?

In the Kathmandu Valley we may think of the town planners, from the Malla Period, the Nepalese caste system, and the communities that come together to build and carry chariots in times for festivals, or, among the Newar people, we may think of the guthi systems dedicated to religious, funerary, or locality-based traditions, as examples (see Toffin, 2005). I also point to the recent post, Where is gender in heritage research?, (curated by Pooja Kalita, 2024, April 3), where women’s invisibility is recognised in the carriage of tangible and intangible heritage in research from past to present. Who is it, then, who tells what is to be and do, and what isn’t? In some cases, one might say that they who began a heritage, by agreement or by rejection of other values, are the hinges upon which change does or does not occur. In others, we look to other ways of doing and being in this world, and take and learn where we can.

LED lights line the roofline of the temple. Photo courtesy of Tanya Jones.

In the case of the Bhairab temple in central Patan, was it a man, or a guthi member, an employee, or a landlord who caused a building nearby to be torn down? As a foreigner to the Kathmandu Valley, I could not ask, and may never even know these answers. Despite this, I wonder, especially, who arranged the LED lights on the temple, or who caused the temple to be untouched and unharmed, and beautiful, in what appeared to be the re-construction of that nearby building? Is it the temple, or the people living around it who carry the heritage of this little crossroads in Nepal?

I, of course, cannot argue for one or for the other – nor can I say that the people and place have equal value in all cases in the Kathmandu Valley. That said, someone, somewhere along the lines of reasoning in changing this little public square, has accommodated the sacred even as they sought to build what may be accommodation for people. Stray dogs sheltered in the shade of the rest house from where I took my photos, and flowers were decorated onto even the tiniest of mandalas in the streets bordering this Bhairab temple. Life flows in and around this public space, maintained through the changing everyday and urban lives of the people in and around it. Vehicles and buildings, and people and animals all come to stay at some point, and all must go, too, swayed by the harmony and discordance in community and the city that holds them.

References:

Chitrakar, Rajjan. 2020. Morphology of Traditional Towns and the Organization of Neighborhood Public Spaces in the Kathmandu Valley. In Revisiting Kathmandu Valley’s Public Realm: Some Insights into Understanding and Managing its Public Spaces. Nova Science Publishers (pp.1-28).

Kalita, Pooja. 2024, April 3. Where is Gender in Heritage Research. Heritage as Placemaking. Accessed 20 April, 2024, from https://heritageasplacemaking.com/blog/where-is-gender-in-heritage-research  

MacDonald, Sharon. 2018. Heritage. The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (pp. 1-12).

Toffin, Gérard Tofin. 2005. From Kin to Caste: The Role of Guthis in Newar Society and Culture. Lalitpur, Nepal: Social Science Baha.