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.
