The pulse of a place

Heritage matters

Never before in the history of humanity has it been possible to stroll down a few metres to partake of the globe. Coffee from a US-based company, Italian ice-cream, clothes from a Spanish outlet, shoes from an American brand... everything is now within reach in your neighbourhood mall, whether you are in Bengaluru, Kanpur, Madrid or Buenos Aires. Our world, it seems, is coasting along towards becoming One World, at least culturally.

And yet... Think of a city, any city. What is it that comes to mind first? With Paris, it’s likely to be the Eiffel Tower. With Delhi, perhaps the Qutb Minar. London may have conjured images of the Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, or perhaps a melange of its streets and its old buildings, while New York might remind you of the Empire State Building or its many mouth-watering museums. Point to note: a city is still usually associated with something unique about it. Rarely, if ever, is it identified by its modern malls or by its resemblance to other cities.

In the last decades of the previous century, there was a fear that the march of globalisation would swallow up some unique cultures of the world. But we had reckoned without the fact that humans are conflicted creatures: We all want to be the same, but we all also want to be different! And so, the world over, the threat of globalisation-induced cultural homogenisation has engendered a tendency to hold out against sameness by holding on to one’s roots. This is not to say that globalisation has not been an engine of change, because it has. But even as globalisation bulldozes over the local, it is simultaneously the driver of a celebration of the local and the unique.

This is nowhere more evident than in cities, those engines of growth that are at the forefront of globalisation. Governments around the world have attempted to showcase their cities’ uniqueness, their distinctive heritage that makes them special. In Singapore, for example, in the late 1980s, the government stepped in to conserve and revive the traditional shophouse. These narrow and terraced houses, built between the 1840s and the mid-1900s, were common in most southeast Asian cities and functioned both as shops and residences. Post conservation, alongside Singapore’s famously swanky high-rises, these traditional shophouses are home to its hippest shops and restaurants and some of its toniest residences.

In the case of the Pike Place Market in Seattle in the United States, it was citizens who took on the role of retaining and highlighting local heritage. This marketplace began life as the Public Market in 1907. By the 1970s though, it had fallen into the kind of hard times many of us Indians are familiar with — reduced footfalls, low rents, peeling paint and a general disrepair. The city government proposed an ‘urban renewal’ plan which envisaged replacing the ageing and fading market with spanking new high-rise offices, hotels and a multi-storey parking lot.

When citizens got wind of this scheme though, there were vociferous protests. They argued that the market was a unique and valuable community asset that deserved to be retained. Eventually, their push for a Historic Market District prevailed. The market was restored and rejuvenated with generous public funding. Today, it is reputed to be the country’s oldest operational marketplace, and is Seattle’s most-visited tourist destination. It is also central to Seattle’s image, and a source of great pride for its people.

Cultivating culture

A fine example of sensitive urban renewal in India is the Nizamuddin Urban Renewal Project of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which in 2007 initiated a still-ongoing intervention in the historic urban quarter of Nizamuddin, in New Delhi. One of the mandates of the project was to use culture as a catalyst for urban renewal. The intervention began with extensive community consultation and dialogue and has successfully restored several heritage structures in the neighbourhood, with full community co-operation. Cultural spaces have been revived and created where poetry readings and melas are held, all of which go towards fostering a keen sense of place.

The Nizamuddin initiative, unfortunately, is an exception in India. Most of our cities have hitched themselves onto the global bandwagon, while resolutely turning their backs on the local. Bengaluru itself is a perfect example of this. A recent survey by the NGO Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) found that more than 50% of a set of heritage buildings (including mostly houses) that had been recorded in the city in 1985 had been lost by 2015.

This is unfortunate because a city is more than just a set of buildings and streets. A city is a palimpsest, with several inter-layers of history. It is also an accumulation of stories, memories and meanings for its people. Most people’s lives are entwined with the houses and streets they grew up in, or the trees, parks and hills that they roamed in their neighbourhood. The demolition of these old houses and traditional markets, and the transformation of streets into a glitzy modernity erases these markers of memory, severs the city’s links with its past, and leaves its people feeling unmoored.

It is this feeling of being lost in one’s own city that moves people to seek an anchor that they can hold on to even as they are buffeted by waves of change. For proof of a search for rootedness, browse through social media. There has been a surge in the number of social media groups catering to nostalgia for the old days. There are groups dedicated to bygone Abu Dhabi, Manila, Bangalore, San Francisco, Liverpool, Madison and scores of other cities, each boasting more than 20,000 members. Posting their memories and photographs on these groups gives people a sense of shared history and belonging.

Another symptom of the need to belong is the popularity of heritage walks across cities both in India and elsewhere. Not all these walks showcase monumental heritage or discuss national history. Indeed, many of the more popular city walks focus on the ordinary and the everyday — local cuisines, vernacular architecture, and street-side stories and heritage. Such walks feature prominently on the itineraries of tourists seeking out islands of non-conformity and non-homogeneity in a sea of sameness.

Interestingly, residents also flock to these walks to understand more of their own city and neighbourhood. For in-migrants, acquiring knowledge of the city’s heritage is one way of getting an insider’s view of their adopted city. Abhaya Agarwal, an entrepreneur who moved to Bengaluru 10 years ago and attended his first heritage walk in 2011, says the walks helped him look past the language barrier to understand the city, and also made some parts feel familiar and more approachable. “It certainly helped establish a ‘connect’ to the city,” he says. For those born and brought up in the city, awareness of their heritage is a way of reaffirming and proclaiming their ‘belonging’.

An eye for detail

Exactly which city do people want to belong to? There is a plethora of pasts and a multiplicity of histories that have contributed to the present character of cities. Which of these pasts and which strands of history are chosen to be projected and reclaimed as our heritage reflects who we think we are. To say that heritage and identity are closely linked is a tautology. The very meaning of the word implies it. The Oxford dictionary defines heritage as ‘the history, traditions and qualities that a country or society has had for many years and that are considered an important part of its character.’

Most often, our identity, and therefore our cultural heritage, is strongly linked to the two Rs of region and religion. We want our children to learn our mother tongue, the dance form associated with ‘our’ region, ‘our’ kind of classical music, ‘our’ cuisines, and of course, ‘our’ religion. ‘Other’ histories and ‘other’ heritage do not carry the same resonance for many people. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas is only one extreme example of this. Less heinous instances happen in smaller ways, such as when things from the past fall out of fashion, or are simply neglected or forgotten. An example that comes to mind are the many Iron Age burial sites on the outskirts of Bengaluru.

These approximately 2,000-year-old sites are remnants of a civilisation we know little about and that probably did not share our religious beliefs. Most of these sites are being quarried away, replaced by residential layouts, or being dug up by treasure hunters. In fact, in one instance, people living in their vicinity referred to the site as nidhi, meaning treasure! 

Can we transcend territoriality and religion in our identity? Just as my identity as a South Indian does not preclude my identity as an Indian, we must try and remember that our identity as Indians or as French does not preclude our identity as first and foremost, humans. I like to think we already see this. After all, we make time for the pyramids when in Egypt, or for Stonehenge when in Britain, and we are awed and moved by these ancient manifestations of human endeavour.

We immediately connect to these heritage sites that are thousands of kilometres from home because we understand the hopes, dreams and desires that they represent. Humans, through the ages, have gone through the same striving, hoping, living and longing that we all do. Globalised world or not, we all have a shared history of humanity.