Heritage of impermanence: decolonising the conservationist paradigm

Abstract

Modern heritage discourse, essentially its conservationist paraphernalia travelled to India through colonial governance and its establishment of colonial administrative institutions such as ASI (Archaeological Survey of India). In the process, the colonial governance took a paternalistic approach to uncover and teach the ‘natives’ their own history. It advanced the narrative of conservation to recover an ‘ahistorical’ society from its apparent predisposition of forgetting the past (Nandy 1995). The absence of ‘scientistic materialism’ (Winter 2013) in the form of identification, categorisation, documentation and conservation of past objects was marshalled as a lack of historical consciousness, engagement and awareness of the past. Further, the absence of materialist conservation was designated as an inferior form of knowledge rather than a different relationship with the past. Consequently, when the need for conservation as a universal discourse was imported to India it committed certain forms of epistemicide (Santos 2016). Drawing on Santos’ work on Epistemologies of the South, Escobar explains the mechanism of this effacement, ‘what does not exist is actively produced as non-existent or as a noncredible alternative to what exists’ (Escobar 2020, 69). Advancing this argument, I present a counter-hegemonic narrative of heritage sensibility which is lived through the very act of destruction and embedded in the idea of impermanence. This paper essentially challenges the underlying logic of the conservation oriented Eurocentric modernist heritage discourse which is rooted in scientific rationality and ontology of stasis/permanence. Through observation of a craft practice of clay idol-making in Kolkata, I aim to decolonise the ontology of heritage studies and introduce diverse ways of being, knowing, and living in the world which promotes a pluriversal epistemology.

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ORCID for Rishika Mukhopadhyay: orcid.org/0000-0002-6722-4987

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