Against heritage
Heritage is a means of denying that history is madeand remadeevery minute of every day in every part of the world
In the recent past, the militant group ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) has taken over a significant portion of West Asia, murdered and executed an unspecified large number of people, and dragged hordes of impressionable jihadists from everywhere into its murky depths. Last year, a top ISIL commander, armed with a semi-automatic and decked up in camouflage, was caught lecturing his men from a Hello Kitty notebook. After looting and pillaging their way through Libya, Iraq and Syria, in the course of which various minor and major sites of Islamic antiquity were destroyed, they finally did it: they took over Palmyra—the site of major Western heritage, the potential destruction of which will be unforgivable. As unforgivable, in fact, as the Taliban’s dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 2001, since everyone agrees that the Buddha is now more or less a European god. Never mind that Western history, much of which is located in Muslim West Asia, isn’t actually acknowledged as such; never mind that the first time most people heard of the Bamiyan Buddhas is when they were blown up; ISIL is destroying our heritage and that’s a bad, bad thing—and they are bad, bad people to be doing this to us.
Two months ago, I was witness to another act of wanton iconoclasm in another part of the world. Students and workers at the oppressively white University of Cape Town (which has held out against the reality of South Africa as much as the Mother City) brought down a statue of British mining magnate and African colonizer Cecil John Rhodes that had blighted their campus for the last 80 years. It started with a simple act. An angry student, Chumani Maxwele, flung human poo at the statue, and one month later—after thousands joined him in protest, and after the event became headline news in the country—Rhodes was gone. He had vanished, like he was never there; trussed up in plastic sheets, hauled away by a crane, lurching mid-air under tight straps as if he were a common drunk—instead of merely the hugely annoying imperialist who seized land the size of two countries and trampled upon everyone within. This act of vandalism did not generate anything close to the same level of outrage: even those who privately admired Rhodes knew full well that he was a publicly certified bad man whose time had passed. Grumpy white elders grumpily defended his legacy; fiery black intellectuals took to the classroom to incite revolution; the media decided it was all for the best; and last week, for his pains in sparking this nationwide movement for the decolonization of education, the iconoclast got what was due to him: I read that Maxwele had been suspended from the University of Cape Town.
One night, about 20 years ago, a mysterious fire engulfed a warren of rooms called Begum Mahal and reduced a beloved institution to dust. I was heartbroken. I grew up in a home by Ulsoor Lake, in the heart of Bangalore Cantonment, about a 100m from Begum Mahal, and the building featured significantly in my life. That it’s gone will surely come as a surprise to anyone who navigates the city by word or map; the removal of the physical structure has necessitated no change in what the area is called. This Begum Mahal, the name of a crucial four-road intersection that lives beyond the narrow possibilities of its physical origin, is now the site of the Hilton, a hulking tower of a hotel crowned by a helipad. Of course, as an endlessly litigated and complexly sub-contracted space, Begum Mahal would have been nothing less than a bureaucratic impossibility to take over legally. The story of how it was seized is the stuff of real estate legend, involving the usual characters deploying the usual tactics and leaving no trace, except perhaps, whatever some bright young investigator with her finger on the pulse of the Right to Information Act will unearth some day.
I miss Begum Mahal because with it went a whole life. Not exactly my life, I should add, since my family was middle class, but nevertheless one I participated in. Begum Mahal was squarely working class, a place to stop for tea and sympathy between long bus journeys, a place to hire a horse-drawn tonga at a short notice, even, remarkably, a place to say a quick prayer in a multitude of faiths. It was a place of convenience and conviviality; a public space for public people, which is to say, a private arrangement for people who couldn’t afford private comfort. Begum Mahal was made by working-class people for others of their kind, and then one day, it was taken over by upper-class people to be turned into a utility for their kind. Despite being remarkably central, and therefore potentially valuable, the Ulsoor Lake of my misspent youth was topsy-turvy. Big houses, like the one I lived in, existed alongside grimy automobile workshops and backyard chicken farms. One side of the lake had respectable middle-class homes; another side had a large Indian Army base; one corner was given over to public educational institutions run by the redoubtable Rai Bahadur Arcot Narrainswamy Mudaliar Educational Charities Trust; another corner led to the crowded Ulsoor market, which housed people from every single income bracket possible.
The past hasn’t been obliterated yet. Much is as it was, which means that when the Hilton hotel opens for business (construction began exactly as world markets slumped in 2007, and therefore stalled for many years), it will find itself both the site of one of the city’s busiest informal transport hubs, as well as the entryway to a bustling vegetable market whose layout has remained unchanged for centuries. And it has no reason to be nervous; it has company, in the form of four other luxury hotels, all of impeccable international reputation, which precede its entry into the area.
Here comes the neighbourhood.
When upstanding, upper-class people in Bengaluru lament the loss of their heritage, they are not talking about Begum Mahal. When they celebrate the city’s heritage, they are not talking about Shivajinagar, an area designed to be the servants’ quarters of the British Empire, where the beauty is ancient but modest and functional, and so tightly packed between people and goods—and so defiantly ungentrifiable—that you hardly notice it. What are they talking about? The good guardians mean something like Victoria Hotel, a sprawling property that sat on Residency Road, in the commercial centre of the city. Victoria Hotel was a lazily run establishment that served indifferent food in great atmosphere (a late-Victorian-style cottage) and allowed its clients to bring their dogs to dinner, all the better to be sucked dry by mosquitoes while waiting it out in the lawns. When it was knocked down—at about the same time as Begum Mahal went up in flames—and replaced by a giant mall, some of my best friends lost their minds (that mall has long been in operation, and while it looks apocalyptic, it employs about a hundred times more people than Victoria Hotel ever did). The selfsame guardians huddle at the Bangalore Club, the city’s most exclusive subsidy for the rich, and hope that everything they hold dear—the immaculately laid out 150-year-old pile set in acres of manicured gardens—won’t be torn down. Where would we be, after all, if Winston Churchill’s unpaid bills from 1899—now obsequiously displayed at the entrance to the dining room—were to disappear? (Rumour has it that in 1991, the president of the club was showing Prince Charles the exhibit, when, bowing too enthusiastically and too often, he hit his head on the table that housed Churchill’s bills and passed out).
I like late-Victorian architecture. I particularly like its tropical mutations; the monkey-tops to keep the monkeys out, the stingy little windows to keep the cool air in, the Arabesque patterns on the floors to keep the slaves busy. I’ve been taken as a guest to the Bangalore Club plenty of times, and invariably enjoyed myself (other people’s subsidies are easier to be hypocritical about when you can occasionally have them). And yet, I think civilization would only benefit by burning the place down and starting again. Bengaluru’s heritage hysterics are a smokescreen: what the fine people are fighting to protect is class control. Make no mistake. In a city where you can move from being working class to middle class in the space of a day, where, at long last, opportunity actually exists, this is a war against mobility.
Heritage is the ultimate revenge of the rich: history reflected in a fun-house mirror and dipped in liquid nitrogen to make the distortion last. Heritage is a means of denying that history is made—and remade—every minute of every day in every part of the world. Heritage is an attempt to lock time up in shiny tinsel wrapping; an attempt to disguise accidents of fortune as noble intention. Heritage is the pretence that the cobblestoned streets of some quaint European city whose only economy is a tattered illusion of itself are somehow superior to the dynamically heaving roads of the developing world megalopolis. Heritage is a plot to distract you from noticing that Bengaluru became a far nicer place to live in once it began offering hope and looking like shit.
This essay forms a part of Silicon Plateau, a forthcoming art project of T.A.J. Residency/ SKE Projects and Or-bits.com.
Achal Prabhala is a writer and researcher based in Bengaluru.
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!