PAST CULTURES AS the HERITAGE of the PRESENT Romila Thapar

1 Keynote lecture delivered at SOAS South Asia Institute/Presidency University conference on ‘Heritage and History in South Asia’, celebrating the centenary of SOAS University of London. Monday 5 September 2016 PAST CULTURES AS THE HERITAGE OF THE PRESENT Romila Thapar Heritage as we all know, is that which is inherited and can refer to objects, ideas or practices. It was once assumed that heritage is what has been handed down to us by our ancestors, neatly packaged, and which we pass on to our descendants, still neatly packaged. Now we know that much repackaging is done and some contents changed, but it still continues to be thought of as ancestral. This is because it has become central to identity and to its legitimation. Heritage is often associated with tradition. Whereas heritage is thought of as rather static, tradition is a more active transmission. Hence it moulds our lives more closely. Between them they are viewed as the still point of a turning world, except that this is a myth, since they too turn and are not still. We prefer to think that these have been passed down relatively unchanged. However, they mutate slowly in an evolving process that makes the mutation less discernable. But the more we seek to understand them the more we realize that each generation changes their content or their meaning, sometimes marginally but often more substantially. The unchanged label gives it a seeming continuity. More recently it has been argued that both heritage and tradition are the inter- play between what we believe existed in the past and our aspirations of the present. Exploring this inter-play, and the ideas and forms it generates, leads to the concept of heritage taking shape, or even that a part it is being invented to serve the needs of the present. Much that is thought of as ancient is often found to be recent – the claim to longevity legitimizing the invention. Historians therefore, are writing about the invention of tradition. Not to be cited, quoted from or reproduced without author’s permission. 2 Heritage and history are quite obviously inter-dependent. This is so not just in terms of history providing a chronology and context for heritage. Both these can change. Chronology changes less frequently. But the context that forms the essential historical understanding of heritage can change more dramatically. This happens when new questions are asked and historians are constantly asking new questions. Complex cultures emerge from a multiple inheritance and their inter-face is not permanent. There is also the problem of selecting items of heritage. Such choices alter the self-perception of a society. The politics that determine such selections should be evident but are often hidden. Sacred sites can be literally reshaped. Some Buddhist chaityas were converted into Hindu temples and some Hindu temples into mosques. Colonial policy had a major role in selecting the heritage of modern India. Political intervention in identifying or evaluating heritage often continues under a different guise. The political use of the past is an ancient practice, but in our times we recognize it more easily. Inheritance from the elite has a more visible presence and has tended to be kept segregated according to caste and religion. As a contrast to this were the cultures of the majority – the non-elite, that easily and happily overlapped with each other if they wanted to, and borrowed without hesitation, particularly in religious matters. This distinction and dichotomy is critical. The historical study of Indian cultures by colonial scholarship and the colonial definition of heritage, focused on elite culture. This was the subject of historical and cultural study. The rest was treated as ethnography and kept separate. Such ethnographic studies as well as literature in the regional languages, are now opening up non-elite cultures. It is not that the study of these has become politically correct but there is a realization that cultures do not exist in isolation. It is also not just a question of being aware of the totality but of observing the juxtaposition and inter-face between the many, however discrete this may be. To try and hear the dialogue between the elite and the non-elite is essential to understanding either. We now speak of history from below therefore the heritage that comes to us from the less privileged sections of society has also to be recognized. If the definition of history changes so does that of heritage. Heritage can be either tangible or intangible. The tangible being the more obvious covers a range of objects - from seals, coins, and archaeological artifacts to monuments and to cities such as Moenjo-daro, Hampi and Fatehpur Sikri. Commonly associated with these are icons and paintings now treated as art objects. These are either valued and placed in museums or vulgarized as commercial commodities. Objects associated with ideas related to science will not be mainstream heritage until Not to be cited, quoted from or reproduced without author’s permission. 3 the history of science is integrated into what we generally refer to as history. Sites can also change their meaning when used for purposes that differ from their initial intention. The Jantar Mantar was a heritage site as a medieval period observatory but is now better known as the location of political demonstrations - the Hyde Park of Delhi. The intangible heritage is that of ideas. It is expressed in the life of cultures – in the performance of rituals, the observance of customary and kinship laws, social and moral values, beliefs, and orally recorded music. This brings me to the highly significant but somewhat in-between heritage, of books and inscriptions. They are tangible objects, but what we derive from them is, as it were, at second remove. It is information in the abstract to which we give a context. This introduces the centrality of language and ideas as heritage. History in a sense makes an object into heritage. We have to ask whose heritage does it symbolize and how. Is it the tangible evidence of upper caste activities or is it suggestive of the generally less tangible evidence of under-privileged social groups. The latter have little wealth or occasion to commemorate themselves with durable objects. Whereas Hinduism and Islam build temples and mosques of great grandeur, there is so little that is tangible and that survives in material form to remind us of the extensive reach of popular religious movements such as those of the Nathapanthi and Sufi sects. Yet their religious ideas swept across northern India. A further question that we have to ask is whether we can assume that what we view as heritage was also viewed as such at all times and by everyone? But heritage can undergo an uneven history of prominence or amnesia at various times. This is interestingly demonstrated in the way the perception of personalities from the past and especially rulers, changes. Let’s take the example of how Indians in the past two thousand years have looked upon the Mauryan emperor Ashoka. The memory of Ashoka has had a checkered history. In the dynastic lists given in the Puranas, composed by brahmana authors, he is just a name in the Mauryan king-list. Other brahmanical texts remain silent. But the Buddhist texts are fulsome in praising him with somewhat exaggerated stories about his conversion to and support of, Buddhism. Since there was little overt dialogue between the Brahmana and the Shramana– the Buddhist and Jaina – Ashoka remained just a name. Modern colonial scholarship initially investigated only the Brahmanical tradition on pre-modern India, so Ashoka continued to be unknown. But the link to Ashoka rose and fell in earlier times as well. His edicts explaining his thoughts on ethical values were inscribed on rock surfaces and on pillars located all over his empire, virtually the sub-continent. They were inscribed in Not to be cited, quoted from or reproduced without author’s permission. 4 the then used script, an early form of brahmi, and in the language of the time, Prakrit. Unfortunately, scripts have a habit of changing their forms as do languages. It would seem that after six hundred years, these edicts probably could not be read. A Gupta king ordered an inscription to be inscribed on the same pillar in the changed brahmi script, and in Sanskrit. This inscription eulogized the military conquests of Samudragupta and of his uprooting of people. These were statements endorsing a sentiment contrary to that propagated by Ashoka. Was this done deliberately? Was it countering the message of the earlier king? Or was the pillar the more important object of attraction? It was a magnificent polished sandstone pillar with a sculpted capital, placed adjacent to a stupa and therefore revered by many people. Was it seen as the appropriate object and location for a statement in praise of Samudragupta’s conquests? Could the earlier script still be read? Or, did the choice of the pillar arise, as I like to think, from a vague historical consciousness that it appeared to be important as a record of and from the past. Did the Gupta age think that engraving the new inscription on the ancient pillar would gain for them some historical legitimacy, even six hundred years later? Much later the Ashokan pillars intrigued Firuz Shah Tughlaq. But no one knew who had erected them nor could anyone read the script. Two were shifted and installed in his capital in Delhi despite the immense problems of transportation. The Mughals later were equally mystified by the pillars but attracted by the mystique. The pillar that had the two major earlier inscriptions, had also by now acquired the multiple graffiti of local rajas.

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