52 – Unpacking the post-secular nation: Heritage sites and national consciousness in postcolonial India

October 3, 2025
3:45 pm
H02
This panel deals with a triad of interwoven and mutually influencing concepts: History, heritage and the nation. As part of the process that entails the construction of a normative understanding of collective history, the politics of heritage has played an important role throughout the development of the postcolonial Indian state. It is proposed to investigate the processes underlying the construction/identification/preservation of heritage as an arena where conflicting notions of state and nation come into confrontation, where the value ascribed to heritage objects is debated for its potential to promote forms of collective identification or, conversely, to carry divisive notions of the historical past into the present. This panel will address key issues that characterise the cultural, social and political history of postcolonial India: ideas of state and nation, secularism, inter-communal balance and religious intolerance, casteism will be discussed, as they have all been under constant renegotiation. Such a conceptual framework helps also to comprehend the rise, in the past three decades, of an increasing emphasis on narratives that promote a static vision of the subcontinent’s history, while curbing forms and experiences of dissent. These narratives conform to a homogenising mainstream view of Indian culture and society, and attempt to rewrite the foundations of national discourse through the production and re-signification of sites and tangible symbols of public memory. What happens when one is confronted with highly divergent and contradictory ideas about what the nation and the state are or who they should include? What places, practices, buildings and monuments become emblems of these contradictory ideas? This panel welcomes contributions that address these questions through specific case studies, sites, heritage-orientated policies, or in critical engagement with a methodological perspective of critical heritage studies.

Convenors

Tommaso Bobbio
Shraddha Kumbhojkar

Presentations

A Modern Heritage
Viswanathan Rashmi - University of Hartford, University of Hartford, West Hartford, United States
Echoes of a Lost Legacy: Unravelling the Fading Identity and Heritage of the Calcutta Jews in Post-Colonial India
Singh Sweta - None (Independent Scholar), None (Independent Scholar), Kolkata, India
Sikh Memorials for 1984
Singh Kanika - Ashoka University, Ashoka University, Sonepat, India
Nationalist Frames & Colonial Frameworks: Contested Narratives of Space, Heritage & Identity in the Gyanvapi-Vishwanath Precinct of Varanasi
Saharya Karan - Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Bauhaus Universität Weimar, Weimar, Germany
Post-secular Heritage: Mapping Wonder and History in Contemporary Ahmedabad
Patel Shruti - Salisbury University, Salisbury University, Salisbury, United States
Nationalist Interpretations of the Vedic Heritage
Kumbhojkar Shraddha - Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune university, Pune, India
Monuments as Archives: Bhima Koregaon and the rethinking of caste and secularism in post-colonial India (1818-2018)
bobbio tommaso - Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, University of Turin, torino, Italy
Rise of the Monumental Spinning Wheel: The Charkha and Its Meanings after Gandhi
McLain Karline - Bucknell University, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, United States