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